By the time you read this I will be playing Beatles Rock Band with my parents, an experience which I admit was a large reason of why I bought the game. Of course I am actually typing this some seventeen hours prior, so what I’m actually doing right now is checking my moogle mail in Dissidia and contemplating whether or not I have the funds to pick up the next few Discworld books and some cheap PSP games off Amazon. (“Not this week,” says the mean little voice in my head. He’s probably right, but you know, fuck that guy.)
The new job is going swimmingly. It’s not particularly demanding work, just your typical call center stuff, and after this week I’ll likely be done with it and will have moved on to whatever odd jobs a call center needs done for the poor sap who gets stuck with (i.e.: specifically requests) the overnight shift. Then my life will settle back into its nice, comfy quasi-nocturnal rut and all will be right with the world.
People tell me the Peemeister stuff is the best stuff on my site, and flipping through my archives I’d say I have to agree with them. It’s a little disheartening to think I won’t be adding any more. I wish I had committed myself to this frequent update schedule back ’round 2005 when I was in the prime of my Peemeistering years, because I feel like my fuzzy memory is holding on to a lot of stories that I never got around to writing about for reasons like “it is grey outside today” or “Subway ran out of bacon” or “it is Thursday”. Now that writing is part of my daily routine (seriously, the reason I’m awake right now typing this is because my head would not let me sleep until I got up and took care of it) I’ve got this mercifully stress-free but nonetheless boring job that doesn’t make for interesting stories. Hindsight, 20/20, etc.
I did talk to a guy today who asked if they’d have to take his heart out of his stomach to do an EKG on it, and I told him no, that’s probably not how it was done. I don’t know how his heart ended up in his stomach anyway. That’s not where those go, right?
I had a huge stack of Pepsi caps with Rock Band codes in them which I had intended to cash in for Wii points, but apparently they ran out of them, whatever that means. I kind of figured that the whole point of a giveaway was to, well, give away prizes, and while I can appreciate the concept of “while supplies last” I sort of thought figured that digital content that can be copied and distributed endlessly was not a resource that was going to run out. There’s a lot of things I don’t understand about the world, I guess.
I wanted those Wii points too, because the final chapter of FF4: The After Years came out today. Between that and Dissidia I think it’s fair to say that I’m going to remain balls-deep in Final Fantasy for a while. (Have I made a post about Dissidia yet? I forget.) I am, of course, hyper-aware that the allure of these two games in particular is lost on anyone but the most die-hard FF fanboys. Say what you want about the series, but it’s over twenty years strong now and has reached the point where it can afford to cannibalize itself and still turn a profit. And hey, look what finally got a release date:
 They’re cutting it loose in Japan in December, which means we’ll probably get it sometime next year. I’ll be counting the seconds until then, but that’s not even the most interesting part of the ad. Let’s zoom in a tad:
 Is that… is that facial hair? I didn’t know men under the age of 50 were capable of growing facial hair in Final Fantasy games. I mean, sure, Basch, but FF12 is kind of a black sheep when you take the series as a whole. I don’t really know what to make of this. I’m betting this is a hilarious mistake of some kind, and somebody got fired over it. And since this is Japan we’re talking about, somebody probably then went on to fall on their sword over it.
This is probably old news, and that’s probably a character that was revealed ages ago, but I try to avoid spoiling myself on FF games in the run-up to their release. Which, for FF13, has been… uh… three years now? Wow. Except for Lightning and Afro-Balthier I haven’t been introduced to any of the cast, and I’d like to keep it that way for as long as possible.
Still, that dude has scruff on his chin. Was he accidentially cropped in from an unrelated ad? Maybe I’ll get to find out sometime in 2010.
So there’s an official trailer out now for Boondock Saints 2, and it’s baffling. Troy “Biggest Asshole in Tinseltown” Duffy has been threatening to make this movie for a couple years now and, as much as I enjoyed the original, I could never figure out why. See, some movies just don’t need sequels. Boondock Saints’s story wasn’t Shakespeare, but it was complete. You saw a few wild gunfights, you saw Willem Defoe in drag, it gets capped off with the legendary courtroom scene and then roll credits to folks on the street being interviewed about their city’s new living legends. The story can stop there. It has to stop there. Any possible development after that point brings the characters back down to mortal levels, when the whole point of the film was seeing two regular men become something extraordinary.
That, and the trailer just doesn’t… look very good.
I finally watched Taken last night and, like the rest of the Internet, I was enraptured by it. Instead of watching it again immediately I went online to read about it on IMDB and Wikipedia, which has become part of my post-exposure habit when it comes to films. During my journeys I came across this comment: “Robert Mark Kamen revealed that a sequel for the film is already in the works.”
