Like Clockwork
I drop by The Bagel Bin in Manchester (formerly Hooksett Bagel) about every six weeks. Every six weeks is approximately when I have put off doing the dishes for so long that I am completely out of even the most basic of flatware — knifes — and cannot even butter an English muffin to consume for breakfast. My friend Meghan said that sometimes she’d rather buy new clothes than do laundry, and I consider this pattern of mine to be the runt cousin of that sort of mentality.
So as I saunter in this morning, the girl behind the register looks at me and recites precisely what I was going to order. Now, I have been to this establishment fewer than a dozen times, and I had barely even heard of it prior to last June. But apparently I have become a “regular.”
I wanted this phenomenon to happen to me during my last year of college. I’d spend two and a half years living in a dormitory, and once I moved into an apartment on the outskirts of Saratoga, I enjoyed the breadth of the wider city. I came home one evening, having spent an enjoyable forty minutes getting lost down blind, meandering residential areas, and declared that my friends and I needed a hangout. Me needed to find an odd greasy spoon, and out-of-the-way diner, a “joint” that we could transform into our home away from home. A place where we were regulars.
“You mean, like Cheers?” someone asked.
That sort of took the wind out my Great Idea. That and the discovery that the neat, hole-in-the-wall pizza place I was proposing to be our new clubhouse didn’t actually have any chairs, as they wanted you to vacate the premises as quickly as possible. What good is a place where everyone knows your name, and you can ask for “the usual” if you can’t stay there and de-rez?
And now I’ve become a regular by accident at a yuppie breakfast joint. Highly irregular.
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