pureburrito on Schellingstraße
Masako Toyoda
I think that the guy who took my burrito order a few hours ago may have bullied me. His English was just fine so I’m rather confident this didn’t happen because of any language barrier. After placing my order from the preset menu, I asked him to switch out the beans for the rice and to switch out the not-spicy sauce for the spicy one. He definitely heard me, but then switched to making fun of me for not having seen the choose-your-own-combination menu (that in fact I had seen) directly in front of me. I tried to laugh it off and insist: but I want that exact combo on the preset menu with rice and the spicy sauce, but he didn’t back down and taunted me with each ingredient (though there were customers behind me)… was I sure I wanted this one, how about that one, tell me, sweetheart. When we hit the selection of sauces, he essentially did the same for each of the spice levels. When I insisted I wanted the spiciest one-maybe he thought I couldn’t handle that much spice (joke’s on him) but-he took a very very large scoop of it (despite having barely added much of any of the other ingredients) and very very slowly poured it all over everything else. It was certainly spicier than any of the other burritos I have ever gotten from there.
When a few years ago I recounted to a few of my close friends some experiences I had on my middle school bus (which I’d rather not talk about), they identified these experiences as that of bullying. Today, I had the same super uneasy feeling I had many years ago and my body reacted with the same nervous laughter that comes out of me when I am extremely uncomfortable but don’t know how to deal with a situation. In the past I’ve only been able to identify these instances months or even years after they occurred as ones within which I experienced something I totally didn’t deserve. I’m glad that I’m beginning to be able to identify them more readily now. I wish I’d said something to the guy to stand up for myself, but, baby steps are still steps.
