is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Snow and Supper.
It should be a snow day, but it isn�t. So in a matter of hours I�ll be trudging through the snow with suitcase to get to a train, to take a train to another train. Both of those trains will of course be delayed, and then slow. Then I�ll trudge through more snow to get to a meeting. And, of course, lots of people probably won�t show up for the meeting, because of the snow. But I�m one of the people running the meeting. And so I run through the snow to get there, from Philly to midtown New York. And there�s like a foot of snow here, that has fallen in the last 12 hours. It should be a snow day.
However, the meeting will be fine. It�s a good group and an interesting set of questions we�re dealing with. Because the good part is that it isn�t an administrative or otherwise bureaucratic meeting. I�ll actually be meeting with other academics to talk about IDEAS. It�s rare.
I think people outside the academy would be shocked to find out how rarely people who are trained to think for a living actually talk about their thinking with their colleagues. It�s just not how things are wired to work at the present moment. Some of it is inevitable. But much of it could be otherwise.
On Saturday, before the snow came, Gus took me out for a nice dinner at a place called Supper down on South Street here in Philly. The space is great�nice design, good lighting, good architectural layout. The food is really good. The service isn�t bad. But our meal got delayed, and the waiter was really bad at dealing with that. The chef came and apologized, but not until we had our check. That should have happened sooner. It�s not like we�re the needy type of customer. But a dinner that takes 2.5 hours shouldn�t take that long because we�re left waiting for 45 minutes between course 2 and 3. I said to Gus while we were waiting that if they paid for some part of our meal, we wouldn�t ask to talk to the manager. They offered us free dessert. Dessert was good. But there was still something stinkily lame about how it was handled. And it�s really mysterious to me that they would let it slide like that. The restaurant wasn�t full. The waiter wasn�t new at her job. And, let�s face it, Philadelphia is full of excellent restaurants, many of them in easy walking distance from where we sat. So why not make an effort to make up for their error? Bring us an extra appetizer for free during our long wait, or offer some booze. It costs the restaurant almost nothing to do something like that, and yet it makes all the difference to the customer�s decision to frequent the restaurant in the future.
That�s all I�m saying. But we still had a great time, and waiting for all those chunks of time was of course manageable because we always have fun together.
Oh, and the chef walked up to us and said some stuff and then said, �I�m sorry this wasn�t the penultimate eating experience for you.� Um, what? Heh. Oh man, he�s related to George W. Bush. �Penultimate� means next to last. It doesn�t mean �excellent� or �perfect� or �end all.� But I guess he was right on one level: it wasn�t our penultimate eating experience at Supper. It was probably our ultimate, by which I mean last, eating experience there.
Nonetheless, everything about the place is good, except for the experience we had with the delay and how they handled it. It may have been an anomaly. But I do think it�s OK to judge people for how they handle anomalous situations.
12:23 p.m. - March 02, 2009
sduckie - 2009-03-02 19:25:22
You might want to write a letter to the manager or the owner just to make sure they know. It does sound weird.
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