I must tell you this story about brunch the other day. Near where I go to school is a diner. We go to this diner often. Many of us are sick of it, but we still go there because it’s convenient and they have many many things on the menu that we can eat. That’s one of the nice things about diners—something for everyone.
So, as per usual, I ordered an omelette. It came to the table and looked nice and omeletty. I took a bite and decided it needed salt. I sprinkled salt on it. I took a few more bites. Tasted better. Then on my 4th or 5th bite I suddenly felt something very sharp in my mouth.
“Ow!” I said. “I feel something very sharp in my mouth!”
I reached in and pulled out a large piece of eggshell. This wasn’t a forgivable tiny piece of eggshell, but a large wall of shell that looked like a shiv a bird might carve in prison. As I pulled it out, I felt that there was a big part of it caught in my mouth.
“What’s going on, Adam?” asked my dining companions.
“Mrrwahyahaha,” I replied, as I dug around my mouth. I don’t mean to be graphic, but there was some blood on my finger.
Eventually it was determined that there was eggshell lodged in the gum behind one of my front teeth. We told the waiter. I showed him the blood, I showed him the shell.
“Well,” he shrugged, “it’s an omelette—it happens–eggshell in the omelette.”
We asked to talk to the manager. He came over. He shrugged. “It’s an omelette, what you expect?” He reached into his pocket and removed a toothpick. “Here,” he said, “Go to the bathroom, dig it out.”
Molly gave me her pocket mirror. I went to the bathroom. I tried to dig it out. I bled more. It wasn’t pretty.
Eventually, I decided to leave it alone and brush it out when I got home. The check came. The omelette was on the check. We found this ridiculous.
(Please note, here, that I come from a family of restaurant complainers—my mother or grandmother can get the entire table comped if they find an eyelash on their plate. I’ve always shyed away from gratuitous complaining, but here I felt justified. We’ll leave the parentheses now.)
We said to the waiter, “This is ridiculous! We shouldn’t pay for this!”
He shrugged and said, “We’ll make you a new omelette.”
“No thanks,” I said, growing bitter. “I’ll pay for it–fine–but I’ll never come back here again.”
There was a dramatic pause.
“Ok, one sec,” he said, and waltzed away. He came back looking stern: “We take it off. We take it off the check, fine.”
He acted like it was a big sacrifice when I was almost killed with eggshell. I left feeling minorly victorious, all the while touching the shell with my tongue on the way home.
When I got home, I brushed and swished and brushed and swished and brushed and swished and nothing happened. Something tiny fell out but I still felt the shell with my tongue.
Then I realized: maybe the back of my tooth is deformed, and what I thought was eggshell is actually enamel?
That is where I currently stand. You may think me a bad person, but let’s not forget that there was indeed a giant sharp shell in my omelette. What have we learned from this? Next time: order a burger.
