Cokes at the Shanghai Public Library cafeteria Glitch_in_the_Matrix

In 2013 I was working in Shanghai, China, and my girlfriend and I would occasionally get lunch at the cafeteria in the city's main public library, because it was a short subway trip from our apartment, it served absolutely delicious food, was impeccably clean, and was heavily subsidized for the underpaid library employees and to attract patrons. So you could get a huge plate of yummy traditional Shanghainese cuisine for RMB 5, or less than a dollar. Sides were RMB 2 or 3. This was a better deal than the dirtiest hole-in-the-wall ethnic mom-and-pop restaurants. But unless it was on the employees' lunch shift, there were never more than a few other customers there.

So the glitchy thing was cans of Coca-Cola. All of the drinks other than hot tea and room temperature water were in a locked refrigerator case in the back wall of the cafeteria that you had to order at the register while you were paying, and then the cashier would call another attendant employee to unlock the case and get the drinks, sometimes several minutes after sitting down to eat. That's what we did whenever we went there, but after our first visit, two cokes would just mysteriously appear on the table where we had set our coats, bags, and umbrellas, sometime while our orders were being dished up at the service counter.

The employees generally could not care less about service, and we never we able to figure out where the cokes came from. We ordered and paid for them, but we got more from the attendant summoned by the cashier when they got around to it. When we asked those attendants where the first cokes had come from, none of them knew, they shrugged, but they also looked a little frightened to me. This happened several times. The only theory was that some industrious employee who we never saw, and never owned up to it when we asked the other staff, was getting our cokes in advance, but that would have been completely against policy and quite likely to get anyone so presumptuous in trouble. The cans were cold, too, so they had to have come from the locked fridge case.

After the second time this happened, we pointed out to the cashier that we already had cokes waiting for us where our things were, and we demanded an explanation. The cashier would look concerned and frightened, ask us whether we brought them in with us, charge us for them after we said we hadn't, but refuse to speculate on how they got there. After that, we wouldn't order any drinks but drank the cokes anyway, and nobody said a word. When either of us went to eat there by ourselves, it didn't happen.

The Shanghai Public Library since 1996 has been in this huge 24-story building, the tallest library in the world, but only the first four floors are open to the public because most of the collection was digitized on CD-ROMs while it was being built. The rest of the gargantuan tower building isn't even used for office space.

Submitted December 27, 2016 at 03:58AM by jsalsman http://ift.tt/2iy1hMA Glitch_in_the_Matrix