More Harmful than You Might Think

Last evening, while simultaneously ingesting some mediocre bar cuisine and the first half of the Spurs-Blazers game, The OCC and two associates happened to spot a noteworthy interaction at a table nearby.

Seated just a few feet away were a pair of 20/30-something suits and their dates. During the 30 or so minutes that our visits at the establishment overlapped, these four individuals had really done nothing whatsoever to draw our attention in a positive or negative way.

However, not long before we were getting ready to leave, one of the suits (we’ll call him Tony) got up from his chair to go to the bathroom. Before he could get out of earshot, his buddy (we’ll call him Jake) stopped him and said, “Hey, what do you want to drink?”

Tony stopped where he was standing, a few feet away from the table, and paused a second for dramatic effect. Then a second later he pointed at Jake – much like the Val Kilmer rendition of Elvis points at Christian Slater in True Romance – and with a smile at his amigo, as if to say, you know what I’m gonna say, old buddy, Tony dropped his drink order in a tone that suggested he knew no individual more cool and fun-loving than himself:

“Jack and diet,” he said.

Jake, the recipient of this order, did not so much as flinch.

But right at that moment, somewhere across the world, an unknown person awakened in the night and screamed out – a brief but jarring cosmic disturbance caused by the oblivious behavior of one low-carb douche bag.