A Modern Romance
Would you be more, or less likely to go to a restaurant, if you knew the serving staff were obligated to flirt with you? Before you answer… consider your loneliness.
So the word on the street is that the things at Pizza Express are changing. I received an email (that’s right, I get emails about pizza. So what? Who are you? You’re nobody!) informing me of a change in initiative. Now the staff are being trained to flirt with their customers. Aside from the moral outrage I’m choosing to bracket, as it can really go unsaid, or said by people more important than me, I know what you’re thinking. “A class on flirting that Sandy isn’t teaching? Way to fuck it up at the starting gun!”
Yeah that’s pretty much what I was thinking too. And with this in mind, an experiment was born.
So just how well trained are these people? If I was incredibly hostile/forward, would they still be forced to carry on flirting with me? Now I can’t afford to go to pizza express a whole bunch of times so I had go for both routes on the same day, with the same waitress. I realise this makes my results difficult to standardise, and definitely falls under qualitative research, but sometimes those studies are the very best!
I'm what she goes to school for.
WAITRESS: Didn’t I see you in here a few days ago?
ME: Yeah you served me, and brought me the wrong juice.
WAITRESS: I thought it was you! Small world eh?
ME: No, it’s a very big world, with 4 billion other men in it. Good luck.
So far so good. She laughs nervously to herself and I order an apple and raspberry juice and a ham and mushroom pizza. She brings me my drink.
WAITRESS: I brought the right one this time!
ME: Haha! Well thank you. Although this does remind me of last time I was in a hotel.
WAITRESS: Yeah? Why?
ME: Well, I was there, and so was someone spectacularly beautiful!
She laughs again. Not repulsed? Check. With an equally flirty comeback? Fuck no. She just grins at me and walks off! Amateur. Still, she’s not backing off. Going to have to step this up a little.
WAITRESS: Here you go. There’s your pizza.
ME: Well I’m glad I was sitting down for that fucking revelation.
WAITRESS: … There was a nice guy here just a minute ago.
ME: He’s in here. Hold me tight enough, you’ll feel him.
Yes! She’s looking uneasy. Neither of them on their own seem to be off-putting to her, but a rapid fluctuation between the two may be just what is required.
WAITRESS: Was it good?
ME: It was actually.
WAITRESS: You sound surprised.
ME: Yeah I thought I was going to have to pretend?
WAITRESS: Why would you pretend?
ME: Oh please, I would bite the label off your apple if you’d let me.
WAITRESS: (Laughing) Well, I don’t actually take that much pride in my work.
ME: Maybe you should take pride in fucking something.
WAITRESS: Sorry?
ME: Are you?
WAITRESS: Does your personality have a remote control or something?
ME: Oh I’m not even remotely controllable.
She walks away to get me a dessert menu and I see her chatting to one of the other waiters and surreptitiously looking over at me. Is she going to ask her friend to come and serve me? No no, she holds her ground and heads up with the menu.
WAITRESS: What do you fancy?
ME: A fucking challenge.
WAITRESS: Excuse me?
ME: The banoffee pie looks good.
WAITRESS: It… it does look good. I saw someone else eating a piece it looked amazing.
ME: Do you think they spend ages making it look good?
WAITRESS: Probably.
This is taking ages. Time to lay it on really fucking thick.
ME: What do you think the mathematics behind aesthetics is anyway? Because me plus, charismatic, for example, does not equal gorgeous, and I should know! I shave me! And I scribble “stunning is only skin deep” on those little scraps of toilet paper I use to tend my blemished face, my blemished face has bled enough. You on the other hand… You look like… a waltz. I just want to paint your picture on a coffee mug, fill it with a crab and 7 different types of salt. You stand there offering me a banoffee pie, and it feels like I’m standing on dry land and just panhandling at the ocean.
WAITRESS: Fuck I wish I could meet someone who would say things like that to me for real.
ME: You’d love that guy?
WAITRESS: I’d do my best.
ME: Yeah well, love is like the holocaust, except unfortunately for you, you won’t get thinner.
WAITRESS: What?
ME: That one I felt bad about.
WAITRESS: Does the guy from quantum leap keep jumping in and out of your body?
At this point I just had to stop and shake her hand. I couldn’t really compete with that. Annoyingly, at that moment I kind of fancied her. Fuck.
Looks like they were actually trained pretty fucking well, but I think out of a sense of respect for that waitress, I won’t expand the study by comparing the staffs of various restaurants. There’s a fair amount of guilt stuffed in there with that respect too. But no-one wants to hear about that. She’s a pro though, I’ll tell you that much. I should have asked her if she wanted to take part in my game show “So you think you can fuck?”
Still, point proven. Any management which asks you to stand there and flirt with a shit like me has to be a pretty vicious one. So I urge you to be extra nice to the serving staff next time you’re in a Pizza Express. Their job isn’t an easy one.
Even if she did totally want me.
Breakfast Epiphanies 