Huh? How does that work? Taken 2: The Takening? Taken Again? Re-taken? How is any possible sequel to this movie going to be anything but very artificial? If it uses all the same characters it’s just going to come off as remarkably corny. “My daughter has been kidnapped… again! This time in Shanghai! By ninjas!” And if it doesn’t, why even label it as a sequel? It’s not even like they could use the original characters in a new situation; Liam Neeson wasn’t a special ops commando who specializes in kidnappings, but a father who went on a rampage looking for his daughter. It’s not going to be possible to bottle the lightning a second time unless they bottle the exact same lightning.
Wait, I’ve got another one: Taken 2: Indian Giving. Oh lawdy.
My intention was to put a vlog up today, but as it turns out I felt more like spending my first weekend home from my new job napping and playing video games. Funny how that worked out! Truth is I’m on a 9-to-5 weekday schedule for the time being, and my evenings are often taken up by one of those womenfolk that demand so much attention, so it’s tough to find a couple uninterrupted hours in which to write/shoot/edit/upload a three-minute video. I’ll be working nights starting the week after next, which is going to require a lot of rewiring, but I expect things to settle down a bit at that point. I should be able to once again fall into a nice comfortable rut. Vlogging will resume when I can devote some real time to it rather than just shoehorning it into whatever free time I happen to have laying around.
And I’ve decided I want a better camera. The little flip-cam was good when I was just experimenting, but I think now I have a good format worked out and could do with some better equipment. Christmas is just 3.5 months away!
Most of my gaming time this past week has been devoted to Dissidia. I have a pretty good handle on most of the mechanics now and am working on leveling everyone up and moving through the story mode. I don’t have many gripes about the game, really, except the cast and setting. The strict adherence to the “protagonist/antagonist/final dungeon from each game” format left us with a lot of same-y characters and locations. When you’re picking a map to fight on, for example, your choices are: old castle, weird metaphysical realm, weird metaphysical realm, moon, weird metaphysical realm, weird tower, weird metaphysical realm, weird castle (with strong weird metaphysical realm influences), weird metaphysical realm and weird metaphysical realm.
I think mascot fanservice games like this should strive for two things. First, they should be as represent the source material as thoroughly as possible. And second, they should offer a wide and interesting variety of options to the player. I think Dissidia succeeds on the first part and fails on the second. Each of the first ten FF games are adequately represented here, but character variety is pretty heavily slanted towards Dudes With Swords Fighting in Weird Metaphysical Realms. Square-Enix never asked me (they probably lost my number), but here’s how I would have fixed it for them.
FF1: Red Mage/Garland/Chaos Shrine
I don’t know who “Warrior of Light” is, but he’s not in FF1. Problem is, FF1 doesn’t really have a hero that is all its own. Even if they were to just take one of the six FF1 jobs and plug it in, five out of every six players would complain that the one who made the cut wasn’t their favorite. Of the six, I believe the most iconic is probably the Red Mage, but I could probably be convinced otherwise.
The villain and stage choices are already good. Garland looks awesome indeed, and I’m a big fan of his crazy transform-o-sword. As for the stage, FF1’s dungeons are pretty much all palette swapped caves. The Chaos Shrine is unique among them, and (almost) has unique music, to boot.
FF2: Firion/Emperor/Snowfield
They did a great job with Firion. His gimmick is that he’s a weapons specialist; each of his special attacks utilizes a different form of weaponry. This is a cool throwback to how weapon levels are gained in FF2, a system that remains unique to that one game (probably because it sucks and everyone hates it).
The Emperor is a dumb character, though. As is typical in FF games where the primary antagonist ends up not being the final boss, the Emperor is lame but his right-hand-man Leon is actually interesting. Unfortunately this would mean replacing the Emperor’s interesting magical trap-based style with yet another Dude With Sword. The trade-off isn’t worth it.
We can fix the stage, though. Only a few FF games have icy areas, and FF2’s requires a unique vehicle to pass through. The story of what happens there is repeated as a legend in FF9. An icy plain under a big blue sky would be nicer to look at than the boxy pink/purple atrocity that is Pandamonium, anyway.
FF3: Onion Knight/Xande/Airship Invincible
Onion Knight is perfect as-is; he’s distinct, he’s got a varied skillset, and he’s very obviously from FF3. Cloud of Darkness isn’t a character, though; she’s the boss that shows up in the last sixty seconds of the game for no particular reason. What’s more, the “Cloud of Darkness” in Dissidia isn’t even the “Cloud of Darkness” from FF3. For starters, she’s not a cloud. Kind of hard to play a cloud. I can see why they retooled her, but the better option would have been to fall back on the antagonist, Xande, who the heroes had actually spent a great deal of time fighting.
The Invincible is the series’s first “home base” airship, and is one of the first things people remember when they look back on FF3. It’s virtually criminal that there are no airships in Dissidia, so here one is.
