Waiting on a River

My mom had told me a couple times that I would probably be a great waiter.

One day I finally decided to go for it.

There’s this restaurant in my hometown called Fratellos. It’s like one of the best restaurants in town. It’s not super fancy compared to bigger city standards but in a town of like 62,000 people it counts as a fancypants restaurant.

I went there, applied, and went through all that stuff. Eventually they called me for an interview.  It was unlikely for me to get an interview since I had no waiting experience. However, the river still had plenty of ice chunks flowing through it, and therefore they must have been real low on staff . They were likely scraping the barrel of my medium-sized hometown. But they happened to scrape out just what they were looking for. I knew that I would make a great waiter. I was good at memorizing things and I was real friendly with people. I’m also good at catching things that fall.

Here’s a little background about the place: Fratellos was a restaurant that you could get to by car or by boat. (I guess by foot has well, obviously.) So they had docks and you could park your boat and come up to the restaurant or have them serve you on your boat. Pretty fancy.

During the interview things were going pretty well. We were sitting at a table with a view of the river. She was dressed real nice and professional-like. The kind of person you don’t want to ask stupid questions to.

At the end of the interview the interviewer asked me if I had any questions. Now, I have been told that it’s always good to have questions for an interview. However she already answered everything that I was wondering about so I didn’t have any questions left.

But, I assumed that it was  better to ask any question then no questions at all. I had been gazing at the chunks of ice flowing down the river while the lady was talking, and I began to wonder.

I asked, does this river ever change direction in flow?

She looked up at me.

Because I think I remember it flowing a different direction another time that I saw it.

She looked back at my resume’

I was beginning to realize that my question was irrelevant. But I did want to know.

“So I’m just wondering if the flow of the river ever changes directions like with the seasons or something?”

She stared out the window for a few seconds, and said she didn’t know. And asked if I had any other questions.

I didn’t.

And I did not get that job.

I still wonder though, about that river. And I bet she does too. Actually, I don’t think rivers ever change direction. Why would that even happen?

One thought on “Waiting on a River”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.