7 Foot Long Plastic Chili Peppers' Don't Taste Very Good Anyway

I am normally a very mature and calm person. I swear it. (Shut up, Sonja.) But, is there such a thing as Hunger Induced Tourette's Syndrome? Just curious. Well, because I think I might have this rare disease if it does exist.

After working in the yard for about four or five hours, shoveling compost, and weeding, etc; my husband decided that he needed to take me to lunch. Cool. I all for that. I was absolutely starving. And even though I was in my grubby gardening clothes, and was perfectly willing to participate in some Taco Bell chow down time, he insisted on taking me to Olive Garden for some mussels and breadsticks. YUM!

Let me get the first lesson learned out of the way: Avoid Olive Garden at 2:00 pm on a Saturday. It seems like an oddball time for the place to be packed but it was. I didn't even want to get out of the car when I saw the 15 or so people standing outside waiting for a table. The husband says, "We can just eat in the bar." We went inside against my better judgment and the chick at the stupid little podium says it will be 15 minutes. Now I don't know about you, but my experience is that when they estimate any amount of time to wait, you might as well multiply it by 2, every time. So I asked her, "Is that a real fifteen minutes or 'The Olive Garden' fifteen minutes?" She just stared at me. The Tourette's kicked in a little at this point. I turned to my husband, grabbed his hand and steered him towards the door, while stately loudly that I wasn't going to wait a half hour to eat over priced food at "fucking Olive Garden." My husband decided it was a good idea to leave.

Then he seems to think that we needed to go to another over priced chain restaurant. Chili's. I actually like Chili's, they have good food. But we walked in and it was packed. Does anybody ever eat during normal hours? I figured the lunch rush would be done by then. Nope. They tell us it's going to take 15-20 minutes to get seated. I'm pretty sure at this point you could see steam coming out of my ears. Then the chick at the stupid little podium pipes in and says, "Unless you want to sit at a 'high-top". What the hell is a high top? I looked at her like she was the retard and informed her that I didn't work there and had no idea what a "high-top" was. I am not normally this rude, but by this point it was 2:45 and I hadn't eaten all day and was ready to rip the giant chili pepper off of the ceiling and knaw on it. So we get seated. (A high-top by the way is one of those higher tables that they have in the bar section.)

We are handed menus, and told that our server would be right with us. We watched a couple to our right get seated and handed menus. We watched a couple to our left get seated and handed menus. We watched both couples give their drink orders. We watched both couples get their drinks and give their food orders. We hadn't even been given water yet. WTF? The chick that sat us was prancing by when I caught her and asked her, "Do we even have a server?" She looked at the empty table, and went to go find us one. I don't know what happened, but from the time we were seated and the time we actually gave our order, 45 minutes had elapsed. Nobody is that busy, I don't care who you are. Especially since we were sitting right next to the servers station. Sigh....maybe it was because I was bitchy, I don't think so though.

And before I get a bunch of comments, yes I have been in their shoes. I have waitressed, bused, cooked, you name it, I've done it. So I know what to expect at a restaurant, even while it's busy. And I have sympathy. But 45 minutes before even getting a waitress to give us the time of day? That's just plain bad service. Or it could of just been my Turette's. My eye is twitching just thinking about it.