My staff and I have a particular place where we like to spend our coffee breaks. Just a little spot that takes us completely out of the office and away from it for a distance, which allows us to take a walk, get some air and let our heads cool a bit. This location also happens to be surrounded by a number of eateries, many of which I take part of when I forget or neglect to bring lunch to work. In case the description is a bit too vague, I’m describing a food court. We take our coffee breaks at a food court.
A few days ago, we were enjoying a quiet afternoon coffee and chatting about some random things, when I looked up at one of the eateries and noticed a female employee, sitting on a chair near the till. It took me a brief minute and an awkward double take for me to acknowledge that she was picking her nose with the enthusiastic ferocity normally attributed to a seizure. Her index finger was basically buried almost to the second knuckle and I don’t know what she was looking at but she seemed transfixed as she dug for nose gold with a Zen kind of enthusiasm.
I went through the many stages of morbid comedy… Surprise, laughter, judgement and disgust followed by the sudden realization that i occasionally order food there. All of this went through my mind in under a minute and I pointed out the offending party to my colleague, who shared a laugh without any of the disgust that would follow, signalling that he never eats there. I don’t like being sued, so I won’t name the eatery or its exact location but it woke me up to the fact that as pleasant as occasionally eating take out food can be, one really never knows how clean the location one orders from really is.
I don’t really have a point to today’s post. It’s just something that happened that I decided to share. We often see documentaries about cleanliness behind a counter but this was one of the few instances in my life where I actually saw something happening, firsthand. The icing on the cake was when we got up to leave and walked past and the woman in question made eye contact with me and smiled because she recognized me. Awkward. ☯️
The Blogging Buddhist 