Blue

Strange Seas

"Are you fucking stupid? I asked for this sandwich without mustard! Jesus Christ, it's like nobody in this stupid little beach town has a brain. Are you serious? What, did all the surfing get to your brain? Make you stupid?" The man stared expectantly at Adam, as if waiting for Adam to agree with him: 'Yes, Mr. Tourist man. I have time to surf every day, and somehow, all of that surfing has left me dumber than the average person, and I am also incapable of making sandwiches. Everything is my fault.' Adam wished he could take the mustard-soaked bun off of the top of the sandwich in his hands and shove it onto the man's perfectly coiffed black hair. His revenge would be swift; violent. He'd grind the bun into a paste of bread and mustard and hair gel right on top of this man's head. Then, he'd use the paste to wax the nonexistent surfboard that he didn't own, because he was too busy with work and school to even think about surfing.

"I apologize, sir. The kitchen must have made a mistake. I'll see what I can do about getting you a new sandwich," Adam said instead. The man's face was still twisted between anger and disgust and he shot Adam a rather impressive glare.

"You owe me a free sandwich, kid. I can't believe that you would do something like this. You must be new or something. I come here every year and I have never had such terrible service here before. Where's Tammy? I want to speak to Tammy. I can't believe she'd stoop to hiring someone like you. We obviously need to have a talk about her hiring habits, if this is what's going to start happening around this place. Fucking ridiculous," the man snapped. Adam struggled to tamp down the dumbfounded look of horror he could feel bubbling up onto his face. It was mustard. A thin layer of mustard. This man wanted to talk to the owner of the shop over a simple condiment mistake, one that could have easily been rectified if the man had just given Adam a second to do his job.

"I'm sorry sir, but Tammy isn't here today."

A lie. Tammy was always here. She just didn't need to have her time wasted by this angry mustard man.

"Are you serious? She's not even here? What kind of business is she running? Let me see a manager. The manager and I need to have a little chat," the man said. Adam took a deep breath in through his nose. There was always one. Always one. It didn't matter how long or short Adam's shift was. There was always one rude tourist who demanded that he relinquish his job for one reason or another. Today it was mustard. Yesterday it had been them running out of plastic straws. A few weeks ago it had been because they had plastic straws at all. There was no winning.

"Yes, sir. Let me just get my manager," Adam said, pasting such a fake smile on his face that he probably looked like a magazine cutout. Or, a regular person with a magazine smile pasted on them, which was probably scarier because Adam's eyes were certainly dead and angry above this magazine smile. Adam was going on hour eight of his shift and if he had to spend one more minute talking to this man about a little bit of mustard on his sandwich, he was going to explode into a screaming match with the man. He wasn't even supposed to work today. He had picked up this shift at the last minute to keep his mind off of... nope. He wasn't going to think about that. He turned from the pissed off tourist in front of him and headed to the back to grab his manager.

"Ken, there's another nutball who wants to talk to Tammy." Adam shut the door carefully behind him and sagged against the wall. Tammy and Ken looked up from the pile of paperwork in front of them. The room was silent for a moment.

"Another one?" Tammy asked. Adam shrugged in a noncommittal way.

"Dude, you like, attract them or something," Ken said. He was small, laid-back, and was so into surfing that he smelled of surfboard wax. Part of why Adam had agreed to get his manager was because of the surfboarding comment. Ken looked and smelled like he had just stepped out of some surfboard commercial. The mustard man was about to blow a gasket and Adam was here to relish in it.