"I live in a Sitcom", by Rox Midge

There's this girl that is a waitress in the sandwich shop I go to. I'll call her 'Sandwich Shop Girl' for reasons which should be fairly clear. Anyway, she's a waitress there, and I go there quite often (as the shop is directly next to the building I work in, which makes it extremely convienent for my lunching pleasure).

Now, I've worked at this job since Janurary 2001, and I've been going to this sandwich shop at least three times a week since then. At first, I ordered items from all over the menu, trying nearly every sandwich that they offer. I learned, for example, that the Cobb is incredibly nasty, and that there's another sandwich which is nearly impossible to eat without having it fall apart and make a large mess.

The thing is, I prefer regularity over variety in the long term -- I like McDonald's because I know exactly the quality of the food, and I know that one side of the burger is going to be the same tempature and consistency as the other side of the burger. So what I wound up doing is falling into a regular pattern of ordering sandwiches.

At first I just alternated with ham and cheese sandwiches and some sandwich that has turkey, salami, ham, and cheese. But then I just wound up ordering the same thing every day. Which brings us back to Sandwich Shop Girl, who I will now refer to as SSG.

SSG, as one might expect from a waitress who has a customer that comes in every day, started to recognise me. Further she started to memorize my order. When I realized that she recognized me and had my order memorized I was flattered and bought her a card to thank her for her service. She was flattered, I was happy.

Once I'd given her the card, she also knew my name, and started addressing me using it. Soon after that, she started to give me my order as soon as she saw me. For example, I would walk in at the end of a line of six to eight people, and she would scribble my order onto a ticket, walk to the end of the line, give it to me, smile, wink, and walk back to the front of the line.

This screams of preferential treatment, obviously, and so I thought: "she likes me! I'll ask her out." So I bought her a book (Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth, available from Amazon), and came in really early one day. I handed her the book (wrapped), and asked her if she'd like to go out and get coffee sometime.

She said yes! I was estatic. I gave her my phone number at work and told her to call me. She called later that day and said she couldn't do anything that evening. The next day she didn't mention it at all, and so on, until I finally brought it up and she said she was kind of seeing someone else.

Ok, I thought, no problem. She's obviously not interested, so I backed off. I still go to the sandwich shop for lunch, she still takes my order as soon as she sees me, and everything's happy. Sometimes, when it's slow, she strikes up conversation.

The book I got her was pretty depressing, though, and I'm afraid that she might take it the wrong way. In it, there is a guy named Jimmy Corrigan who has a lot of trouble relating to other people. A good way to describe him is 'a man paralyzed by the fear of being disliked.' That's also a pretty good way to describe me, which probably explains why I liked the book.