Loud Conversations and Smart Toilets
Dave did not feel well when he woke up one morning. I left him alone but, when morning officially turned into afternoon, my stomach started rumbling, reminding me it was that time of the day again. Possessing such a fine-tuned organ, I don’t know why I bother with a watch. I suggested that I could serve us something innocuous, such as rice with a banana, but Dave just rolled his eyes and said that he was not that sick. Then he suggested that I go out for a bite by myself.
I texted my British friend Maira to see if she was free. But, sadly, she had a Skype chat arranged with her family back in the UK. At that point many people would give up and search the cupboard for some crackers. Not me. My mind was set on a decent meal. I have many friends who’d rather grab inferior fast food than go to a restaurant by themselves. I have no such qualms. I love good food too much to be kept away from it by such trifling things as social discomfort.
I can always pretend to be a savvy businesswoman travelling alone who, having closed a grueling business presentation with an amazing deal for her company, just wants to be left in peace to enjoy her well-deserved meal. The jeans and flowery top just serve to blend with the masses, I reasoned as I headed out to a newly opened place I’d heard about. I suspect that a lot of people, when alone in a restaurant, do not use their phone because they are bored. After all, they could use that time to observe their surroundings or to count the floor tiles. I think they use their phones to make a statement. “No, I am not a loser without any friends. No. I am here because I choose to catch up on some work while having something to eat. There are all those emails that need to be dealt with. But one has to eat, right?”
The menu promised a Caeser salad. It is not easy to be a high maintenance customer when communicating in another language. I would prefer to avoid this potential land mine. But, knowing from my previous experience in many Uzbekistan restaurants that the lettuce is usually drowning in the dressing, I needed to try. I wanted the dressing on the side. I braced myself, as an arctic diver would before taking a plunge, and started.
“Please, dressing not on the salad.”
I checked the waiter’s expression. He seemed to understand, so I continued. “Dressing outside the salad.”
I pointed to a glass, hoping to get the message across that I wanted the dressing in a separate dish. The waiter smiled, nodded and left. When the plate arrived, it looked exactly as I feared, all mixed in, dripping with excess dressing. I looked at him sadly and said slowly.
“No, I asked for the dressing on the side.”
It occurred to me that despite his agreeable nodding, he might not understand the word ‘dressing’. I touched the soggy leaf, getting a bit of the dressing on my finger, extended the finger and said, “This is dressing,’ and adding for further clarification, “the sauce.” The guy smiled again, nodded and took the plate away. After a while he re-appeared with two plates. One had just lettuce drenched in dressing. The other had also lettuce drenched in dressing but with all the goodies that come with Caesar in this part of the world; croutons, chunks of chicken, onions etc. I smiled at him, picked up my fork and without even the slightest grimace said, “Thank you.”
I rank restaurants by several criteria. The taste of their food is #1, of course. But in third place, right after the service, is how I like their toilets. Do they have the Turkish track-start style only, or a combination of Western and Turkish? How clean are they? The toilet in the new restaurant was a revelation. I was reminded of the wonderful old Steve Martin / Lili Tomlin movie ‘All of Me’ as I stood in the tastefully tiled toilet cubicle and stared at a new contraption. In the movie a guru, who had just arrived in New York fresh from India’s countryside, flushed a toilet in his hotel room. To his wonder a phone started ringing. He flushed again. Ring, ring. The phone responded, the intervals of his flushing coinciding perfectly with the phone ringing. The scene was hilarious. The expression on his face, exaggerated by what he considered magic in action, was priceless.
I felt just like the guru as I stood there, staring at the toilet seat rim covered in plastic, with the flat side of the seat lid facing me proclaiming in bold text” Handy Intelligent Sanitary Toilet Seat. By now I am used to my smart phone being smarter than me. But a toilet seat? Just how intelligent is it? Can it discern whether the person is going #1 or #2? And what difference would it make? Another thought flushed through my mind (and yes, pun intended). Maybe, if it detects a testosterone presence, the seat will automatically lift itself, and then lower itself after the action? That would be clever! All women would appreciate that! I continued reading the text: Press button at center before use. Do not press after sitting. The last part sounded vaguely ominous. What would happen if a person disregarded the warning, made herself comfortable and then pressed? For a short while my imagination entertained me with different scenarios, some of them leading to an unplanned visit to the ER.
There was only one way to find out. I was too scared to sit, but I did press the button, waited and watched. A whirring sound followed, and I realized that the transparent plastic sleeve covering the toilet seat had started to move. Whizzing and hissing, it moved all the way to the left, until the plastic disappeared in the darkness behind the toilet, replaced by a new one.
Witnessing this magic prompted another memory. An abundance of memories that get easily triggered by the most mundane of things, never mind something as cool as a moving toilet seat, is a bonus, or curse, of reaching a certain age. The new memory that popped into my head was of a book called ‘Civilization, My Mother’ in which an old Algerian woman who had never seen a radio in her life was given one by her son. After enjoying it for a while, she opened it up, wanting to set free all the little people she expected to find there. “So how many Lilliputians does it take to pull a plastic sheet off the toilet seat?” was my next thought.
Still amused from my toilet experience, I headed back to my table. As I was sitting down, two young women entered the room. The place was hardly full but, for some reason, they thought that there was something really special about the table right next to mine. They looked to be in their early thirties, with long hair that is typical of women in this part of the world. The shorter one sported a pair of jeans with a blazer. Her friend had a skirt. The one in the skirt had lips just shy of Angelina Jolie’s and, judging by her lipstick, she was proud of them.
Noise pollution is something we usually associate with loud motorcycles, unfixed car mufflers, construction and, in general, life in a city. Loud people are not quite as bad as a honking car, but they can still be quite annoying. These two women were loud right from the beginning. But what really topped it off was the first thing they did after they ordered. The one with the Angelina lips whipped out a phone from her stylish purse, speed dialed someone, put the phone on the speaker and placed it on the table. They then started a loud three-way conversation with someone who was not even there. I checked for my invisibility cloak. No, I didn’t wear any. So why were they acting as if they were the only ones in the room?
Why is it so much more annoying to listen to a loud conversation that one doesn’t understand? I suppose, overhearing in English, we have a chance to wonder at the silliness of the people, to feel superior. We are deprived of even that small perk when we don’t understand the language.
I tried to read my book, but I could not focus. To tune them out I needed to listen to something of my own. I had an audio book on my phone but no earbuds. I decided to do something I had never done before. I put my audiobook on low and, following their example, I placed it on the table and started to listen. It worked! I was so engrossed in it that I never even noticed when they stopped conversing with their absent friend. It only came to my attention when I noticed movement. The Jolie woman got up and headed towards me.
I thought, “Uh oh, trouble! Talking loudly may be socially acceptable, but listening to an audiobook, no matter how low the volume, is not. They must have realized from my audiobook that I was a foreigner, because the woman started talking to me in remarkably good English. It turned out that they were both language instructors, and we ended up talking up a storm. After we finished chatting, they even insisted that we take a group selfie, thus sealing our status as BAFs (Best Acquaintances Forever).
About a month after this encounter I was asked to deliver a short motivational speech with some uplifting message during the Monday morning assembly at our school. I used this anecdote, and concluded “The moral of this story is that sometimes we become judgmental too quickly, and that we should not 'judge a book by its cover.’" I laughed appreciatively when, after my little speech, a colleague asked me innocently, “But isn’t this what book covers are for?”