The Waiter's Plan

I am in a good mood today; in fact my mood is so good that I am going to reveal to you the most mysterious mystery of my life. I did not really want an interesting life – in fact I will go to the extent of saying that I wanted a rather boring life. Looking at so many bored people around me I could have picked any profession- because it seems – sooner or later everyone is bored. Then I hit upon the idea that if I became a waiter then the most interesting part of my job would be overhearing bored people talk about how boring their lives were. And with a “most interesting” part like that I could look forward to a very contented and blissful boring life.
As they say - the dreams of mice and men often go awry. There are two rather poorly adjusted individuals whose sole joint aim in life is to thwart my humble desire of leading a boring life. Indeed, as you continue to read this story, you will realize that were it not for this aim their lives would be absolutely meaningless.
It all began when I started my first job as a waiter- patting myself on the back for the extremely wise choice I had made. A perfectly normal looking young couple came in. They asked for the menu which I promptly offered them. They started discussing the menu- the guy – Frank, made some silly comments about blindly choosing anything or ordering the thirty-seventh item on the menu which the girl rejected. I was eavesdropping on their conversation to prove my point to myself and was greatly pleased with the way things were going.
Then they started going weird – the girl, who is called Tipsy, even without the aid of any alcohol, started cursing some omnipresent writer who had created them. Initially I thought that they were making some reference to a creator who has thrown them into the world or some such morose bullshit, but I soon realized that they literally thought they were characters in some wacko writer’s works. “They thought” is perhaps too weak, they were absolutely convinced about it; the way you and I would be convinced that we are alive – “I think, therefore I am” – pretty tough to deny that. Anyway these two people absolutely ruined my happiness on the very first day of my job. I will not have people talking anything but the absolutely boring and banal when I am eavesdropping – is that too much to ask for?
Anyway, I settled into the humdrum and prayed to all the powers of randomness that I never see those people again. That was not to be- they returned within a week and continued their disruptive behavior.
I decided to call their bluff. I had half a mind to walk to them and give them a piece of my mind – like say something like – “quit acting weird”. But then, I thought I might as well have some fun and started acting weird myself – I gave them a long tirade on the benefits of potatoes and spoke as if I was a character in some work of fiction. I had expected them to come out clean, say that they were only doing it to get on my nerves. I am a good man, had they done that I would have forgiven and forgotten. But they behaved as if what I was doing was absolutely natural – they took no objection to my playing out a character in their mythical writer’s story.
So I left the job and moved to a restaurant halfway across the world. And the beasts, the sadistic psychopaths, turned up at that restaurant pretty much promptly. They refused to recognize me (at least this was normal, for who in their right mind would recognize a waiter). And, yes believe it or not, they continued abusing their imagined writer. I gave them a lot of weirdness that day, but they were unfazed.
This continued for a long time, wherever I took up a job, this couple turned up and insisted on talking about some non-triviality- mostly relating to the fictional nature of their existence.
Now, I was running out of ideas to out-weird them. I needed a lot of money to carry out more imaginative extravaganzas. So I started investing in mutual funds, then in common stocks, then in bond spreads, private equity, and venture capital, algorithmic trading, and eclectic-heuristic risk-adjusted relative-absolute value hedge funds and so on. I wasted a lot of hard earned tips in this futile exercise. Then I hit upon a brilliant idea, bought lottery tickets to the top ten lotteries in the world and became a multi-billionaire.
Now I could carry out most of my plans. I tried to break their cool building menu recently. That didn’t really work but I think I saw signs of their breaking up. I have a lot of things up my sleeve. Like I said I am in a good mood today- I think the day is not far when they will grovel before me and accept defeat.