The Daily Cow

Today I went to Subway for lunch, and before me was a 65-year-old black woman. For around two minutes, the Hispanic girl making the sandwich and the black woman ordering a sandwich had an unfruitful dialog over what type of vegetables to add. The black woman kept saying "tomatoes and olives, please" in a strongly-black accent and the Hispanic girl responding with confused looks ("We don't sell potatoes, ma'am").

I was fed up with waiting for them to reconcile this, so I said to the Hispanic girl: "She wants tomatoes and olives, please." So the girl puts them on. You would think that the black woman would thank me for resolving their deadlock, right? That's exactly the opposite of what happened.

She chided me: "This is a free country, boy. I am a free 64-year-old woman. I was born black but I was raised American. I make my own decisions. I don't want no kid like you making decisions for me."

Huh?

Immediately I flared back: "If you were raised American you wouldn't have this terrible accent that prevented a language-impaired worker from understanding you, and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Slavery was abolished over a century ago. Your mom had numerous years to teach you proper English." At this point, I wanted to say something like "But I forgot she never learned proper English herself" but I felt that that was too much, so I chose to end right there with "go away and let me get my sandwich."

And I turned around and said to the girl: "Oven-roasted chicken breast foot-long in honey oat bread, please."

I hate people who attack you for helping them. It's the most disrespectful thing that one can do.