I don’t have much time because I think they’re on to me. Let me just get this out quickly. I’m sitting in an uncannily good facsimile of a Panera Bread in a suburb just north of Indianapolis.

If my well-trained urban senses weren’t so sharp, I might be lulled into believing I’m in civilization instead of some surreal twilight-zone joke.

As I sit here hacking away on my daughter’s pink Sony VAIO, my family lay asleep at my wife’s sister’s house. Across from me sits a man laughing at his Blackberry. I spy the mousse in his hair and can overhear his conversation. I know he must be stranded here on his way to or from California because people at the Steak ‘n Shake across the parking lot can hear him too. Listening intently, I hear him intone “real estate” and “my partners” at a whisper just above the sound of a Airbus passing overhead. Yep. Californian.

I have to give it to he Indians here, their attention to detail and eye for minutiae is mindblowingly good. But something just seems wrong. The woman at the counter taking my order is neither rude nor ironic. In fact, I think they modeled her after this character.

There are several people pecking away at their laptops, again, almost convincingly. Like children banging away at a Fisher Price keyboard, I know that these well-intentioned but primitive people could not be actually accessing the Internet. It is a known fact that Japanese electronics just doesn’t function from the dead zone that begins East of Harrisburg and runs to the Sierra Nevada range.

The dead giveaway comes when I hear a man speaking in a strange accent. “Must be a systems analyst from Bangalore,” I mistakenly think. Casting a glance sideways, I realize how wrong, wrong, wrong this all is. He’s a sixty-ish man with blue eyes and fair complexion! “What the Hell is going on here?” I almost say aloud. White people don’t speak this way!

I need only to make it to Saturday. The simplistic kindness, cleanliness and safety of this place is killing me. Oh to get back to Philly. I need to be roughed up on the subway by some Italian union labor or share a good cry with one of my “artistic” co-workers.

See you this weekend.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at 10:00 am and is filed under Cavalcade of Whimsy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.