Subway at a Virginia truck stop

On my ride up to DC last week I was excited to get back to a Subway and get our family's favorite sandwich (rotisserie chicken on whole wheat with pepper jack... I'll spare you all the granular detail). It's a sandwich we Mary, Natalie and I settled on after a lot of trial and error over the years for our jaunts up and down the coast to the Northeast, so we were very sad when Subway briefly axed the rotisserie chicken from its menus during the pandemic.

Right around noon I got off of 85 at a truck stop between the VA-NC border and Petersburg. When I walked into the Subway section of it I was surprised by an exceptionally enthusiastic greeting from the woman at the register. No argument there. It being the very tip of noon, there were maybe eight people in front of me, but that's what one gets for stopping right at the statutory hour of the mid-day repast. I stood and waited.

Shortly thereafter a few Black* people came in and the woman behind the counter greeted them with cheer equal to what she had offered me and then asked: "Are y'all off of that bus? How much time did they give you?" The newcomers said something like 15-20 minutes and the woman behind the counter said she was pretty sure she could get them through in time. This was the moment of my fail. I probably should have offered to let them go in front of me right about then. I was slightly pressed for time in that I wanted to get to my hotel in downtown DC before rush hour and then to my co-working space to work on my presentation for the next day. But it's not like I had a bus that might leave if I didn't make it through on time. I'm pretty sure they got them served anyway. They were cranking.

*I draw attention to their race only because the woman at the register was white and country and in all likelihood a Trump voter. The urban intelligentsia's view that that makes them entirely, inherently and reflexively racist is entirely devoid of nuance. Plus we're as racist as fuck in our own way anyhow. We just mask it better with pieties, yard signs and layers of bureaucracy.