Ten minutes later, a security guard for the building calls me. He asks me why I haven’t come down to get my lunch and tells me the delivery guy is getting frustrated. I explain to him that the food is a gift for a friend, that I work in a completely different part of town and am not in the building and that they just need to deliver the food to Katie. He seems to get it and he gets off the phone. At this point I texted Katie to say “There’s a very confused sushi delivery guy wandering your building with food for you.”
A half hour after that I receive another phone call, this time from someone who works in Katie’s office asking me if I worked there and if so, did I order lunch? Apparently in the time after I spoke to the security guard, he’d sent the delivery guy upstairs, but didn’t call them to explain the situation, so it basically rebooted when the delivery guy got upstairs, but like most reboots it got bigger and more obnoxious when that happened. During the time in between my two phone calls, Katie had been called at her desk several times by pretty much anyone who the delivery guy was able to show his bag of food to in order to let her know it was there. Because Katie hadn’t seen my text, she kept having to repeat that she had not ordered food, and that there was some sort of mistake.
By the time Katie saw my text and figured out what was happening, the entire office was wondering about the mysterious sushi, so when she got up and walked over to the front and got her food, she immediately became “the Sushi Girl.” My attempt at being subtle but sweet turned into a giant red arrow pointing at Katie for everyone at the office where she had only recently started working to see. To put it in her words “the largest order of flowers with the brightest balloons would have been less embarrassing.” That day she reassured me that it was still a very ‘sweet’ thing to do, but to please never do it again. Still, while she didn’t outright credit it, I’m sure her new nickname at work made her impending termination of the relationship a whole lot easier.
The “Sushi Incident” was the last time that I tried any sort of overt romantic effort, and it was a stellar way to go out on a career of one hundred percent perfect failure. It’s not that I don’t believe in love now, I still definitely do. Now I just believe in expressing it via things like cooking dinner or binge watching a show on Netflix together. One day I may even just say “I love you.”