Christine the Curmudgeon

Today, Christine the Curmudgeon is going to rant about people who do not properly plan ahead – specifically large groups of people.

Several years ago, Mr. Curmudgeon and I dined at a restaurant in Portsmouth, NH called The Stockpot.  It is no longer there…too bad, it was a pretty good place.  Anyhoo, it was kind of a small place, at least the one non-smoking room was (at the time, smoking was still permitted in NH bars and restaurants).

We were there on a Saturday night in the summer, a busy time in Portsmouth and other seacoast towns.  Since it was just the two of us, we were able to walk into The Stockpot and get a table right away.

As we were sitting there, drinking our beers and enjoying our dinner, this group of nine people walked in.  The hostess told them that she could not seat them all together at the time, and that they’d have to wait.  The leader of the group started screaming at the poor hostess, as if this were somehow her fault.  But there was nothing she could have done, she did her best to calm this person down.  They left for a while, but then came back, probably because they realized that there was nit a single restaurant in all of downtown Portsmouth that could seat a group of nine people together on a Saturday night.  In the middle of the summer.  With no advance notice.  They were still waiting when we left, and they were loudly bitching and moaning about it all as we walked past them.

I was reminded of this incident by one that happened more recently.  I’ve been becoming a regular on the 3PM Boston Express Bus from Boston’s South Station to Manchester, NH, at least once a week.  This is because we go to a lot of New Hampshire Fisher Cats games, and for the weeknight games, it is easier if I go up on the bus, and Mr. Curmudgeon meets me at the stadium after he gets sprung from work.  His office is about halfway up I-93 between our house and the ballpark, so it makes no sense for him to have to drive home, get me, and them backtrack north again.  We’ll have season tickets for next year, so I’ll be using Boston Express Bus all the more; I hope they come out with monthly passes by then!

Anyhoo, these buses come equipped with free WiFi, as well as electrical outlets at some of the seats.  These are clearly marked, but you need to get in the queue for the bus early so you can get on sooner and snag one of these seats, if you need one.  Since I never go anywhere without my cell phone, Amazon Kindle, and iPod (and sometimes I bring my netbook if I need to do some work), I always get there early enough to get an outlet.  I always seem to have SOMETHING that needs to be charged up!

So I was on the 3PM to Manchester last Friday, sitting in my seat with the power outlet, my phone happily charging away.  At exactly 2:58, this large group of older ladies got on the bus, and once they saw that the bus was nearly full and that there was no way they could all sit together, they started bitching and moaning loudly about this.

Some people actually got up and moved so at least some of them could sit together.  I was not among them.  I was the one who planned ahead because I wanted access to a power outlet; although I do charge things up at home, using mobile web on a phone sucks up a lot of juice.  But that’s not the point – the point is that I knew what I had to do to get a power outlet seat, and I made sure to get there in time to board the bus and get one.  It’s not my problem that this bunch of old biddies didn’t plan ahead to get to the station early enough to be the first to board and get their choice of seats!  This is NOT the same thing as refusing to give an elderly person a seat on an MBTA bus or train, now that I would do.  The Boston Express Bus only sells as many tickets as there are seats, so nobody has to stand.  This was just a case where the old bats all wanted to sit together, and it wasn’t going to happen.

One of the old biddies sat next to me, but I put my iPod earphones in and ignored her as she glared at me.

Next time, get there earlier!  Sheesh!  If I ever act like this when I become an old bat, somebody please shoot me!

Oh, yes – Christine the Curmudgeon is going to be piling on the complaints today!  Where to begin?

We’ll start with my cell phone.  I am getting VERY sick of Opera Mini 5 crapping out on me right when I need to use it for something.  The mobile web browser that came on the phone is the biggest piece of crap; Opera Mini is much easier to use.  The only thing is, it craps out, and won’t connect to the internet at critical moments, such as when I’m trying to check into a venue via Foursquare.  Sometimes just powering down the phone and turning it back on a few minutes later works.  Sometimes it doesn’t, and I have to re-download it by going to the Opera site via the crappy default mobile browser and getting it from there.

