Saturday, December 15, 2007

Counting Isn't So Hard, Is It?

To add to the chorus that's talking about law prom... well, I'll sort of add to it. I drank and ate and actually made a bit of money at Texas Hold 'Em without surrendering to my massive competitive streak and losing my temper. Also, I talked to people who I don't always get to talk to and had a hot date that sat by me as I bored her with the rules of poker.

But alas, there was a taint to the evening (and I'm not talking about T&E grades) - we went to the massively crowded Texas Roadhouse before the party. I was the first to arrive and promptly signed the 6 of us up for the hour-long waiting list. The others arrived and we chatted for said hour. Said hour goes by and the crowd is thinning. People are going past us (in groups that are just as large or larger) that came in after us. We send one of the boys to check on the wait time.

Answer - "Um, I don't know. Let me check."

Cue the riffling through pages and pages of names, standing around looking confused and, let us not forget, the dismissal of unhappy customers in order to joke around and laugh behind the counter instead. Finally they tell us that we could be seated separately in 2 adjoining booths. Because, you know, it's become so difficult to push 2 tables together these days.

Whatever. We're cranky and our blood sugar is low. We'll take what we can get. But 10 minutes later, when they STILL haven't seated us, I'm shaking and about to let loose a tirade. They must have felt the evil, angry gale approach because they finally called us as I came up to the counter.

We ask if we could possibly get just one table (because it never hurts to ask, right? WRONG.) Now we're surrounded by the entire cadre of managers, asking us in a rather condescending tone if there's a problem.

After explaining EXACTLY what they've done to us (and receiving nothing but a "Well, it's an hour wait for a single table for 6", despite the fact that that was what we HAD BEEN WAITING FOR), we sit down to 2 booths anyway. Luckily for them, they placed bread right in front of us so that we could sate the savage beast of starvation that was gnawing at us.

On the plus side, our waitress was terrified of us and made sure we had everything we ever wanted, short of a winning lottery ticket. (No, we did not take out the hostesses' idiocy/managers' rudeness on her. It was just nice to get actual service.)

On the con side, I don't know if I can go there again, which whittles the number of decent restaurants in this town down to about 3. *Sigh*

But the rest of the evening was lovely. Gracias, SBA.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I was at Black Angus once when my blood sugar had dropped so far that I was getting to shaking and nausea stage, which is usually followed shortly by the passing-out stage. In order to force service from the SLOWEST WAITER EVER, I was forced to eyeball dagger him, playing with the steak knife in a very "pointed" fashion, and finally wait until a manager was within ear shot before loudly reminding my mom that WHEN I PASSED OUT, TELL THE EMT THAT ALL I NEED TO FOOD.