Bad Eating Experience

It was one of those days where it was just one thing after another. It started off by me waking up twenty minutes late for my 9:30 class. Then I proceeded to spill my cup of water all the way down my shirt as I walked to class, mind you it was pouring rain outside and I did not have time to grab my rain boots so now my Sperry’s the shoes they claim to be “boat” shoes were completely ruined. So not only was my shirt soaking wet but so was the rest of me. As I sat in my own puddle on my chair I then came to realize that I had forgotten my homework for a class that does not accept late submissions and I was late, so basically I received no credit for even being there. So now I was soaking wet, failing chemistry and it was only 9:45 in the morning. By the time lunch time came around I just wanted the day to be over, but lucky for me that was not the case, it was just the beginning. The rain still hadn’t stopped and I still had two more classes left for the day, and I had promised my friends that if the rain stopped we would play tennis. This day was going to be anything but short.

As the day went on the rain died down and the warm breezes started drying everything up. My friends and I decided that we would still play tennis since the courts were starting to dry so we drove over to the rec. On our way there we noticed that not that many people were still out walking around campus and that campus seemed almost dead. The sky still seemed dreary due to the rain from earlier that day but there was something else, it was almost like campus had a strange aura to it. It seemed deserted and spooky and in my mind I was convinced that it was because of the rain. We had played for about an hour when we saw eight cop cars drive by the rec center and tennis courts. We all looked up and pondered the thought as to why they were all following each other and what for, but with no answers and no words between any of us we just kept playing. Time past and we hadn’t seen any more cops in a while but we also hadn’t seen many other people either. Which was strange for an afternoon mid-week at the rec center, because typically it is packed. As we packed up our equipment I took out my phone to see if I had any messages. I had one text message from my mother and one email from the university. The text from my mom read “have you checked your school email? Bomb threat?” So immediately I got nervous and my palms began to sweat as I opened the email from the university to read “The University of Alabama is under a bomb threat warning. Students in the areas of sorority row, fraternity row, The Ferguson Center, and so on should evacuate those areas immediately and return when instructed.”  As any person would I began to panic as I read the message to my friends and we got in the car to leave. None of us could go home seeing as we all lived in the sorority house together so we decided that we would go out for dinner to try and make the time pass. We thought that we were making a great decision to go somewhere a little farther away from campus, so just in case we wouldn’t be in harm’s way, little to our knowledge we had just made a big mistake.

We chose to go to a restaurant that all of us had gone to before and no one had anything bad to say about it. I think I can speak for all of us in saying that we will never return after the outing we experienced the night of the bomb threat. We arrived around six o’clock and were seated within five minutes of arriving. Everything was going great, the hostess was very polite and sweet and we instantly had water on the table. But what I was about to experience was something that was going to blow my mind. Our waitress did not come to our table for another fifteen minutes of us being there, a little busy maybe I though in my head?  But as I looked around for confirmation I realized that there were only eight other tables full out of the twenty that were there. So let’s just say we had some extra time to look at the menus. As time passed we were finally greeted by our waitress, and all of us being the impatient people that we are decided to put our orders in with are appetizers and drinks. Well for us this was where it all went wrong. Apparently that was far too confusing for our waitress because not only were the drinks all messed up but we never even received our appetizers. After “arguing” with our waitress about who ordered what drinks we gave up on the thought of even eating any appetizers, at that point we just wanted our meals. Two of us had ordered steak dinners, one ordered the crispy chicken strips and two of us ordered the chicken and pasta dish. We waited and waited, but the food never came. From the time we walked in the door to then we had been there for almost an hour in fifteen minutes. Having a father that works in the food industry I have learned that drinks should be delivered to the table in less than five minutes, appetizers in fewer than 15 and your meal within twenty five to thirty minutes, this was clearly not the case for us. So not only were we worried about our entire school being blown up by some crazy bombers but we had waited for our food for over an hour now. I finally saw the waitress come around the corner approaching our table when everything flashed before my eyes. She tipped her carrying tray slightly to the right and the steak dinners flew off crashing onto the floor and splattering everywhere. She was able to salvage the chicken tenders and the chicken and pasta dinners somehow but I just knew in my mind this dinner had just begun. When the new portions of steak dinners arrived we were instantly disappointed with them as well seeing as both of their side items were wrong, but at that point waiting a total of almost two hours for all of the meals we were not going to send anything back. As to be expected my meal was anything but impressive as well. The chicken was dry and tasted like there was no flavoring and the portion of pasta was maybe enough to feed a small infant. As you can imagine the chicken tenders although they looked appetizing the uncooked raw middle tasted anything but divine.

            Being the unhappy customers that we were, all we wanted at that point was the check, we didn’t care if we hadn’t been instructed to come back to campus, I would rather risk being blown up than sitting in that restaurant any longer. So we asked for the checks very politely and the snarly attitude that we received back from the waitress was anything but friendly. We waited and waited and at the time we had been there for two and a half hours and had been waiting for our checks for about forty five minutes. Little to our attention though our waitress had been trying to divide the appetizers we never received between all of us and trying to add the two dropped steak dinners to our checks as well. One of us went over to the manager and asked if we could speak with her about our service. We explained that we had never experienced such a rude waitress and that we demanded not to be charged for the oh yeah food we never received and for the dinners that had been dropped on the ground. The manager feeling entirely embarrassed fixed our bills for us and paid for our drinks. But in my mind that still did not change the terrible experience I had just had and the entirely unsatisfying meal either. I never thought that I would hate one meal so much that I would rather risk my life being on a campus with bomb threats, but I can assure you that night I would have done anything to get out of the restaurant.