However, last night, I was trying to check into John Brewer’s Tavern, and was not only unable to access Foursquare, but I was also unable to re-download Opera Mini 5.  It would only offer me 4.2, which I DO NOT WANT, 5 is much more user-friendly.  Why will they not let me have 5?

Luckily, I had my Amazon Kindle with me.  I turned on the wireless on that, and was able to get to the Foursquare mobile site from there, and check-in.  So I know for sure now that the issue was not on Foursquare’s end.  Either the Opera mobile browser crapped out yet again, or the problem was with the Sprint network, which is what my carrier, Virgin Mobile, uses.  It may well be the latter, because a guy I know who also uses Virgin Mobile said he was having similar issues.

Also, I’ve been having trouble sending picture messages to Facebook, and I’ve not been getting Facebook messages on my phone, either. I had taken some pictures with my phone over the weekend, sent them to Facebook, only to find out later that they.  Tried re-sending, only to get error messages.  Luckily, this phone has a microSD card slot, and I had one in there, on which I store all my phone pictures.  Luckily, I had the adaptor handy, so I was able to insert it into my netbook and upload the pictures to Facebook that way.  But sheesh, what’s the point of having a camera phone if you can’t just upload the pics directly from that?

If I can’t do stuff from my phone on a consistent basis, why the hell am I paying for unlimited data and messaging?  I can do that for free from my Kindle, as long as it’s not a picture message.  I should just go back to pay-as-you go voice minutes.

Oh yes, the phone part of things works just fine.  The annoying-assed telemarketers are able to call my cell just fine.  I don’t waste my minutes on them because if I don’t recognize the number, I don’t answer.  If whoever it is has a legitimate need to talk to me, they can leave a message on the voice mail, and if I decide it’s important enough, I will return the call.  And I always Google the numbers to try to figure out where they came from; these numbers usually show up on those sites where people complain about annoying phone calls.  Most of the time, there is never a way to identify the company who is calling; that way, it is difficult to bust them for violating the DO NOT CALL laws.

I wish there were some sort of digital deadbolt locks, to use on phones and computers, to keep the undesirables, the telemarkers and the spammers, out.

John Brewer’s Tavern pissed me off last night, as well.  I was already kind of pissed at Mr. Curmudgeon, for not wanting to go to the Wild Rover Pub after the Fisher Cats game yesterday.  He wasn’t hungry, he claimed, even though I knew he soon would be.  Anyway, we headed for home, and when we were almost there, he decided he WAS hungry.  We’d been away for the weekend and I was too tired to cook, so we opted to go to John Brewer’s, a place we had previously liked.

Everything was fine until my beer went empty and I was not finished eating.  The stupid bartender, an older guy who’d waited on us before, and who we’d always tipped very well, was ignoring other customers in favor of his stupid Malden townie friends at the other end of the bar.  The place was NOT busy, yet I could not get this jerk’s attention.

Finally he came past us, picked up my empty glass, and went right back to his townie thug pals.  He didn’t ask if I wanted another beer, and once again, it was impossible to get his attention.  By this time, I was livid.  I got up from the barstool and said loudly to Mr. C that if they were not interested in serving me a second beer, I was leaving.  I walked out the door and to the car, saying to the hostess on the way out that the service sucked and that I was never coming back.  She said she was sorry, in that tone of voice that meant that she didn’t give a rat’s ass whether I ever came back or not.

Mr. C. paid the bill, leaving a much lower tip than the jerk would have gotten if I’d gotten that second beer.  When we got home, I sent an email to the manager from their website, so far, no response.  If they don’t even care enough to respond to a customer complaint, then they do not deserve any more of our hard-earned money.  I also removed all my positive reviews of them from foursquare, and wrote a new one telling people not to go there unless they are Malden townie thugs, that’s the only way you get any attention at this place.  I plan to amend my reviews on other sites, as well.  Many restaurants and other businesses are taking user reviews at sites like foursquare, Yelp, and TripAdvisor very seriously, as do many potential customers.  Nobody wants a bad review, it can hurt business, but this place so deserves it.  Not just for the poor service, but for then ignoring me when I complained about it.  Nobody keeps me from my beer and gets away with it.

