People, Not A Fan

Midday. I bought a large mixed salad because it was one of those rare days that I didn’t take my lunch to work. Sam makes it for me every day, but we ate leftover pork and noodles last night. My colleagues think I have gourmet lunches.

I chose a seat on my own in the less used empty corner room of the huge café set out in the foyer of the large building opposite mine. Is it the stock exchange building? Shrug. Oh, I don’t know.

One guy came and sat at the next table, despite every other table in that section of the room being free.

Oh, here we go, I thought.

Moments later a lawyer and his pin-stiped suited client, presumably, came and sat at the table on the other side of me. I knew the lawyer by sight from one of the law firms I have worked for.

They started to talk.

The first guy’s lunch companion arrived – like that was a surprise – and sat with him and they started talking at a great rate. I'm sure he was trying to sell the guy something, he sounded as dodgy as a used car salesman trying to sell a used car to a real estate agent.

The lawyer prattled away. Mr dodgy yap, yap, yapped.

Grrrr.

I moved across the room, so at least I wasn’t between the two groups, which, unfortunately, put myself in direct line with the lawyer’s client’s booming voice and his annoying laugh. He spoke so loudly and freely that I couldn’t help but think he was a CEO of some company.

Then two women, exhausted from a morning shopping, sat in my first seat and they stated to chat away, like high pitched machine guns. It was a cacophony.

Am I to be spared nothing?

There were two guys sitting in the opposite corner on their own with a seat between them, one on his laptop, the other reading, it looked like the library, so I moved there.

Not long after one of the guys finished eating and left.

Shortly after, a man and a woman took his seat. The male of the couple started to talk excitedly, in an effeminate voice, (not that there is anything wrong with that, of course) about all the weight he’d lost. He was giddy with delight.

Grrrrrr... people, not a fan.

Then the other guy left.

What looked like a Filipino house keeper and another woman’s Indian husband, who she is screwing, sat in the seat behind me. They were the worst, his high pitched voice arguing with her demands (to leave his wife), neither of whom I could understand clearly, she was whisper-yelling. She growled at him (You said you'd leave her), he whined back (Yes, darling, soon, be patient).

He will never leave her, I thought.

They were too much to bare and I had finished my salad by that stage anyway, I could forgo the coffee.

I headed back to my office.