My next customer was the only remaining unidentified man, the one who had laughed at Brian's order. He had previously failed to respond to the name-extraction trick. I decided not to repeat it.
'What would you like?' I asked.
'I'll have a double-coddled Kurdistani sailmaker with a reverse twist,' he said. 'Shaken, not stirred.'
I was unfamiliar with this drink, but assumed the professionals behind the bar would know it.
'Your name, please?'
'Sorry?'
'I require your name. To avoid errors.'
There was a silence. Dr Jenny Broadhurst, beside him, said, 'His name's Rod.'
'Dr Roderick Broadhurst, correct?' I said by way of confirmation. The rule against partners did not apply, of course, to people who were in a relationship with someone from the same class. There were seven such couples and Jenny was predictably sitting beside her husband.
'What -' started Rod, but Jenny interrupted.
'Quite correct. I'm Jenny and I'll have a sage and pineapple margarita too, please.' She turned to Rod. 'Are you being a jerk? About the sailmaker? Pick on someone with your own complement of synapses.'
Rod looked at her, then at me. 'Sorry, mate, just taking the piss. I'll have a martini. Standard.'
I collected the remainder of the names and orders without difficulty. I understood that Jenny had been trying to tell Rod discreetly that I was unintelligent, presumably because of my waiter role. She had used a neat social trick, which I noted for future use, but had made a factual error which Rod had not corrected. Perhaps one day he or she would make a clinical or research mistake as a result of this misunderstanding.
Before I returned to the bar, I spoke to them again.
'There is no experimental evidence of a correlation between synapse numbers and intelligence level within primate populations. I recommend reading Williams and Herrup, Annual Review of Neuroscience.' I hoped this would be helpful.
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