I had the good fortune of meeting an anonymous reader the other day. And not just any anonymous reader. A former anonymous reader.
It was late. I had put in a full shift behind the bar on a busy Friday night. It was nearly midnight when a woman in a wrinkled shirt and skull cap purposefully flopped onto a stool at my bar. Her posturing—the way she knowingly observed the closing servers as they criss-crossed the dining room and finished up odd bits of busywork—indicated that she was waiting for someone on staff.
That someone it turns out, was her girlfriend, my co-worker. The two of us were introduced as we counted money and processed the end of the night paperwork. The woman (I’ll call her “G”) made friendly banter until, just a few minutes into getting to know each other, she stunned me with a statement I wasn’t expecting.
“I used to read your blog,” she said. Her girlfriend shot G a look that almost looked like a wince.
“But then I stopped. It pissed me off too much.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Upon seeing the stunned look on my face G added, conciliatorily, “It wasn’t just you. Your blog was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”