The other day, my wife and I ordered lunch from a food truck which had just a couple of adjacent tables.
When we sat down, I noticed our table was on a slant. Not the kind of tilt you get when one of the table legs is a bit shorter than the others — a problem usually remedied by sticking a folded napkin or maybe a matchbook (do restaurants still give those out in this no-smoking era?) under there.
This was more like ten degrees off level. And so was the other table. Not so much that our food and drinks would slide right off, but certainly on a slope. I hadn’t noticed the uneven terrain before, but now it became obvious.
And here’s where my weird brain goes when situations like this come up — to an old pop culture reference.
Which is why I suddenly pictured us in The Penguin’s lair on a 1966 episode of Batman. You see, the villains on that show (e.g. The Riddler, Catwoman, The Joker) were all crooks, so the scenes at the headquarters of their criminal enterprises were all shot to make the floors and walls look crooked.
If only the restaurant’s employees had been wearing shirts like the ones Penguin’s henchmen wore, which labeled them Goon 1 and Goon 2, as if their boss had read “The Cat In The Hat” too often.
You may now exit my brain.