Just reading some stuff on Facebook today is pissing me off.  But this post is already too long, so this will be for another post.

…it would be required by law that ANYONE who is in a position to deal with customers SPEAK AND UNDERSTAND ENGLISH!  This is the UNITED STATES, we speak ENGLISH here.  If you want to live here, learn the damned language.  While you are learning it, you can always get a job where you aren’t dealing directly with the public.  Companies need to take mind of this; if they are looking to hire someone to operate a cash register, sell anything from bagels to mens ties to high-end electronics, the employees need to be able to properly communicate with the customers.

The other day, I was taking the bus from Boston’s South Station up to Manchester, NH, to go to the Fisher Cats game.  I was early, and was looking for someplace to grab a quick breakfast.  I was hoping to find a Dunkin’ Donuts there, but for some reason unknown to humankind, there is no Dunkin’ Donuts in South Station.  now what the hell is up with THAT?

Lacking Dunkin’ I went to Au Bon Pain.  Nobody there spike English very well, but the only other choice that I could see was McDonald’s, but since I wasn’t interested in getting the runs (which is what their crap food does to me, and is why I don’t eat it), Au Bon Pain it was.

I decided to make it as easy and fast as possible, so I ordered an onion bagel, not toasted, with cream cheese.  So she put the bagel, unsliced, a thingy of cream cheese, and napkins into the bag.  I paid and headed for the bus station.

About halfway there, I realized that I didn’t see her put a plastic knife into the bag, so I went back to get one.  The woman who waited on me was busy, so I asked some guy who wasn’t busy if I could please have a knife.  He looked at me as if I had three heads, clearly not understanding what it was I wanted.

I held up the Au Bon Pain bag, and tried to tell him that they forgot to give me a knife for my bagel.  He still didn’t get it.  I finally had to take the bagel out of the bag, pretend I had a knife, and made slicing motions.  He finally got a clue and gave me the damned knife.

Sheesh!  Good thing I was early, or else I might have missed my bus!  I’m sure that if it were a Dunkin’ Donuts, it probably wouldn’t have been any better.  In any case, it’s annoying and inconvenient and should be against the law to have these non-English speaking workers dealing with a public whose primary language is ENGLISH!

Srsly.  Even Christine the Curmudgeon cannot make stuff like this up!

So we have this jerk on Planet Feedback, who wrote a letter complaining that he was unable to get the Saturday Dinner Special, the chicken tenders, for $6.99. He was told that the special only went until 10PM, and he showed up at 11:30PM.  He also claimed that he had been given the special price at that hour in the past.  And now he is screaming bloody murder, and wanting to call his attorney and file a class-action suit, yada, yada, yada.  Read the letter here.

I had never heard of this restaurant, so I Googled them to find their website.  Here it is.  No wonder I never heard of them, they are nowhere near here.  In any case, I looked for anything about these specials, found nothing.  So this guy does have a valid complaint, if the start and end time of the specials is not printed nor posted anywhere.  This I don’t know, as I’ve not been inside the location he is threatening to sue.

However, they did have a .pdf version of their menu on their site.  That is where I saw that the full price of this chicken tender dinner thingy is $8.49.  Yep, just $1.50 more than the special price!  If this guy is so hard up that he can’t afford to pay an extra $1.50, he needs to take an apidexin, shut the hell up, and eat at home.

He is also whining over being made to pay $2.11 for a Pepsi, that, by his own choice, did not drink.  I swear, somebody needs to take a picture of this guy with their cell phone, post it up somewhere where all of the servers can see it, with a message underneath saying, “IF YOU SEE THIS GUY, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO WAIT ON HIM.  YOU HAVE OUR PERMISSION TO THROW HIS ASS OUT OF HERE.”

