There are folks that I won’t go out to dinner with any more.  They like to complain, compare and send things back.  They do this every single time we go out.  I can be an awfully dense woman sometimes.  It took me a while to recognize their dining behavior patterns and so, I have only recently removed them from my list of folks to go dining with.  I eat out rarely these days.  Part of the reason is that the times require me to be economically frugal . I’ve also found that I tend to eat better at home then I do when I dine out (when I find it difficult to resist certain temptations – oink, oink).  I also enjoy cooking.  Since dining out has become more of a special occasion, I don’t want to waste it on negative Nellies.

One heifer…(I love this word – and hear it the way my mother pronounced it all through my childhood – “heffa”.)  One heifer doesn’t cook and has a limited palate but that doesn’t keep her from being incredibly critical of the service and the food every where I’ve gone with her.  I think it’s a brief spot in her life when she feels powerful and so she exercises her power to mess with and manipulate waiters.

Her silverware is never clean.  There’s never enough ice in her water and the waiter doesn’t fill it frequently enough.  She never had an entrée that she didn’t have to change something about.  There’s never enough sauce.  The rolls aren’t hot.  The staff kept us waiting too long.  Aaarrrggghhh!  Dining with her is crazy making. 

After one particularly bad experience, I asked her if she wasn’t worried that the waiter hadn’t put something bad in her food the way she had carried on all evening.  She looked shocked that I would even think such a thing.  There is no way I would trust food that I had sent back two times in a dining experience about which I had issued complaints from the beginning.  “They just need to do their jobs correctly,” she sniffed.  It’s good I’ve never been a waiter because I would have done some act of sabotage that’s how much she annoys me.

Another friend takes absolutely forever to find something on the menu she wants to order.  She always says something like, “We should have gone to the other place.” Never mind that it took some tussling to finally settle on this restaurant.  She wishes she had ordered what I ordered because mine looks better.  She has told me that when she cooks at home she does “thus and such” (which, of course, is better than what she’s been served).  She also reminisces about back-in-the-day when she used to entertain all of the time.  I’ve known this heifer (that word again) for ten years and she hasn’t entertained me or anyone I know in that time.  To hear her tell it, she’s can throw-down in the kitchen.

Sometimes I wonder if some people have fantasy lives in which they deem themselves perfect.  These two friends are clearly legends in their own minds when it comes to food and proper service.  They can have at it because I won’t be going out with them again.

(And why order fish in a steak house and then complain?  Hel-lo, it’s a steak house, fish probably isn’t the thing they do best.)

Okay, I've vented.  I feel better now.  Thank you.