Reach out and touch somone.

When you eat something along the lines of 50% of your meals downstairs you begin to become familiar with the people who are getting their change working there. I’m not on first name basis with any of them, but I recognize them. Whether or not they recognize me I don’t know, there are something along the lines of 5,000 people in this complex, but that’s not the point anyway.

The Point is Erin. She’s starting to freak me out. If you watch her when she isn’t talking directly to a customer she looks like a fairly normal person, but when she’s talking to a customer she adopts an outlook that’s at serious risk of giving anyone within five feet diabetes. It gets to me not so much because she’s inhumanly cheery about things, but because anyone who’s making even a passive effort to watch her can see that it’s a mask. It’s not even a good one, because it’s only there when she’s talking to you, when she’s doing the more mechanical aspects of her job, boxing things, stirring, etc. she has a fairly ordinary expression.

You also have to remember that there isn’t any room for promotion at 1101. You’re there for as long as you’re living 50’ above the place, and then you’re gone. The highest promotion you’ll ever get is register, and I think that pays the same anyway. They don’t even have an employee of the month program.

So what’s the point? And trust me nobody would do this just because of who they are. She’s aggressively, VIOLENTLY friendly, in 15 second intervals when she’s taking your order and thanking you. I’m tempted to classify it as the world’s best managed case of schizophrenia*. I’m also tempted to grab her and shake her violently and shout WHY!?! But there are a lot of people in line ahead of her for that** Then again if I assault someone for being friendly we have a clear imbalance of crazy in her favor.

I have drawn one conclusion from all this madness though. Asian girls are screwing with my head. There’s a giant cabal of them out there somewhere, and they’ve arranged UW in a giant set of traps for me to negotiate around. I don’t know what their motives are, but I bet it involves something eldritch, maybe even macabre. I’m also open to the idea that the world is just a giant series of obstacles to maneuver around and that the statistics keep thrusting Asian girl as the facilitator of my recent set of obstacles, but I don’t like that idea as much because it doesn’t involve secret cabals, and I don’t get to use the word Macabre, which is a great word. Macabre rolls off your tongue.

*Holy crap! I spelled schizophrenia right on the first attempt.

**Dude you can’t just stand around on the ave reading sci-fi novels with a sign that says “please give.” Hell, you’re fatter then I am you’re obviously not going hungry. Put some damn effort into it.