Me and a platoon of my engineering colleagues stumbled into a chicken rice shop for lunch today. Although it was a chicken rice shop, the place offered a variety more of local fast food – eg. various choices of noodles, rice vermicelli’s, “wan than” (a type of shrimp/meat balls wrapped in dough), etc. A typical Penang’s multi menu eatery.
Planning to have a really quick lunch, the 7 of us quickly settled down onto a medium sized round table and flagged the old waitress to take our order. She seemed quite happy by the sight of our presence – as if it was a rendezvous with her long lost gay lover. And because we intended to be quick, each of us ordered just a plate of flat rice noodle and a bowl of “wan than”.
That was when the happy face of a friendly lady turned into a grumpy old hag. Her friendly voice suddenly turned into something that resembled a full grown male primate crossed with a really old buffalo – bellowing some comment of dismay :
old hag : “Is that all ?? Is that all you guys want to order??”
Trying to be nice, I politely replied her with a short explanation
Me : “Yes aunty. That’s all. We’re in a hurry. Thank you.”
Then she started to gripe something that was beyond our comprehension, followed by another question,
old hag : “I thought you guys are going to order some chicken?? Everyone here orders chicken… you guys are weird”
She sounded agitated. Again, I politely declined.
Me : “Thanks aunty, but we’re really in a hurry. We’ll just stick to our original orders please..”
old hag : “I thought you guys going to order a whole chicken with that crowd… bla bla bla”
She continued to bitch about her chickens while walking away into the kitchen to process our order. We took no offense about her rude demeanor as we’re a bunch of understanding youths. Old people are not very much different from psychopaths so… it’s ok to let them be.
We thought it was all settled but the old psychopath hag returned to our table again, standing beside me and was kinda staring at me. It freaked me out needless to say. She stood there staring for what must be like a whole 5 seconds, before she was able to gather her thought to ask me another weird question
old hag : “You really don’t want to order our chicken? They are very nice… Trust me.”
Alright, that was my limit. I snapped. She reminded me of those desperate credit card salesmen – which pisses me off. I decided to stop acting nice and tone up a bit
Me : “Aunty, you heard me very clear – no chickens. Please leave us alone”
old hag : “our chickens here are very famous… you should try it.”
Me : “Your chickens are famous eh ? Then are their names? If they’re famous, I should know their names… ”
The old hag was dumbfucked when I asked for her chickens’ names. I bet she had never encountered any of her patrons asking her chickens’ names. Then one of my colleague Wilson added more confusion to her jammed mind …
Wilson : “Aunty… don’t force us to order chickens lar … you want to be a pimp is it?”
(“to order chicken” is a slang in Hokkien for “whoring”)
She immediately disappeared into the kitchen and never bothered us again. Some people are just plain weird.