Eatin' Good in the Neighborhood

 I realize the earth may crack asunder and the heavens tear open if I write two blog posts in one week, not to mention within two days of each other.  But I just gotta take the risk.  Joan & I stopped at the local Applebee's to grab a quick bite.  Where we had the most surreal restaurant experience ever. I mean this put the sushi restaurant with the fish conveyor belt to shame.  I may not ever eat out again.  

What happened:  We had just been to Half Price Books.  It has come to our attention that if we ever want to get a new washer & dryer, we're gonna have to clean out our spare room so that the door on the far end is accessible.  That's the only feasible way in or out of that room with a large object.  There's no way anybody's wrestling a full size washing machine through the ridiculously narrow door from our kitchen and down that tiny staircase.  I'm sorry, but they'd have to dismantle it, take it down a piece at a time and reassemble it once they got it down.  Ain't nobody got time for that.  

The problem is, the space in front of the door at the other end is full of boxes of books.  We had to box everything up in order to paint down there, which was another crazy adventure I should tell you about sometime, but anyway, we no longer have enough bookshelves to accommodate all the books.  So a bunch of the books gotta go.  We've been going through the boxes one by one and dividing them into "keep" and "Half Price Books."  Today we hauled five boxes down there and sold them for around $90.  Sweet, right?  Well, read on.

So we were on our way back home and we stopped at Applebee's.  By their very nature, Joan distrusts restaurants with apostrophes in their titles.  Chili's, Bennigan's (no longer in existence), Cheddar's, places like that.  They all seem to be substandard in food and service, or at least service.  But hey, it was after eight and it was a Sunday.  Most restaurants were already closed.  So to Applebee's we went.  And then the fun began.

To begin with, it didn't seem like anybody was in any hurry.  There was no hostess.  We waited at the hostess stand (which, oddly, had an upside-down sign posted that said "Please wait to be seated") for about ten minutes.  After which I said, "Hey, the sign's upside down.  Let's take that as a clue that it really means the opposite and find a table."

Which we did.  Some time later, a confused waiter came by and asked if anyone had taken our drink orders.  We said no, and he did so.  He did not, however, hand us the menus that he was carrying.  Which I thought were for us.  So I followed him, and when he stopped at the cashier's station I asked if I could have the menus.  He said, "Oh yes, of course.  I'm sorry."  Then, "Did you seat yourselves?"  I admitted we had.  "Oh, okay.  Okay.  Yes, I'll be right with you."

So I took the menus back, and absconded with straws and silverware while I was at it.  We looked over the menu and picked out some stuff to order.  Then--nothing happened.  I mean there was a basketball game on, and we were watching it, and we noticed there was only this one waiter on the floor, and then another guy showed up to take our order.  We were kind of surprised and he said, "Oh, did someone already take your order?"  I said, "Well, we ordered drinks, but--" "Okay."  And he zoomed off.  To get our drinks, we thought, only he never came back. 

More time went by.  The basketball game got more interesting. Joan broke out her Tarot cards and I asked her what I'd told Joan I wanted for my birthday, which I no longer remembered and which she hadn't written down.  The answer was the two of pentacles (tough decision), the four of pentacles (it was expensive), and Judgment (I have no idea what that means).  Normally you can't start flipping Tarot cards around in a public place without at least one person nearby losing their shit.  I mean, this is Texas.  But nobody turned a hair.  

Some 20 minutes after we ordered our drinks, the first waiter showed up with them and apologized for the wait.  "I'm the only server here.  We had three people call in sick tonight."  He took our order and we mentioned there had been someone else and he said, "Oh, that guy?  He's a cook.  He's just trying to help me out."

While that was going on, this family of a mom, dad, three kids and one kid on the way settled into a booth nearby.  The kids were actually doing great, coloring away.  The youngest one started to get a little boisterous.  Mom started to look seriously annoyed, and after a while she and Dad and brood got up and left.  Numerous tables, not bussed from previous diners, sat around.  The manager walked out, looked around and then disappeared.  He did this at least two or three more times.  

Just then, a shouting match broke out between our waiter and a customer.  Not sure of all the issues exactly, but it seemed to have something to do with a tip, or the lack of one.  It sounded like this:  "Not for a forty-nine cent tip, dude.  No.  No, just get out of here."  The shouting brought the manager back out.  The manager was trying to calm everything down, the waiter was trying to explain what happened, the customer kept asking for his goddamn card back, please, and then the other guy who had appeared on the floor came out with our food.

Which was, to be honest, very good food.  I had no complaints.  Our waiter showed back up next to our table and said he was sorry for the commotion.  He had three tables waiting for their checks and he hadn't forgotten about us and he was just going to vent, if that was okay.  He started doing exactly that and then  somebody else yelled for his attention.

The manager came back out and called the waiter and the other guy, the cook, over.  Thus began a three way conversation with all three of them talking over each other and saying "No, dude, it's like this" and weird apparently restaurant-related gestures.  The volume went up.  The comprehensibility went down.  The manager broke it off, walked over and started talking to a customer about something.  The basketball game ended and another one started.  Our waiter came over, apologized again, and said he'd be right back.  He came out of the kitchen with a bus cart and started bussing the many vacated tables, only he never got to do any of it because some other customer came up and started to complain that he'd been double charged on his credit card.  The snippets of that conversation sounded like this: "No, it didn't go through.  It didn't go through, sir.  There was an error message.  No, I can't print you a receipt because there isn't one. Do you want me to train you on how this works so you can see for yourself? Because there wasn't a charge, sir.  No, you'd have to ask your bank that, sir.  Sir, you're not understanding me.  No, I can't run it back in the machine because it's not there."  

The manager reappeared and started talking to the customer.  The waiter went past us and started talking to someone behind us.  A few minutes later, somebody burst into song.  "Amazing Grace." Good voice, too.  We turned to look and it was our waiter!  He was serenading a table of African-American people.  We were too far away to see if they thought was cool, or just weird.

Around this point Joan and I decided we might just wanna pay for the food with the cash from the bookstore and get the heck out of there before someone whipped out a gun.  I mean, this is Texas.  All told, we were in this Applebee's for just under two hours.  So maybe Joan's right about apostrophe restaurants.  Anyway, the food was good.