Had lunch at your basic Poor Man’s Planet Hollywood chain restaurant today. Just as we had been served our food, some unlucky sucker at the next table was having a birthday.
I think you know where this story is going.
It happened that the staff member who was bellowing out the military-themed birthday greeting, alongside 40 or so of his compadres, was standing right next to me. So he was essentially shouting into my ear. And don’t forget the clapping. Ugh. “There should be a law,” indeed.
My two reactions to this event, in order, were:
1. We should get our lunch for free.
2. If I were the guy who had to shout out birthday greetings, I would get a different job or kill myself.
[straining with clenched fist]: Must… not… wield… steak knife!
my first job not working for a relative and not harvesting fruit of some kind involved working as a boxboy at a new safeway’s restaurant in southwest washington state many years ago. to celebrate the washington state sesquicentennial, someone had the idea to make all the boxboys wear dan’l boone coonskin caps.
i was let go soon after that, for malingering and a general lack of initiative.
We have a restaurant chain in western Canada (I don’t know if the reaches the US or not) called “Montana Jack’s”. Their particular spin on the humiliate-the-birthday-boy/girl-and-interrupt-everyone-else’s-meal” activity is to have the hapless victim wear a helmet with a giant pair of horns fastened to each side. I don’t know what type of animal the horns originated with, but they are a good three feet long each.
Some memories are just too special for words.
Could not agree with you more. I will never eat at Red Robin again, it is so annoying. What moron thought up lets keep clapping if we have nothing to do? There was a place or places in Minneapolis that served breakfast. There special was somthing called pannanukin or something like that. Every time one was order and brought from the kitchen, the waitperson had to yell it out. After 2-3 times it started to be annoying. If you could of seen the waitpersons face and tone as they yelled it, it was painful to watch. I never have gone back and as far as I know they went out of business. There is a God!
I probably would have elbowed the guy & told him to move along. you definitely should have at least gotten the meal for free…