Also true for dietary and beverage preferences that are felt to convey moral and social superiority (without being a part of religious beliefs).
If I was teaching an early morning class, I’d come in early and write something on the board to get people to wake up. My favorite was a Venn Diagram with three circles: VEGAN • CROSSFIT • DOESN’T WATCH TV. I left the center blank til everyone got there. Then I wrote “NEVER STOPS TALKING”.
.
One day I wrote “NASCAR is NOT a sport”.
THAT got all the “Seed Cap Yahoos” to wake up and defend their heroes. So I asked “Would you call Kyle Busch an athlete?” and the fight was on.
One student said Ty Gibbs looks even less like he plays a sport.
By the time we were done, we’d made a continuum using two walls of whiteboards. Curling and Poker (my two favorites): were at one end, Soccer and Rugby at the other… and half our class time was shot.
You didn’t have to say “no cheese” because she was going to ask you if you wanted cheese 
. You’re messing with the order flow. And yeah, she shouldn’t have asked you about cheese 5 seconds later, but a lot of any job is muscle memory, particularly if the terminal is prompting you along (“do you want fries with that?” “make it a large?” “cookie?”, etc).
I’ve observed this as well, at drive-through windows and such. It seems to throw the cashiers off a bit if I try to anticipate any of their routine questions about my order.
Was any of that still there into the early 1990s? I remember walking underneath a freeway overpass, on what was probably my first trip to San Francisco. And I didn’t go anywhere except the Haight, the Embarcadero/piers, and North Beach. It recently occurred to me that I hadn’t seen it on later visits and I was wondering what happened to it. Good riddance anyway.
I knew about the Nimitz freeway, bu I thought that was the only one that came down as a result of the quake.
Here I am. I don’t own a TV. I have gotten many, many incredulous responses to this discovery. I don’t mention it mainly because people whom I have mentioned it to in the past, react like I’m being a snob. I’m not. I had choices to make and decided that a TV was too expensive and time-consuming. I decided this almost 40 years ago. And I don’t really regret it. Very occasionally I do.
When forced to explain myself I say that I don’t watch trashy TV shows (or other TV shows) because it detracts from the time I set aside to read trashy books.
I have no recollection of when it was torn down. I’m kinda wanting to say it was long before the Loma Prieta earthquake, but @snowthx says, above, that it was after than and because of that.
From your description, it does sound like the Embarcadero Freeway (SR-480) is the one you saw, since it ran alongside a portion of the Embarcadero.
For a few weeks after they shut it down, but before they tore it down, they opened the upper deck to pedestrians. Lots of people were roller-skating there.
Yeah, it was torn down in 1991. The residents had already been lobbying to have it removed anyway, and to cancel any additional freeway plans through SF. One of the main defenders of the Embarcadero Freeway was some of the merchants in Chinatown, which, evidently, the offramps from the elevated freeway fed into, so there was always a steady stream of cars. I think the feud between the businesses and other residents affected the mayor’s office (Agnos?), who sided with those wanting to remove the freeway. The earthquake in 1989 damaged the structure and closed it to traffic, and sort of gave momentum to the removal team. If you walk along the waterfront today from the Bay Bridge north to through the piers you would never know that monstrosity ever existed - it was replaced with a widened boulevard and parks, benches, bike lanes, etc. as well as opening up the views of the bay and Ferry Building. They did the right thing.
The Right thing would be forcing SF, as we did with Santa Barbara to let 101 freeway run through the city as a freeway, instead of travelers wasting gas and time trying the drive through.
The only time that bothered me was a TV show that was set in Richmond, VA, but obviously filmed in Southern California. They use “the” before the highway numbers on at least 2 occasions that I caught.
I’m already over the goof at the pizza place last night. My takeout was supposed to be a meat lover’s pizza. When I got it home, there was nothing under the scanty top layer of cheese but a thin crust. No meat. I brought it back, and they tried to argue that it was what I ordered. No apology.
Did eventually get a refund.
Those yahoos will pay! 
Supposedly, this was a medieval taboo that was sensible back in the days when tables were generally of trestle construction. Put your elbows on a trestle table, and you risk knocking the boards onto the floor.
The story I heard is, you didn’t want to get food stains on the elbows of your expensive wool jacket. You wanted the stains to be on the cuffs of your linen shirt, which was easier to launder, and less expensive to replace.
Or maybe it’s for the reason I keep telling my husband to get his elbows off the table. It’s not because of the etiquette rule, or because he might knock the boards off or because he might get stains on his jacket. It’s because when he puts his elbows on the table , he isn’t doing this , he’s doing something more like this and leaning on his elbows - which means the table moves as he moves his elbows on and off the table to put the sandwich down and pick up the glass, etc. .
