My name is Brad. I am a writer, I am awkward in social situations, and I spend a lot of time in coffee shops trying to escape all of the terribly distracting things I find at home (video games, movies, tv, cats, comics, vitamin water, robots, etc.). I rotate amongst local coffee shops throughout the week so that no single location becomes too familiar with my presence. Spending any appreciable amount of time in one place is bound to make you privy to the occasional odd situation, but I have come to believe that coffee shops are breeding grounds for weird. The following is my account of the wonderfully weird and horribly awkward situations I have encountered.

Did Niko Bellic End Up Owning An Arco At The End of GTAIV?

The great thing about wearing headphone all of the time is that people tend to think that you can’t hear them.  Even people sitting in the chairs next to you.  With the apple headphones, music on mute, you can pretty much hear just as well as you would without them.

This assumption was clearly made by the Russian man and woman sitting next to me.  They originally started speaking in Russian, but then the man said something and nodded toward me.  The girl turned and looked at me.  While that was a little weird in its own right, the truly bizarre part was the story of which I apparently reminded him.

As he was nodding at me, his eyes went wide with a triggered memory.  He (oddly enough) switched into English and it went something like this…

(Note: I was actually typing this out as he was telling the story.  This is a direct transcript with a small amount of short hand.)

“Oh!  You know he tried to kill his wife?  He had an Arco gas station near disneyland making a lot of money.  Now he married this girl.  When he was engaged to her he went to her house.  We were all there.  Me my dad.  He took her in his car and screwed her… so, she was a slut.  So, he has his first gas station. He bought a house and then she was going to divorce and walk away with a lot of money.

At this point, he started laughing.  The laughter built to such a hysterical state that he was having trouble getting the rest of the story out.  The remainder of this story was told while wearing a huge smile with occasional pauses to chuckle.  He also added in the appropriate hand gestures to mimic the various actions.

“He puts on a mask and sneaks in the room and he is choking her while she is sleeping.  He is talking shit and somehow she rips off the mask.  She starts screaming, “Don’t kill me! I’m the mother of your kids!”  Then he just runs out.  She presses charges.  They put a warrant out for his arrest, but he already ran away.  He pays her off to drop the charges.  He pays her a lot of money.  And who does he enep marrying?  His friend’s wife that she’s cheating with.”

(Another Note: He laughed the loudest while trying to mimic the woman yelling, “Don’t kill me! I’m the mother of your kids.”)

The moral of the story?  Arco gas sucks.

*Bonus tidbit: While I was outside on a phone call, I caught the Russian woman rubbing the corner of my closed laptop that I’d left on my chair.  She saw me see her, but never mentioned it when I sat back down.

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