Have it your way

I don't go very often to the Burger King that's nearest my home, for a few reasons. I usually eat fast food on the weekends when I also do recreational shopping that takes me a few miles farther. The shop seems to have minor problems with tricky parts of orders like ``with cheese, no mayo''. And then there was a stretch of a couple visits where the Diet Coke dispenser had consistently flat soda. Every soda fountain spends some time flat, but too much of that makes a place unappealing. Add in a failure to have ice twice in a row (so it was warm enough to need ice which was thus impossible) and I can mark the place down.

And there's one other thing. The place turned into, for whatever reason, a pretty big teen hangout. I don't want to sound like those cranky elderly people upset about lawns of various existence, because I'm not, really. I don't mind most of what teens do and the lawn isn't even mine. But I do suppose that teens today are, like those since the basic model was invented (1941), prone to doing foolish things loudly, and by myself I prefer to eat in reasonable quiet and without distraction. If they want to see whether they can use food trays to skateboard along the planter walls before a manager catches them, that's fine, and I'll leave them their space.

But I gave the place a try, and while they had modest confusion regarding my order (the cashier asked for it several times after the back-room folks insisted it was done), the soda was suitably fizzy and cold, and while there were two packs of semi-associated teens all seemed respectable enough. And then I overheard a girl describing a phone conversation. She had been upset at the caller because she ``was chugging bottles of water to go peeing on a car later'', and she was concentrating her squatting on the seat so as to save her urine for its intended purpose.

I worked diligently to not hear the rest of this. So I do not know if she was speaking of a new trend in inappropriately placed urine, or if she was speaking sarcastically to a person who would not get off the phone long enough for her to tend her business. I don't want to know. But I think I will give the teens their space, and that I am not being being too curmudgeonly.

Trivia: After the bombings at Pearl Harbor, the United States's B-17s at Luzon, Philippines, were ordered into the air to avoid being caught on the ground. They finally landed about 11:30 local time to prepare for a delayed strike on Japanese forces in Formosa, when the Japanese air forces based in Formosa, delayed by fog, arrived. Source: History Of The Second World War, B H Liddell Hart.

Currently Reading: The Mightiest Machine, John W Campbell. This 1972 reprinting from Ace features a cover note, ``Science Fiction From The Great Years'', by which they mean, when you didn't need to have the restrained tones or closely observed realism of E E `Doc' Smith.