¿Que?

Last night my mobile phone informed me that I had an unchecked voicemail. The message had come in around 6 or 7 pm. T-300 asked, “Would you like to hear your voicemail?” “Damn skippy,” I chirped.

But the message was in Spanish. Despite three years in high school and a summer as a bus boy at The Olive Garden, my Spanish is limited to a bevy of nouns, verbs in the present tense and a smattering of profanity.

(The profanity was courtesy of the old dishwasher at The Olive Garden, who we lovingly called “Grandpa.” He hated all the bus boys and was forever yelling spanish profanity at us. In retaliation, we threw olives at him when he wasn’t looking, and then promptly blamed the other bus boys. Which he would then yell at. It was a vicious cycle.)

I did the best I could to pick up what the message was trying to tell me. The words I got were: elección, Los Angeles and Jim (Jeem) Hahn. I erased the message. My wife, Miranda Kopfschmertzen, noticing my perplexed expression, asked, “What was that?”

I joked, “Jim Hahn knows he’s losing and is now employing his ill-conceived plan b: curry the last-minute latino vote.” Imagine my surprise when I heard on NPR this morning that Jim Hahn had lost the election.