My wife and I went to hear a jazz band at a local restaurant last night (the band lead is the head custodian at her school) with a few of her friends. Having been to this restaurant before to here this guy play before and having experienced awful server, not to mention mediocre, over-priced food, we made sure we ate dinner first (I even had a candy bar right before we left so I’d get my dessert in). So, we get there and a waitress didn’t even come over to us to take our drink order for 30 minutes. Then the food order wasn’t taken for another 20-30 minutes (I can’t recall exactly). If that wasn’t enough, the food arrived about 1.5 hours after we got there (I had dessert only which arrived about 30 minutes before everyone else’s food).

I’m not sure why the service was so awful, but one of the wait staff profusely apologized and said that in the 10 years that she had been there (on and off), it was never this bad. I kind of find that quite hard to believe as that was our second (and last experience) with that restaurant. One of our friends and my wife complained and the entire meal (6 people) and drinks was provided free of charge. The waitress that apologized said that next time we come back, we should ask for her and we’d have a great meal. Hmmm…fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me….fool me three times? I don’t think so.

Our community (an area of San Diego) has 3 Italian restaurants, with this being one of them. We enjoy another one, but experience sub par service (we got smart and remembered they have free delivery). I guess we might have to try the third one or maybe we shouldn’t push our luck.

I’ve never had to work in food service, so I don’t know what it is like, but it seems to me that if part of your job depends on tips, you’d do your best job so you are rewarded (monetarily).

Lately I’ve noticed that that the freezer part of our refrigerator wasn’t keeping stuff completely frozen despite cranking down the temperature. What do I know about refrigerators? Turns out, I know enough about mechanical/chemical engineering to be able to understand a diagram of a heat exchanger. I took off the top panel of the refrigerator (a lot of the mechanical stuff is on the top of this unit), looked around, looked at the little diagram showing how it worked, and saw tons of dirt. I figured that before I called an appliance repair person, I’d take a look to see what I could do. I vacuumed out the grill to the condenser and as I did, I felt a blast of air coming from the other side of it.

I said to myself, “holy cow, it can’t be that easy.” Well, knock on wood, I looked in the freezer this morning and the ice pop that was mush last night is much more solid. So, I might just have fixed my refrigerator. I’ll keep my fingers crossed!