“Oh Sorry, That Was A Cat.”

I think I can honestly say that a few days ago, I was waited on by the most amusing waiter I have ever had in my life.

This man goes by the name of Samuel.

So we went to Aburi to spend a day there, for no particular reason at all, and it happened to be at a resort called Hillburi, a sort of play on words, since, you know, it was on a hill.

A daytime view from outside the lobby of Hillburi

My cousin said that it was obvious from the very moment we walked in that the guy didn’t like us at all. I wonder why? Maybe it was because there were just so many children. The only adult there was my Dad. Apart from that, it was me, my ten-year-old brother, Delali, my best friend Lena, my cousins John and Mary. I would assume that is the most likely case, since this tablet was basically the first thing I saw when I walked in.

It says: “TEENAGERS: Tired of being harassed by your stupid parents? Act Now!!! Move out, get a job, pay your own bills, while you still know everything.”

The tablet in the lobby

So then he started asking us for our dinner orders, and he was obviously peeved because we arrived late and the restaurant was supposed to have been closed like an hour ago. He was trying to hide his annoyance professionally, but it was obvious that it wasn’t working. And we were so indecisive, too! It must have taken us what, twenty minutes to choose from a single page? And my brother said he didn’t want to eat and suddenly he did want to eat but then he didn’t want to eat now so there was a lot of confusion.

But this waiter too…he managed to bamboozle my Dad into paying 35 cedis for a Ground Beef pizza without the ground beef but with pepperoni, which he could have paid 25 cedis for, for a Margherita with a pepperoni topping. Which was basically the same thing. And he told us one pizza was only big enough for one person, so we ordered more than we had intended.

So there, we didn’t like him, and he didn’t like us.

When the dinner actually came, oh man! We looked at the food in front of us and wondered how in heaven we were going to eat it all! He had told us it was only big enough for one person. Meanwhile, all of us could have shared one and gotten enough to eat. The situation was so absurd that we all started laughing spontaneously, and Samuel just didn’t seem to understand what was going on, every single time he came to the table.

There we were, trying to eat up all of that not-very-spectacular food, when I saw a little cat coming down the stairs a little way away from the area where we were eating and I said, “Look, a cat!”

My own cat, Alex

My cousin John saw it too and said, “Look, Mary, there’s a cat behind you.” I promise you, she almost jumped out of her seat. And then everyone started laughing like crazy again, and we were all saying variations of: “It was just a cat!”

All of a sudden, Samuel walked in and, as if we were so confused, so blind, and like we hadn’t been saying it for the past fifteen seconds…he said, “Oh, sorry. That was a cat.”

That set us all off again, because really. Don’t you think we would have figured THAT out by now? What did he think we saw, a dragon? What was extremely funny was the apology. “Oh, sorry.” What was he apologising for anyway? And he looked so harassed, as if he thought we found HIM to be the joke. Which, I must admit, he partly was.

The next morning when we were having breakfast, he kept getting all our orders wrong. And we all started laughing again. When we were done, we ordered some snacks for later, and Samuel recommended the famous ‘Pavilion Sandwich.’ When Lena was asked if she’d have one, she asked of him, “What’s in it?”

And he repeated, blankly, “Pavilion Sandwich.”

How could we NOT crack up?!

Oh, Samuel. We probably ruined his whole week, with all our laughing. And we just kept doing it, all through the visit, from the time we walked in to the time we walked out. He even called John to lecture him about ‘reasons for laughing’ or something of that sort, leaving John with the advice that when he goes back to his room, he must sit down and think about why he laughs…That man must hate all our guts. But we had so much fun being waited on by him.

I just cannot forget that time when he came up and said, “Oh, sorry. That was a cat.”

Lena, Mary and I at Hilburi