Customer said the first thing he’d do to make the economic expansion more equitable would be to increase the housing stock (specifically by slashing zoning laws). “The rents people are paying is outrageous.”
(Attendant speculated that the reason the customer had said “the rents people are paying is outrageous” rather than “the rents people are paying are outrageous” was in order to avoid having to say “are” twice. Yet it may well have rather been that the speaker had changed his idea while he spoke, going from the one just quoted, that rents being paid were outrageous, to an idea that rent, as a general matter, “was” outrageous. Of course, we do not and ought not hold spoken language to the same standards as written language, but it is interesting to reflect on the causes behind our unintended departures from the orthodox.)
Customer ordered everything bagel with lox and med peach smoothie.
Customer asked which smoothie the server preferred and the server answered with which was the most popular, yet the customer insisted on hearing which he liked best. (This encounter brought to mind something the Attendant hadn’t thought of in years, his intense dislike of this word “smoothie.” First became aware of it in Athens, GA in the 90’s, but originally it applied to a smooth person, attested from the 1920s.)
It was not the wing of an insect floating in the stopped up sink, but a spinach leaf.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 