Enforcing my diet

I told you before that I'm on a diet. Well, sometimes, you have to force yourself to follow that diet - despite public pressure. And sometimes, you can rig the system to avoid public pressure altogether!

While I was in Guangzhou over the last couple of days, a group of us went out for dinner. As is the norm when you have a large group of people in a chinese restaurant, we ordered way too much food. We're at the tail end of the meal and there is still a large plate of prawns remaining. The problem is that everyone is already full. At the same time, no-one likes to waste food.

What to do?

We decided to let fate decide who should eat the prawns. To understand this next bit, you have to realise the setup on a large table in a chinese restaurant. Basically, you all sit at a large round table. This facilitates conversation by the whole group. Food is placed on a large plate in the middle of the table. This plate can spin so that even if food is on the other side of the table, all you need to do is spin the plate so that you can reach the food. It's a good system.

By now, you can probably guess what we did. We spun the plate and decided that wherever the plate stopped, that person would have to eat one prawn. The colleague on my right starts the process and spins the plate.

The plate spins round once and then starts to slow down. I'm looking at the plate and thinking, "crap, that looks like it will stop at me!". Luckily for me, everybody's attention is on the spinning plate of prawns. While their attention is diverted, I lay my hand on top of my chopsticks (in a very natural manner - I'm a natural actor!) and surreptitiously push one of my chopsticks forward slightly.

I didn't push it very far or very hard. Just enough so that the chopstick is sticking against the spinning plate and creating extra fiction. The speed of the plate slows down even more and stops ... facing the girl to my left! We all laugh and she grabs a prawn.

However, we still have a large plate of prawns left. So we repeat the game. Once more, based on the speed of the plate, I suspect it will stop facing me. So once again, I surreptitiously push forward my chopstick so it is sticking against the spinning plate. And once again, it stops facing the girl to my left! The poor girl hadn't even finished eating the first prawn yet!

Three prawns later, we all decide that the game is too cruel. And noone realised that throughout the game, I was rigging the result.

>:)

What can I say - I'm on a diet!