the birthday curse

it has come to be a tradition that our friends b. and e. take us out for our birthdays and vice-versa. and, as it should be, the birthday boy or girl gets to pick where we eat. this just happens to be the second year in a row that the captain has picked a place in which we've all had previously good experiences, just to have a frighteningly bad one during his birthday celebration.

last year it was ch1li's. this year, it was at a shack owned by joe. we decided to sit outside, as there was a nice breeze and a good view of the playground, where punkin and b. and e.'s son (i'll call him batman) ran around terrorizing the younger kids. as far as i could tell, our table was the only one that our waiter had to attend to on the patio. that should have been red flag #1, but no one thought anything about it.

the guy brought out our drinks fairly quickly and then literally disappeared. it had been a while since we had been to the shack, and apparently they had added a new feature: a big bowl of salad and baskets of bread that automatically come to every table. the kids were off playing and we adults were having a good time chatting, but eventually, we started noticing that people who had been seated 15 - 20 minutes later than us were finishing up their bowls of salad and were getting their entrees! b. finally saw our guy and flagged him down, requesting our bread and salad. to make a long, ugly story short, we had to request our bread and salad 2 more times, and then finally had to ask to speak to a manager. our @#$% bread and salad finally came out about 30 seconds before our entrees, which were delivered to our table almost exactly one hour after we had first been seated. the manager was most gracious, taking 50% off of the total bill for our inconvenience. [why does this never happen when we're paying?]

but wait! there's more! since we were getting our goodies at half price, we decided to have dessert. punkin and batman love to get the "make your own sundae" things and the captain and i usually split a bananas foster. the waiter, however, must have been on a slow boat to china. b. and i went inside to try and find the nice manager after we had been sitting outside amongst our dirty dishes for another 25 - 30 minutes. we found a lesser manager, as the guy we had been talking to had gone out to "run an errand." fortunately, the lesser manager had been debriefed on our situation and took care of things for us. it was ridiculous that the waiter hadn't even had the balls to give us our check, much less ask us if we wanted dessert! i asked b. how much he left for a tip. as i suspected, he wrote $0.00.

next year, we're cooking.