You're not from here, are you?

On Sunday, He Who Puts Up With Me* and I clipped Doofus to his leash and headed off on a walk by way of the Belltown Starbucks.

As is our usual M.O., Doofus and I grabbed an outside table while HWPUWM zipped inside for our coffees, et al.

Only the zipping wasn't so zippy on Sunday. So Doofus and I sat, and waited, and wondered what the holy heck was taking so long. After a looong while, an older couple (70s, maybe) exited. The man sat down at one of the two remaining empty tables (there are five outside tables, total), and the woman walked my direction. As she approached, she extended her hand, palm down, so I figured she just came over to meet Doofus (Doofus makes friends wherever he goes). I comment that "he's very friendly."

So, as the woman is kind of petting Doofus, she looks at me and asks, "Are you eating here?"

I reply, "Uhhh...yes. I'm waiting for my husband." I accompany this statement with a jerk of the head toward the black hole/interior which has apparently swallowed him up.

"Oh," she says slowly. "Because we were waiting for this table."

What the f--k, I think. "Oh," I say.

She turns and walks back to her second-choice table. She sits. A barista emerges with some pastries on plates and sets them on the second-choice table. She disappears inside and reemerges with coffee in real cups. Gee, I didn't know Starbucks had sidewalk table service.

Finally, HWPUWM extricates himself from the bowels of the building. "Gee, you were gone so long that people were trying to steal our table," I say.

He sits. We eat our shared muffin. We replentish our dangerously low caffeine levels.

I lean toward him and tell him quietly about how the older couple was apparently "waiting" for our table. He starts laughing. Turns out he was behind them in line, and at some point the woman looked out the window, saw me, and with great dismay informed her husband that I had "stolen" their table. "Should I go say something to her?" she asked him, according to HWPUWM (who for a moment considered acknowledging his connection to me, the wanton table-stealer, but then decided it was more fun to watch them nearly give themselves strokes).

You snooze, you lose. I'm glad I don't have to wait until I'm grandma-aged to figure that one out!


*HWPUWM is still being a Big Baby about the fact that I made fun of him in this blog for not knowing that Freddie Mercury is dead. Translation: He is boycotting my blog. Which means I can say anything about him here that I want, and he'll never know. Muah-ha-ha!