Thursday, August 18, 2005

Today's sky report

For a while now, I thought it might be fun to go into Panera and give a false name. The desire comes unearthed from centuries ago when we used to be required to sign into the library during our high school study halls. Somewhere in the middle of the period, the librarian (Chicken Legs Wollney) would call out the names to make sure nobody signed in and skipped out. Of course we would fill the sign-in with all those great high school characters like “Dick Hertz” and “Mike Hunt”. Chicken legs would dutifully call out, “Mike Hunt. Where’s Mike Hunt”. At that point, the quiet in the library would be shattered by barely stifled laughter.

The deal at Panera wasn’t so much about embarrassing the bread DJ who calls out your name when it’s time to pick up your order. After all, they only take first names so while “Dick” might be fun, it’s just not that funny. So when Kreblog and I went to the local Panera’s for lunch, and I resolved to make up a name. I worked on it while we were in line, finally deciding on Rafael.

After a long time waiting for the rather new help to get my somewhat complicated order into the touch screen, she asked for my name. I replied, “Rafael”. She says, “Rafael……how do you spell that?” Duohh, not so quick on my feet, I missed the opportunity to say, “It’s spelled like it sounds”. Instead, I scrambled to make up the spelling which you are reading here. Lesson learned: don’t make up names you can’t spell. On the other hand, Rafael sounded really good and smooth when the deep-voiced bread DJ called it out. I even remembered it was a clue for me to pick up my lunch.

2 comments:

Granite said...

I once saw a webpage that had audio examples of phony names being paged over the Heathrow Airport public address system. Because of the range of nationalities that visit that airport, you're pretty much guaranteed that any name given to them to page will be paged. Stuff like: "Mikollig Fahted" as a name came across the PA as sounding like "My colleague farted" (works when spoken in a British accent). Or two names were asked to be paged: Myas Huhrtz & Ithurtz Tzhit came across as "My ass hurts and it hurts to shit". All good fun of course....

YouWho said...

I have a friend who always leaves the name "Virgil" for takeout or reservations. Isn't that crazy?