25 December 2008

It's Christmas! Go Home!

It's 11:45pm. Christmas Eve. Downtown Auckland.

Why am I stuck in traffic?

Why are there people out in cars, clogging up Quay Street? On
Christmas Eve?

Go home, and go to bed. Don't you people know that Santa doesn't give presents to people that are awake? For goodness sake.

I worked the closing shift at Esquires tonight, which is why I was out. I can't say so much for the other fifty cars in Auckland tonight. One guy came in, drunk. It's Christmas, idiots, not New Years! Get some dignity.

Tonight was a funny evening. There was the drunk guy, some other guy who couldn't afford his coffee (and who left me his number on a paper bag when he left), a ferry captain, and some other miscellaneous lost souls. Granted, a few of these people were on the late sailing to Waiheke, but the rest of them... I have no idea. Take the broke guy, for instance. Saunters in, asks for the cheapest hot thing he can eat, so I prepare him a sausage roll. He wants coffee too. A long black. Only he doesn't have enough money. He's nice enough, not creepy like some of the guys that pass through here, so I just make him one on the house. He sits by himself at a table close to the counter and watches me while I serve the drunk guy and his lovely girlfriend. Later on, when he leaves to catch the Birkenhead ferry, he doesn't do so before leaving a paper bag with "Call me", his name and his number written on it. Clearly, he's all class.

And then there's the ferry captain.
"I'm looking for ways to relieve my stress. I'm drinking coffee. Thinking of starting smoking. And then becoming an alcoholic." I make him a caramel latte, because he doesn't really like coffee. Then he tells me about his girlfriend, who recently left him - his baby in tow. Yikes. I tell him about how Donny left me and scarpered off to India. It's not really the same. He also gives me his number.

I'm doing pretty well. In the last twenty-two years (nearly twenty-three), I've been given four numbers.
1. Donny
2. Chris
3. The broke guy
4. The ferry captain
Curtis gave me his room number the night I met him in Canada, which sounds a lot less classy than it ended up being.

I'm in a happy place.

It's Christmas!

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