The Shrimp Guy
Only in the Midwest can you walk into a perfectly harmless German social gathering — coffee, apple cake, potato salad — and somehow end up with three police officers searching the room like they’re sweeping for a fugitive.
And the “suspect”?
A guy carrying a tray of shrimp.
That was me.
I showed up for Stammtisch with my protein-friendly offering, rode the elevator up, and somewhere between floors, an Asian girl stepped in. The Asian girl — very Gen-Z — looked genuinely startled, like she’d just stepped into the elevator with the wrong NPC in a video game. She gave me a look like I was either holding contraband seafood or had pressed the wrong elevator button with malicious intent.
We got to my floor, I stepped off. She stayed in. The doors closed.
Apparently, she called the police.
So now imagine the scene:
Quiet German club, low chatter, retirees discussing Bavaria and grandkids… and then three officers walk in with the energy of people expecting to find a man wielding a chainsaw.
Instead, they find:
People sipping coffee.
Cake on plates.
One guy warming up sauerkraut.
And me — The Shrimp Guy — who genuinely had no idea he’d been profiled for suspicious crustacean possession.
Everyone stared at them. They stared back. Nobody knew why they were there.
They asked a few vague questions, looked around, saw nothing illegal except maybe the carb count on the dessert table, and left.
And that was that.
Honestly, the whole thing was so perfectly unnecessary it almost felt scripted. A misunderstanding travels up the chain, multiplies, and turns into a police response because someone didn’t know what they were looking at — or who they were looking at.
I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I wasn’t acting strange. I was just carrying shrimp — which, to be fair, isn’t exactly German. Bratwurst is German. Sauerkraut is German. Shrimp? Apparently, that’s grounds for a police report.
If this were a film, the final shot would be me on the elevator, tray in hand, turning slowly to the camera:
“Officers… shrimp?”