"Tonight's not the night to ride my ass, buddy..."

Those were some of my final remarks from tonight. Let me explain.

First, I think I'm a fairly easy going guy. I don't get mad at too much, and I think I'm pretty patient with crappy service. Even crappy waiters. I'm not known to talk to the manager, have my food sent back, or things like that. But tonight was a little out of hand.

The waiter took forever to actually get to us, and when he did, he said he'd be with us in a couple seconds. Which turned into 5 more minutes. When he finally got to us, we were not really appreciative of his description of his favorite wine carried by the restaurant.When all he took were our drink orders, I had to stop him and let him know we were ready to order.

We ordered dipping sauce with our meal. I think ordering dipping sauce is indicative of people who like bread sticks, right? Well, he brought out our salad and no bread sticks. We waited forever. When the bread sticks and sauce finally came, he brought three, which were gone pretty quickly. We waited some more. When he finally got around to filling our water, he still didn't refill the bread. In the mean time while we waited, the dipping sauce got cold. Then the food arrived, brought in by a different server. We ate a couple bites, but waited for our waiter to show up with bread to finish our dipping sauce. The bread refill came with two more bread sticks, for a total of five. Five? Do you think people who order dipping sauce only want to share five bread sticks between them? Those were gone pretty quickly, too.

Now, I'm not claiming that I'm dainty. I'm a big guy. I like food. But I'm not a pain in the ass about it. I don't think even skinny people going to a pasta joint think two baskets of bread should equal five bread sticks. At this point, we were not enjoying our meal, hated the waiter, got sick of seeing him chat it up with other waiters while he ignored us, and watch people who were seated after us get better treatment. so we talked to the manager. She was nice, we explained our service and how disappointing it was, we offered to just pay so we could leave, but she comped our meal. Which was mostly sitting on the table anyway, so I guess it was fair...

Again, I don't usually do this kinda stuff. Neither does Hayley. We're pretty easy to please. If the guy had even said sorry for the wait, it would have smoothed things over some. Or if he had the sense to bring more than three bread sticks at a time to people who pay for dipping sauce. But all that, added on top of the neglect and wait time, and it was too much. I mean, if your job is to serve people, and your pay is based off how good a job you do at serving, wouldn't you want to make sure you did a good job?

After reading this, am I being a little too demanding? I say again, I don't normally do this. If the service is bad, I usually just suck it up. I even tip pretty good. But this was nuts.

So then, after this crappy service, we left. And on the way home, some jerk starts tailgating me. I was doing about 42 in a 35. There's no need for that. And now you know why I've chosen this particular title for this blog post. And why I tapped the breaks a bit and slowed to 30.

An even bigger and more important change

Hayley kinda wants me to blog about my business trip last week, but I have something more important to write about. Well, mostly just go to that link and you'll find out all about it. I just wanted to say I'm excited and happy and really looking forward to the future right now.

My only addition to Hayley's story is that I knew it. I knew she was pregnant. I just KNEW it! I don't know why, but even when she was sad and sure she wasn't even ovulating (if ovulating is too strong a word for you, you better not read Hayley's post ;). ), I was sure everything was ok. I didn't say anything, but when she was late, I was pretty sure she was pregnant. When the first test was "negative," it didn't phase me much. When she was still late two days later, I was still pretty sure. When she told me it was negative again, I started to get bummed, but then I saw the "negative" test for myself, I was so excited! We're gonna have a baby! We're gonna be a dad and a mom? Woo hoo!

Anyway, that's my short addition to the story. We're very excited. I am certain I'm going to embarrass this kid like crazy, but I can't wait to. And when Hayley said someone may have cried at the ultrasound, well... yeah, someone may have.

A big change...

As many of you may or not know, I don't ever say the name of my employer on my blog. Part of this is because if I were to, the Mar-Comm (Marketing-Communications) Manager at my work would get a notice that a blog somewhere mentioned the company. I know the Mar-Comm Manager and, in fact, have a link to her personal blog on my blog. We're pals. But I don't care to have my blog all up in my work business. Worlds colliding, and all that. I don't tell most work people about my blog, because most of them don't need any additional glimpse into my personal life... but moving on.

The imminent big change to which this post refers deals with my employment. I'm going to be changing jobs. It's quite a big change for me in many ways. I'll be moving from a small company to a very large, international company. I will go from driving to and from the office every day to working from home. I will go from one small facet of technical writing to a wider range of writing. I'll be learning new skills on top of that, and will make myself more marketable. And they'll be paying me a bit more... That isn't everything that's great about it, but you get the idea. It is going to be a big change, and Hayley and I are very excited about it.

The reason why I mentioned everything in the first paragraph is that I plan to follow the same philosophy about mentioning the name of my employer on my blog. That is to say, I won't be mentioning the name of my employer or giving many details about work. I'll tell you in person (or via text, email, chat, whatever) a little more about it if you're interested. But here's a little clue about where I'm going.

Wish me luck!