My wife and I own two bakeries in the metropolitan city near where I live. Yes, it’s overran by a certain type of person, typically they signal to outsiders that they are safe to others of their kind but toxic to the converse. We all know the type with blue hair, underarm hair (women), slogans on bumper stickers like love is love and science is real, etc.

One of our locations is on a local university campus, you know, more of the same but in higher concentrations.

Since we are subcontractors to this arrangement on campus, they have a number of items in the contract we had to accept to open business on campus. Like we use their POS system, and they pay us last. It’s been difficult but we agreed that to open on camps. My wife operates the bakeries and has been enormously successful and is outselling Starbucks sometimes. With this success, since they supply the equipment, I asked for a larger freezer to help us grow. They called a meeting this last Wednesday, the day after the elections.

I was unprepared, a lamb to the slaughter…. I was red meat among carnivores… Or to use their vernacular, I was a 13-year-old boy left unattended in a room full of Hollywood actors.

The first sign that something was wrong was that one of the two was physically distraught, gnashing of teeth, at one point he took his glasses off and violently stroked his teeth with the temples of his glasses making the tap, tap, tap sounds but fast and ferocious. It was weird, and I just ignored it.

Well, the meeting didn’t go as planned, we were denied every request. I asked them for the following:

I wanted to purchase and install security cameras, no cost to them whatsoever. This was denied due to the students’ right to privacy. We have a theft problem and have reached upward of 15 thousand in losses last year due to employees stealing inventory.

We asked for a open item on the POS so we can accept catering orders, denied because employees might use it to steal from us. I laughed out loud in the meeting… They make up excuses like a 3-year-old. Their solution is to ask for a temporary button for that catering order. They typically take between two and four weeks to make a change to the POS, but now they state they can do it in 24 to 48 hours. Oh, the campus is cashless…

Along with our denied request, they levied a slew of new demands on us, which are impossible to comply with. They want uniforms beyond our logoed aprons, they want shoes, and black paints, a logoed shirt and a hat. Remember that our employees at this location are the students in between classes. This is impossible, there is no place for them to change and our business can’t afford the costs nor the time of changing. They want some equipment I made to manage storage removed even though the city inspector had no problem with it. They want us to remove the boxes on top of the refrigerator and freezer but offer no other location for our storage of cups and lids.

I couldn’t figure out why, why would they want to shut down a successful café on campus and then it hit me, I’m a little slow when it comes to these things because I assume we all have a similar deck of cards. This was the day after the Trump win and I have conservative tattooed on my forehead, in the same way they signal with blue hair and going around with holes in their bodies in strange places. This was a fuck you attack on a successful conservative business owner. Am I wrong?