Some late night musings from a sci-fi insomniac
I went to see my friend Robert who worked at a big chain bank about a loan.
“Hey Robert,” I say with a handshake. “How’s my old childhood chum?”
“Ugh, has it really been that long?” Robert laughs.
“Yup, and since you are my friend, I wanted come to you first … to offer your bank the opportunity to invest in my new restaurant.”
He was sitting in his worn leather chair behind his dark-stained desk looking rather amused. “But you’re a writer. What do you know about the restaurant industry?” He shakes his head and laughs.
This is where he always shook his head and laughed. This wasn’t the first time I had approached him with a harebrained idea.
“And besides,” he says, “why would you want to run a restaurant anyway … my family has owned the Spotted Cack since before I was born and I hated working there as a kid. That’s why I became an investment banker.”
This is where I really needed to sell my idea to him.
“Well,” I say, “because last night as I tried to get to sleep I came up with some really great ideas.”.
“Really great ideas?” He laughs again.
“Yes, I believe that my ideas are good enough that it will almost guarantee success,” I say seriously.
“A restaurant takes a lot of hard work, not just great ideas,” he scoffs. “Tell me some of these groundbreaking ideas.”
“Okay, well, I think it’s all in the name of things,” I say.
“The name of the restaurant?”
“No, it’s in the name of the items on your menu, like your burgers and such,” I reply.
“Okay, I’ll bite … like what,” he asks.
“Well for instance, you could have a salad with vegetables, jalapenos and jasmine.”
“Vegetables, jalapenos and jasmine?” He laughs. “And what will you call it?”
“We would call it the Vajayjay,” I reply.
He busts out laughing, sloshing a few sips of his coffee onto his desktop. “You can’t call a salad Vajayjay,” he gasps.
He obviously did not notice my seriousness.
“And why not,” I ask.
“Because no one is going to eat … oh, no way, that will never work.” He says this more business-like.
“But it will … the beauty comes in the pricing of it,” I retort.
“No, I don’t think so, but what would the other items be named,” he asks. His curiosity was getting the better of him.
“Well, we could have a spicy chicken sandwich called The Pecker.”
He bursts out laughing again, spraying coffee forward in a Seattle-like mist. “The Pecker!” he bellows.
“Yeah, you know, chickens are always running around pecking at things, The Pecker,” I say.
“It takes more than a few clever names to make a restaurant work,” he says.
“But there’s more to it,” I say insistently. I am really trying to convince him at this point.
“It’s not just the names of the items, but the names of the portion sizes,” I continue.
“How is that,” he asks.
“All of the items will come in two sizes,” I explain. “Little and humongous, and you have to have the portion sizes vastly different.”
“That is the dumbest idea I have ever heard,” he laughs.
“No, it’s quite brilliant,” I say. “The success all comes down to when the waitress brings the customer the bill to make sure that it’s correct before she runs their card … let me explain.”
“Please do,” he chortled.
“Okay… the waitress walks over to a booth where there are two couples on a double date … while they are still eating … and in a loud voice she asks the first woman if she has the Humongous Vajayjay…”
At this point Robert is almost out of breath he’s laughing so hard.
“Now the woman is on the spot… you know even if she did, she is going to lie and announce that she has a Little Vajayjay.”
“Yeah, and therefore you lose money because she lied,” Robert manages to choke out.
“But that’s okay,” I insist, “because you never really make money on salads anyway, right?”
“Well at least you have that part right,” he says.
“If I understand it right, you make most of your money on drinks and the meat-related menu items, correct,” I ask.
“You do,” he says.
“So… when the waitress turns to the first guy at the table and asks, ‘okay sir, did you have the little…’ he is going to bellow out, ‘I have the Humongous Pecker.’”
Robert’s face was red from lack of oxygen at this point, tears streaming down his face.
“You see Robert, we would make money because we would always get the Humongous Pecker price, even if he had had a Little Pecker,” I finish sincerely.
I didn’t get the loan.