Take off your shorts and wave them like a muffin tin

One frequently used trope in action/mystery/spy films is to have the characters who are like expertly sneaky types stand across the street from a person who is in a cafe and watch them for a while and then when the person in the cafe looks up from behind their newspaper, they briefly see the person watching them and then a bus or crowd of people or train or whatever go by, and when it passes, the watcher person is gone. This is done in part to show that the watcher person is good at going and watching people and you never know when they are watching you, but also to show how they are good at disappearing quickly when there’s a bus going by.

I wonder how many times this happens in real life each year both on purpose, but then also by accident. In the on purpose category, presumably there are some number of legitimate spies or people watchers out there who think they are good enough to pull off the classic wait for a passing bus and disappear move; and I bet some of them even pull it off! But maybe more fun is in the on accident category. There’s gotta be dozens of people who are just like daydreaming in foot traffic, or waiting for a light to change, who just happen to be standing outside cafes and happen to start moving away somewhere else when a bus or crowd happens to walk between them and a random person in a cafe who looked up and thought they were being watched.

I don’t think I’ve ever been a sneaky peeky observer of somewhere in a cafe where I’ve had to use the behind the bus trick. At least not on purpose. The closest I probably come to this is when you are arriving at a public place to meet other people and you’re all not sure who is going to be there first, it’s fun to try to see the other people before they see you. With modern smartphones you can even do a super zoomed in picture of them from far away, and then send that picture of them, which causes them to shake their fist at the sky and yell “Curses, I’ve been seen again!” or something like that.

You know they can’t stop because this ship has no brakes

When you stay at an AirBNB, you are paying to stay at someone’s house in the same way that you’d pay to stay at a hotel, but it’s different because it’s someone’s house. Obviously this means that the room you stay in is also different than a hotel room. Instead of having professional room service and cleaning and an in-hotel bar and restaurant … you have, like, a random person’s house.

Another crucial difference is that while after a hotel stay you might be on Yelp and leave a review of the hotel and your stay there and how everyone treated you, on AirBNB they have reviews built right into the platform. The guests can review the hosts, and the hosts can review the guests, and future potential renters can see these interactions. It’s mostly pretty cool, but it allows for one super fun prank that I’d like to see more people embrace.

Let’s say you stay at someone’s AirBNB unit for a few days. While you are there, you need to make a point to scope out a few details of their neighbors house or apartment unit or whatever. Ideally you could meet their neighbor and get their name. Armed with this information, you’d go on to leave a review after your stay, and leave a really glowing review of the unit itself, but then you’d slip in something really really odd and specific that their neighbor was doing as a sort of side note to your main review.

For example, you could write something like “House was awesome, very clean and safe, just as advertised. Local farmers market was great on Saturday! Such a lovely village. Had a weird interaction with neighbor named Ed who kept singing a song about ritz crackers in the shared backyard. Overall, loved my stay!”.

Then, when your host read your review, they'd be like “Hmm, weird, I do have a shared backyard and my neighbor is named Ed” and they’d have to go confront Ed about his ritz cracker song!

That guy knew the difference between fishing boats and non-fishing boats

When you eat at a restaurant sometimes a waiter or waitress will ask if anyone in your party has any specific allergies the chef should be aware of, so that they can point you to safe places on the menu to order from, and make sure they don’t accidentally inflame your gut or constrict your valves in the course of giving you dinner. This is very nice of them to do, and probably leads to fewer allergies people being allergied at eating places.

I bet there are some youngsters out there who think they’re hot stuff who like to go to restaurants and when the waitress — who, by the way, is just a nice honest hard working young woman trying to pay her own way through school! — politely asks them about their allergies or lack thereof, they think they are oh so clever to start telling her about some allergies they have which are not food allergies! Like they throw out a “Yes hun, I’m allergic to penicillin!” (unclear why they are saying hun here) or “Sure, I’ve got an issue with certain alloys of steel” or whatever. The exact allergies don’t matter so much as the idea that they are not food allergies. I bet these guys get such a kick out of themselves for doing this.

One real Power Move for a waitress would be to do some studying in your free time about allergies, and become a medical expert on penicillin and basically every thing a person can be allergic to. Then when these little punks come into your dining establishment, you could drop some obscure reference like “Oh, if you’re allergic to that I’ll make sure the chef wipes all the P. chrysogenum off her knife before she heats up your tamale!” and all their friends would flip over the table and be like “oh snap” or “sick!” or whatever, and you’d have showed them.

You could also probably just enroll in medical school at that point too?