Not a Repeat Customer

Yesterday, I managed to hit all the green lights on the way to work, and found myself with some 10 minutes before I had to punch in -- and yes, I have to punch in at my current work. So I decided to treat myself (as a serendipitous reward for riding recklessly fast) to some soy milk at one of the few local joints I could find that served it.

I order a hot soy milk, and a girl behind the counter gets right on it.
I order a baked biscuit/pancake with egg, and a big burly man cracks the egg onto the frying surface and re-toasts the biscuit. I see that he has big forearms (matching an even bigger stomach), and decide I'll have a rice ball to round off such a hearty breakfast of (grease) champions.

Pause for a second while I explain the cognitive process.

These rice balls (飯團) are actually semi-sticky rice which are wrapped around Chinese fried donuts (油條) and pickled veggies and fried&dried pork (肉鬆) and other things I can't identify (and, knowing Chinese food, possibly wouldn't want to). They spread the rice over a damp cloth, lay the fillings on top, and then wrap the cloth up and compact everything into a tight and cohesive rice meal. Because of the compacting action, you need a guy who has big forearms for that rice-crushing power.

It's tasty. (You don't get to keep the cloth.)

So ... I order a rice ball. The burly man starts to move, and then calls someone to make a rice ball for me. Enter stage right, an old lady of about 70 years, who probably weighs about as much as my left leg, preparing a damp cloth in her hand.

Please understand that as a general preference,

I don't want my rice balls handled by elderly Asian women.

The resulting thing was a bag of practically loose rice with an old fried donut (the kind they couldn't serve alone without disguising it somehow) and some mysterious fishy meat product from a jar (into which I absolutely swear I saw her put bits of stuff from the table as she was wiping it earlier).

And the soy milk wasn't any better.
I'm definitely not going back there again.