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Saturday, May 1, 2010

The ultimate compliment

For the purposes of this needless circumlocution, I return you to my previous life…The Restaurant Wars. Before going there, usher the kiddies and the grandparents out of the room.

This one, from the Citizens’ Voice, caught all four of my eyes:

Expert says Banks delusional despite flashes of competence

Delusions and rational thoughts swirl in mass murderer George Banks' mind like the balls in a bingo wheel or a lottery machine, according to a psychiatrist who has examined him prior to each of his three competency hearings.

One-by-one they reveal themselves, popping up in jailhouse conversations and mental health evaluations as symptoms of one his two competing brands of thought, Dr. John O'Brien said.

Delusional despite flashes of competence? Isn’t that how the on-the-march pseudo-Marxists describe us hated traditionalists? Sophists all!

How much do they pay somebody to come up with conflicted 'ambient domain-speak' such as that? I could do that. What say you Dr. Markie?

Why, I find the subject to be dumb like a test tube full of parasitic protozoans, but brilliant nonetheless.

Make sure you spell my name correctly. Now, who has my cashier’s check?

On a much more personal note, that’s how many of the people that have come to know me have described me. So, should I be whisked away to Death Row to await my execution?

Don’t answer that.

I think George Banks is right where he needs to be, wallowing away in his own perfectly crafted version of Hell.

As for his mindset right before he set off on his murderous rampage, I offer the following.

If I remember correctly, his carnage occurred in the wee hours of a Saturday morning, not that it really matters. Anyway, he visited our restaurant a mere 12 hours or so before he went Full Metal Jacket on his own family. Er, his families.

He and his entourage were in for lunch, and they did nothing to draw attention to themselves. But in the days after Banks put Wilkes-Barre on the map, while the press and law enforcement were in hot pursuit of everything George Banks, our tireless auditing department did what it always did--it audited all of our bundled and submitted guest checks for the prior sales week.

These audits were meant to focus in on 3 things: Comments from customers, pricing errors by waitresses (pre-Point-of-Sale years) and missing checks which could indicate that theft may be afoot.

Among the checks with customer comments on them was a check that George Banks used to comment on. And as a result, our auditing people called the authorities, who then alerted the district attorney’s office. And as a result, as part of the pre-trial investigation, any and all of our employees who had even the slightest of contacts with Banks and his family that day were interviewed by an assistant district attorney, as well as a county detective.

Over the years, I had pretty much seen and heard it all as far as comments from customers were concerned. The lady who claimed to have fished a two-by-four out of her salad, and then demanded a free meal. (Did not happen.) The black, southern trucker who gushed appreciatively because I allowed him to be seated and eat in the store. (It must be tough to be black in the deep south.) The disheveled guy who claimed to know I was a CIA agent right before he swung one of his crutches at my head. (He was rushed to the ER for this bit of spirited commentary.)

But Banks, George Banks delivered what I considered to the ultimate positive comment ever offered by a customer.

When you consider that he wrote this comment on one of our checks just hours before he engaged in mass murder, and when you recall all of the racial tumult that was contained within that troubled brain of his, it was remarkable that he bothered to comment as he did.

He wrote, ”It’s nice to go into a restaurant and not be treated like a ni**er.”

Considering who wrote that and what his altered state of mind was at the time, in my less than valuable opinion, that was the ultimate in customer commentary. At least for me, that was the ultimate compliment.

And that’s my delusional flash for today.

Later

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That picture has *Deputy Dog* written all over it.