Slipping par William Henne

1 We are at the restaurant.

2 A waiter comes to take the order.

3 We choose the menu

4 The waiter goes away and comes back with a bottle of wine.

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5 He goes away again and brings back later with a huge plateau of plates and of dishes.

6 He put it down on a small pedestal table near our table.

7 He serves my neighbour.

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9 While turning himself to take another plate, he jostles the plateau. The plateau slips, the dishes slip, the plates slip and everything smashes the soil.

10 The waiter is confused.

11 And weâ€™re a bit confused too.

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12 The only girl at the table begins to tell a story.

13 The young woman evokes the time when she was working in a restaurant. She relates the day when the survivors of Dachau came to commemorate the anniversary date of the camp liberation.

14 The restaurant crew was briefed to avoid any misunderstanding or unfortunate allusion.

15 The guests (i.e. the survivors of Dachau) arrive and the young woman plays her role of waitress as usual.

16 At the end of the meal, an old lady calls her because she did not receive cookie with her coffee, while everyone received some.

17 The waitress goes back in the kitchen to ask an additional cookie but the cook replies that he prepared the exact account of cookies and there is no cookie anymore. Someone should have had two cookies.

18 The old lady expresses her disappointment and the waitress is sorry for that, but the old lady still wants her cookie.

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19 Touched by the distress of the old lady, the waitress returns in the kitchen.

20 We have to do something, she says to the cook.

21 The cook gathers the cookie pieces on a saucer decorated with a paper lace.

22 She returns in the restaurant room and deposits the dessert on the table in front of the old lady.

23 And if this story was not true, that would have looked like a pitiful and tasteless calendar joke.

24 At the moment she put the saucer on the table, she pronounces some words of excuse and she realizes, at the same moment when she pronounces these words, her blooper.