Um, Ya... The Cow is Still Mooing

WARNING: This may very well be the world's longest single post on a blog ever in the history of man! Err... at least in the history of the Internet. Or blogs. Or whatever. You get the idea.

Okay, so hubs, LO ("Little One"--our adorable 10-month-old daughter) and I just got back from dinner at our local Copper River Grill. I say "local" when in reality it's actually a good 25 minute drive each way. Anywho, we had a gift card so figured we'd end up pretty even once you calculate gas costs to get there and back with the fact that we were getting a free meal. Super!

So we get there and were told we'd have a brief wait. Alrighty-then! No biggie. LO's getting hungry but she should survive. Over the next 10 minutes,at least 6 or 7 other parties arrive and are immediately seated. Weird, no? It turns out they only have like 6 actual tables where a high-chair can be used; the rest are booths with that durn "step up" to them so a regular high-chair would be too short. So strange that they'd limit their ability to sit parties with small children this way. Oh, well. We're finally seated in the "non-smoking" area, which happens to be about 20 feet from the smoking bar area. Now as you can imagine, the lovely smell of second-hand cigarette smoke is just wafting it's way to our table throughout our entire meal. Let's see... table? Check! High-chair? Check! Cancer? Um, check... apparently!

Moving right along... we place our drink orders (water for hubs, Pepsi for me) and a few moments later order our meals. Salads come out a bit later--yummy! They serve a To. Die. For. crescent roll with the salad--you know the ones, the kind with the super-tasty honey butter! Mmmmmm! We're almost through with the salads when our meals arrive (NOTE: This is a HUGE pet-peeve of mine. Please do not bring me my meal while I'm obviously still working on my salad. See, I'd actually like to eat my steak and veggies hot, not lukewarm after sitting at the table for several minutes!). So hubs starts working on his chicken pasta (it looked and tasted delish!). In the meantime, I gingerly cut into the very edge of my sirloin. The durn thing almost jumped across my plate! Red juicy goo starts oozing all over my plate and I almost gag myself right then and there (another side-note: I'm borderline vegetarian these days. Can't stand working with, looking at, touching, smelling, or being within the very vicinity of raw meat. Gag.).

Uh, ya... this is an actual photo of my steak:











I immediately pushed the plate away, made my typical "I'm so totally disgusted" face, and of course hubs wondered what was wrong. Once he saw the cow dash across my plate while mooing incessantly, he quickly realized my issue. When the waitress returned to ask how everything was, my husband handled the problem and reminded her I had ordered my steak "medium-well." Now, in my world, that should mean "very slight warm pink center." In their world, apparently, this meant "make sure he's still buckin' on the way out the door!" The poor girl even asked us what medium-well is supposed to look like! You'd think they'd have some sort of training for their servers before they start serving. Oh, well. We thought it was funny.

To my surprise, she returned a mere 2 or 3 minutes later with my steak. "Hmmm...," I thought, "How in the world did they finish cooking this steak so quickly? They must have some amazing convection-grill apparatus thing back there!" Well, after another little slice into the edge of said steak, the little guy whimpered in obvious pain. He was definitely more done than before, but the cool pink center and slightly red-hued juices on my plate told a different story. Gag. Again.

Rather than have my steak soaked in another round of spit (hopefully just spit--certainly nothing else besides spit, right? Right????), I told hubs that I'd rather just have them take it off the bill and ended up sharing his pasta instead. The waitress was very apologetic (and I mean very--she must've said "I'm sorry" a record 32 times!) and removed the meal from our bill. I also had to ask for refills on our beverages several times (you shouldn't ever have to do that, right? They should just know when the cups are empty!). Although she got me good when she brought me a Diet Pepsi. I'm sorry, but that's just one four-letter-word this girl is not down with (I reminded her I was drinking a regular Pepsi and she brought me a new one a few minutes later. Whew!).

That leads to the funniest part of this whole fiasco... We paid our $17.17 bill with a $50 gift card. After running it through, she returned to our table to apologize (again!) and wished us a good night. My husband asked if we could please get the gift card back, to which she responded with, "Oh, there's nothing left on it." Okay, think through this with me here. We paid with a gift card. Our bill was $17.17. Who in their right mind would purchase a gift card for exactly that amount? Seriously, who? It was quite comical that she thought that way. We informed her that it was in fact a $50 gift card, and she gladly returned it to us. How sweet, huh?

Whew! So that was our latest dining experience. I'm tellin' ya, I think I just have some sort of bad "customer service" karma (not that I actually believe in karma, 'cause I don't.). Experiences like this just really make me feel like some crazy high-maintenance female that just can't ever be happy. "Oh, so you don't want your meat to dodge the knife when you try to cut it... We never get requests like that!"

So I felt it would be fun to jot all this down and figured, while I was at it, why not post it for all the world to see (i.e. read)? Good times. I figure I'll post lots of my random thoughts and experiences here. I think it's good for my soul. And who are you to tell me that it's not? :)