Arianna Georgi

 ”You eat bagels more often than pretty much anyone else I have ever met,” someone recently said to me.  Whether this statement that makes me disgusting or just eccentric is up for debate, but the fact that I eat a lot of bagel is not.  I love bagels (specifically everything bagels with cream cheese).  Now when I lived in New York, this was not an issue since everyone else is also addict and there were plenty of bagel shops every few feet.  Here in San Diego, however, there is only once place within 5 miles of my house for me to get my twice weekly everything bagel and I hate it.  A lot.

It speaks volumes about my addiction to bagels that I continue to go to the bagel store down the street, since going there is an excruciatingly annoying experience on par with anything Dante would have been able to dream up for the Inferno.  I mean, most stores have annoying components, slow salespeople, pushy customers, weird, excessively loud music, etc.  But all of these things have joined together at my local bagel store to make it the perfect storm of irritation. 

For starters, the store is staffed by a bizarre crew of social outcasts who, if they were in a sports movie where they formed a baseball team that eventually took on the champs would be likeable, but since they make my bagels are not.  Manning the bagel-toasting machine, they have world’s oldest man, who I am pretty sure is an ex-pirate that was thrown off the boat for not doing his pirate duties quickly enough.  His massive arm tattoo and deeply lined face stop me from ever saying anything to him but in addition to being incredibly slow, he consistently gets my order wrong.  At this point, I think we may be playing some sort of game I haven’t been clued in on where I tell him what I want, and he in some comical way tries to trick me.  Whole wheat bagel with lox…?  How about an onion bagel with a giant slice of tomato that looks enough like lox that I don’t question it until I get home.  Seriously.  At the cash register is a mid-forties goth woman who is always carrying on a conversation (screamed) with some who’s in the back of the store making the bagels.  I have never seen this man, but I can only imagine (I imagine him with a Mohawk and a pet parrot in case you were wondering).  In between these two are an endless array of unmotivated teenagers. 

I could tolerate the staff, I guess, and write it off to “local color” but the customers that happen to frequent it also seem to be a special level of weird and infuriating.  For starters, I have never been behind anyone in line there that could ever add to 13 (a baker’s dozen), and when ordering a “baker’s dozen” didn’t act surprised that they then had to choose which bagels went in it.  Hours of my life have passed while I stood behind someone picking out bagels, one at a time and taking forever to reach 13 (”and an onion bagel… how many is that???  3???  Okay…. and an everything bagel… how many is that???).  There are also frequently very loud high school kids at the bagel store (I think mentioned in a previous post that I live near a high school), people from the local retirement village who seem nice enough but have a hard time choosing what smear they want on their bagel, and a knitting club on Thursdays (I think they annoy me most of all). 

I complain constantly to anyone that will listen about how much I hate my bagel store.  I fume to the point of punching a wall every time I get the wrong order or pull a charred bagel from the bag.  I stand in line between people ordering a dozen and mutter.  But I keep going back.  Although it is the psychological equivalent of putting my hand on the warm burner I do it… It’s the only bagel shop nearby, I really love bagels, and besides, it gives me something to blog about. 

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