How Not to Make Money

Today I was out of the office on a road trip of sorts. It was work related but involved some of my favorite people so it was like a mini-holiday disguised as work.

Trips like this usually involve treats, like all good road trips do. So our plan of attack quickly became finding a milkshake on our drive back to the city. While I kept my eyes open for police cars, my colleague kept her eyes open for potential locales where we might perhaps find Manitoba's best milkshake (currently at the Capricorn in Notre Dame de Lourdes).

We decided that as we took Highway 1, our best option would be Headingly Grill. Nicks Inn was our first choice but they don't take plastic so HG became numero uno. We went in. We ordered. We waited. She presented us with the finished product. And we went to pay.

My colleague said it was her treat. Why thank you, I said. So she handed over her credit card. Swipe after swipe, nothing happened. Machine said the card had no track. Ok. Odd but fine. She offered up her debit card. Same deal. Old machine, the waitress said. Finicky. Hm. She went to ask the guys in the kitchen if they knew how to make it work. No, they said. Not at all. So she called someone. They told her to try her own card. It was about this time that my pal muttered under her breath, "don't offer to pay, don't offer to pay". We both came to the realization as we stood there sucking back the vanilla goodness, that these icy babies were gonna be on the house.

So turns out the waitresses own card worked. Well, not really our problem. We tried. I lied and said all I had was my work card and I couldn't use it. The woman looked incredibly confused. It was right about then that most people would just reverse it out of the till and call it a freebie. But instead, she asked if we came there often. Ummmmmm. We lied and told her every couple of weeks or so. Could we just remember to pay for it then, she asked? Ummmmmm. We lied and told her OF COURSE. She closed out our sale and handed my friend her reciept with a note on the back for the imaginary waitress that we would imaginarily give this to the next time we imagined we'd drop in that said "ask Gina about this". We both kind of thought that maybe it should have been Gina who kept the reciept but whatever. Gina then pulled out a piece of blank till tape and wrote "will drive by in this month to pay - Jaclyn". No last name. No phone number. No credit card digits. Just the promise of a girl named Jaclyn who would, one day this month, swing by for a bit to eat and cover the loss of two milkshakes.

By the time this was all over I had finished my milkshake. We walked out to the car and my friend looked at me and said, "Dammit". What, I asked her. "If I'd have known that was going to happen I would have ordered chicken fingers too!".