I've been neglecting you, bloggy friends! I apologize. DH and I have both been making a conscious effort to spend less time on the computer and more time together. We've had a relapse already. Shocking, right? So while it's been nice to take a break, I've been missing the blog world. My Bloglines is lit up with hundreds of unread posts that I'll probably never catch up on, but someone gave me a nudge to update so here I am.

Yesterday, a friend from high school that I hadn't seen in about two years stopped by for a visit. Yes, that's right, contact with the outside world! Go me. Anyway, it was nice. We got caught up on the latest happenings and then decided to take the boys to lunch at Bob Evans. Had I known in advance the idiocy that would ensue, we would have just stuck with the Mickey D's drive-thru.

We got there and were seated and the waitress came by to take our drink order. I put Sawyer's food in right away because he raises hell if he has to sit still for too long without stuffing his face. Chicken strips and smiley face potatoes. Easy enough, right? A few minutes later she came back by and took our orders, which we had to repeat three times while she stared at us and slowly nodded her head, looking completely confused. Ohhhh boy.

Fast forward about twenty minutes. Sawyer's food finally came, just in the nick of time as he'd been rolling around under the table and trying to dump out the salt and pepper. Chicken strips and fries. Yes, fries, not smiley face potatoes. I told her it was wrong and she again stared at me dumbfoundedly. I pointed to the picture in the kid's menu of the potatoes and she acted like she'd never seen them before in her life. You know, these things? Right here on the menu? Yeah, that's what I ordered.

So back to the kitchen she went, and at this point we had been there over half an hour and I'd still not received a single refill. We waited another good fifteen minutes and then she finally brought the potatoes (which at this point he had no interest in eating since he'd already devoured the fries). Still no sign of the rest of our food. By this time, Beckett was pretty much over the whole experience and no amount of Puffs was keeping him quiet. I paced with him and tried to keep Sawyer from tearing across the restaurant while my friend asked her for the check and to just box up our meals and we'd take it home.

MORE awkward staring, stuttering, and flipping through her order pad. Then back to the kitchen again, where we watched her tap away at the computer trying to get together our check for ANOTHER ten minutes. She finally brought it to us, along with one box.

"We will need more than one box."

"More than one?"

"Um.. yes? We each had a meal, plus his that he didn't finish? Did they already box ours up?"

Frantic flipping through the order book again. And then she said, "Umm, be right back, something isn't right here."

GEE, ya think?!

We watched her bustle back behind the counter and scramble with some boxes, shouting at the cooks that she needed our orders. We waited some more. And waited. And waited. And watched the manager walk around apologizing to other tables, but never stopping by ours. Finally, I was sick of it and we packed the now screaming kids up and went to the register, where the manager checked us out. I told him we only ever received the kids meal, and got an annoyed "Sorry about that" and nothing else.

So I paid a whole $3.20 for the chicken meal, plus a dollar tip, which I'm not even sure why I left. See, I'm not a sympathetic tipper. You have to earn your tip from me. The husband has worked as a server before and always leaves a tip, no matter what. Not I. Your tip starts at 20% and goes downhill from there the crappier your service gets. I never got a refill, Sawyer's order was wrong, and we never even got our food after being there for an hour. So she's lucky I even gave her that dollar. I think I only wrote it in because the manager was breathing down my neck watching me sign the receipt, and I had a twinge of guilt as I signed.

And yes, you can bet on it that I'll be emailing corporate with a copy of this blog post. I wouldn't go back there and pay, but I'll try again on their dime. Not that I even needed to be eating the caramel banana pecan pancakes I ordered, not in the slightest, so maybe the pancake gods were trying to tell me something?