If he is indeed working seven days a week, as claimed, and is making such a stink over a few bucks, how does he have money for an attorney?  I think he’s just blowing hot air out his ass.  If he doesn’t like the policy of the restaurant, he can go elsewhere.

What a jerk!  There are a lot of places that piss me off, but never enough to threaten to sue.  I just write bad reviews about them, and not go back.  But I still wouldn’t do even that over $1.50.  It would have to be much worse than the specials expiring.  Woe to any restaurant who runs out of the special two seconds before this guy walks in, before anyone had a chance to erase it off the board or spread the word among the servers that it was “86ed” (restaurant lingo for running out of something).

This guy should be blacklisted from every restaurant in the area.

Such as the guy we saw yesterday at the British Beer Company, who left NO tip!

Christine the Curmudgeon and the Mister went to this place on the way home from the PawSox game yesterday.  As usual, we went to sit at the bar, which was very busy due to the World Cup Finals being on TV.  However, we managed to snag two seats together.

The jerk guy was sitting to the right of Mr. Curmudgeon.  He was there with a date, some woman who he was clearly trying to get into the sack, as he kept feeling her up right there at the bar.

They had finished up, and the guy waited until his date went to the ladies’ room to pay the check.  This was probably so that 1. She’d not see that he had to put the bill on two different credit cards, because he did not have enough credit on either for the whole bill total, and 2. That he was too cheap to bother leaving a tip.

She came out of the restroom, and he immediately steered her toward the door to leave.  She did not get the chance to see the charge slips on the bar, as Mr. Curmudgeon did, showing the use of two credit cards and NO TIP added to the total.  I’m sure that the bartender wanted to shoot this jerk with a phaser 8560, the guy probably treated him badly, in addition to the cheap tip.

The total bill was about $75, most of it drinks.  We’d tip $15-$20 on that, the higher amount if the service was outstanding.   It looked like he was trying to get her drunk so he could have his way with her.   But he also felt that he had to take her to a NICE place to get her drunk, taking her to the local dive bar with the dollar draft Bud Lights, which was probably more within his budget, would not have gone over well in his mission to get laid.

I’m not one to judge people by how much money they may or may not have.  But I do judge people on how responsible they are with what money they DO have.  If you go to a restaurant and have to spread out the bill over two credit cards, and then leave no tip, that means you can’t afford to be going to that restaurant in the first place.  If you are a nice, but broke, guy, a good woman will understand if you spend what you do have on a nice 6-pack of craft beer, and cook dinner at home.  That can be done for a lot less than $75, and no tipping is required.

But this guy is not only NOT nice, but insecure, as well.  He probably thinks that the only way to get laid is to spend a lot of money to impress a woman.  It’s probably a good thing that someone like this is likely not looking for a permanent relationship, because the way he handles money is BAD NEWS, and any sane woman would RUN, not WALK away from someone like this.  I’d say the same thing to a guy if it were a woman handling money badly.

Guys – you don’t NEED to have a lot of money to get a woman to like you!  Mr. Curmudgeon was broke when I met him, in fact, his now ex-wife had just kicked him out of the house for being unemployed and back in school to get his electrical engineering degree.  She didn’t get that he NEEDED that degree to get another job.  She also stole some of his student loan money to hire some shark divorce lawyer, and sucked him for what little he did have left.  Yes, this proves that some women are shallow bimbos who only like guys for money.  But if you are a nice guy, and it’s the right woman, she won’t care if you are broke or not – as long as you don’t do dumb and sleazy stuff like the guy at the British Beer Company did.

There have been times when we could not afford to eat out at all, and if we could, it was some cheap place like Denny’s.  I decided that not eating out at all was better than Denny’s, though.  The fact is, though, if you can’t afford to put the bill on ONE card, and you can’t afford to properly tip the server, then you should either eat at a fast food joint, or cook and eat at home.  Period.