It wasn’t busy, which was both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that not all “busy” is good busy. For instance, the person who sends you into the back three times for their water — wrong glass, too cold, too warm — probably is not the person you want to spend all of your time with.
But people often make up for their own inadequacies by searching out inadequacies in others. And what easier target is there than someone tasked with service? The young woman had sat somewhere in between those trips into the back. I stepped up to her, and wiped the “just-right” water off of my hands.
“Two Paper Planes,” she said. She was under 30 years old in my estimation. And I do have to make that estimation about 50 times a night.
I’ve done it every night for 35 years, so I have gotten rather good at it. “May I see some ID?” I asked. She sighed and rolled her eyes.
I already knew where this was going. One of the two types of people who put up the biggest fuss when they get “carded” are the people who are just 22 years old. They are so old now, they seem to think.
She produced an ID that was vertical in orientation. These are the IDs that are given to people under 21 years old. The state of California tries to make identifying underage IDs easy by making the two age groups distinct in regard to the card they carry.
The problem is that the ID doesn’t necessarily expire on one’s 21st birthday. I looked at it closely. It had a picture that looked like her, it .
