Monthly Archives: December 2007

Burn ’em

This week I’ve finally been able to burn up my last 4 vacation days.

It seems like taking vacation time is always a challenge for me – but I really try to do it because I don’t get reimbursed for untaken days and they do not roll over into next year. It’s “use ’em or lose ’em” scenario.

I guess it’s not a bad problem to have; but I sometimes feel like I have more vacation than I know what to even do with. After volunteering with Habitat for a couple saturdays, I literally had 4 and 1/2 weeks of vacation to work with. Next year will be even worse because I’ll have 5 weeks. I did manage to knock out most of it earlier in the year, and wound up with just these last 4 days left.

So far in these last 4 days I’ve played Forza 2 with Vanbergs, eaten at Mongolian BBQ, played Gears of War, flashed my phone with the newest firmware, watched “Doom, watched “Rambo II”, watched “Rambo III”, watched “Brick”, saw “I am Legend” on Imax, bought a new wireless card on ebay for 6.50, painted my hallway with two coats of “Parmesan” satin, and finally got the chance to use my behemoth snowblower…

I’ll see what else I can add to this list today. It is still pretty early.

Wait Staff

An increasing trend that I’m noticing in this world is that waiters/waitresses have stopped writing down orders. Instead of writing down what you want, they simply acknowledge “ok” or “mmm hhmmm” to every item you request and they try to remember every single thing you order.

I’m not sure why this is a continuing trend, I’m sure it must have something to do with management telling their workers to do so in an attempt to be more efficient or something. But really it has an overall negative effect right from the beginning. For some reason it tends to make the person seem cocky or arrogant to me. And as I’m ordering, I feel like I have to go very slow so that the person getting my food has enough time to commit my order to memory. I also feel like I can’t change the order in any way because it will make it harder for them to remember. On more than one occasion, the waiter/waitress has had to come back to my table and confirm something about our order.

Granted, they don’t very often screw up orders – so I suppose it shouldn’t really bother me as much. But I don’t really understand why this is the common practice now. I would so much rather have the person write down every detail about my order. In my opinion that makes me more comfortable when ordering and decreases the chance of a ‘screw up’ with my order.

Stupid restaurants.