RAW DEAL: Just back from an empty nearby sushi joint where I popped for a high-priced lunch. I go there every now and again and am known to many of the folk there. Which made my recent troubles all the more odd...

I order a Coke, as I often do, and receive a very flat, light brown Diet Coke instead. "Ummm, can I get a regular Coke, please," I ask my nice waitress.

She comes back with a really flat, light brown Coke. "Ummm, this is flat, or maybe the syrup is low, or probably both," I tell her.

"I get you new one," she says.

She comes back with the same thing.

"Still bad," I say.

She goes away and comes back again.

"You in luck," she says. "Found a bottle. This last one from bottle."

It's flat. It's light brown. It ain't from no bottle.

"Ummmm, maybe can I just get a ginger ale?"

She goes away and the skinny manager-lady starts gesticulating at me from behind the bar, pointing the soda-gun at me and shaking it. "This good!" she says angrily. "Nothing wrong! Good Coke!" She's not smiling, and her body is rigid. Her lips are drawn taut across her teeth in a sneer.

"Not good Coke," I say. "But I don't want to argue. I just want a ginger ale."

"This good Coke! Nothing wrong!" she insists, loudly, from across the restaurant.

"The Coke is fucked up," mumbles one of the sushi chefs behind the sushi bar.

My food comes and my order is wrong. I tell my waitress I wrote down a spicy tuna handroll and a tuna/avocado maki roll, and that she's delivered a spicy tuna handroll and a spicy tuna/avocado maki roll. I see the manager-lady shaking her head from across the bar. The waitress just looks at me with a little smile, as if to say, "I'll stand here all day, but that's all you're getting, mister."

I eat my wrong roll. I sip on my flat ginger ale, which has been placed alongside two bad attempts at Coke, left there perhaps to remind me that I'm a picky asshole.

I sign the $35 bill and figure out why this place is always empty.