FF4: Kain/Golbez/Lunar Surface
Now we’re starting to get into games with real, established casts. The first thing I’d do is abolish the rule that the chosen character must be the game’s hero. Cecil is fine, but Kain’s the guy everyone really loves. He’s the original bad boy of Final Fantasy. His aerial spear-based skillset would be a welcome digression from the rest of the Dudes With Swords. Heck, they all but compromised as-is by giving Cecil a spear and a couple diving attacks.
Golbez is wonderful and I wouldn’t change anything about him. The stage is already good too; it’s distinctively from FF4 and is pretty much the only stage in Dissidia that stands out alongside the others. For some reason though they call it “Lunar Subterrane” when you’re really fighting on the surface.
FF5: Any Girl/Gilgamesh/Great Forest of Moore
Bartz is one of my favorite characters in Dissidia. They represent his constant changing of jobs by filling his moveset with a hodgepodge of skills from everyone else’s list and naming his EX mode “Spellblade Dual-Weild Rapid-Fire”, which is a reference so deliciously corny I couldn’t imagine it any other way. But you know what? All five of FF5’s PCs share those same traits, so why not go with one of the girls instead and even out the gender imbalance a little bit? I could make a good case for any of them, I’m sure.
The character everyone really remembers from FF5, though, is Gilgamesh. Why they’d pass up this fan favorite in favor of the ugly armor dude with the stupid name is beyond me. As for the setting, FF5 has a lot of good memorable ones (Steamship! Haunted library! Pyramid!) but Dissidia is sorely in need of some outdoor locales so I went with the Great Forest. I have an inexplicable fondness for that part of the game.
FF6: Terra or Celes/Kefka/Floating Continent
Terra is already the most distinctive hero in Dissidia, simply by virtue of being the only lady and the only one with an entirely magic-based skillset. It’s a shame that the only other primary hero in the series with the same attributes also comes from FF6. The two are pretty much interchangeable, although I’ll admit Terra has the market on awesome EX modes cornered.
The Floating Continent is one of the most memorable areas in FF6 and one of the most unique dungeons in the entire series. I’m envisioning landmasses rising and falling, the ground quaking beneath you, sections of rock opening up to swallow you whole and spit you out on the other side of the map. The Ω version would be darker, of course, and would be crumbling far more violently. It’s even a “final dungeon” in a sense, now that I think about it.
FF7: Cloud/Sephiroth/Gold Saucer
As much as I wish they’d picked someone other than Cloud, I don’t think there’s any way they could get away with it. Cloud is the face of modern Final Fantasy, and probably the most popular character in the series, ever. Ditto Sephiroth, when it comes to bad guys.
They botched the stage choice, though. The FF series has lots of caves with glowy bits, but only one amusement park. The list of stage gimmicks you could apply to the Gold Saucer is almost limitless, but even if you wanted to be lazy about it, a roller coaster track you could quicktravel on would be nostalgic enough.
FF8: Quistis/Edea/Balamb Garden
Now with FF8, I think you could get away with using one of the minor PCs instead of the hero. Which is good, because FF8 happens to have a blue-magic-using whipfighter on its cast. I don’t particularly care for Quistis in-game, but she would offer a new style of fighting and tip the gender scale a little bit, to boot.
Ultimecia was almost as dumb a choice as Cloud of Darkness. Edea is cooler-looking, has more personality, and is almost identical in function. They didn’t even keep Ultimecia’s one definining trait (replacing her Cs with Ks) when they brought her over! What a waste.
Ultimecia’s Castle is actually a pretty cool stage. There’s a scene in FF8, however, where you’re fighting off a bunch of bad guys invading Balamb Garden while it’s flying around. The scenery is very distinctive, and I think a stage harkening back to it would have been a much better fit in Dissidia. After all, you spend the entire game running around Garden, but only an hour or two in Ultimecia’s Castle on disc four.
FF9: Zidane/Kuja/Cleyra Trunk
Zidane and Kuja are already the perfect choices. I’m having a hard time thinking of a cooler location from FF9 than the giant sand-filled tree surrounded by an endless whirlwind. I guess Pink Crystal World is cool too though. You know. Whatever cranks your tractor.
FF10: Yuna/Jecht/Luca Stadium
I’m picturing hotpants Yuna here, dual-weilding pistols. Something tells me she’s more popular than Tidus anyway. Jecht is already great. I guess with a setup like this you’d lose the well-written and meaningful plot that develops between father and son in Dissidia, and if you wanted to preserve that sort of hero/villain relationship you’d have to replace Jecht with Seymour, but Dissidia’s writing isn’t capable of conveying meaningful plot anyway so I say pick the best two characters and call it a day.
There is a huge focus on aerial combat in Dissidia, so an enormous water-filled Blitzball Arena would fit right in. Handwave all that stuff about breathing and underwater movement with the Rule of Cool and you’ve got yourself a stage.
FF11: Who Knows
I didn’t play enough FF11 to be able to really make a judgment here, nor have I unlocked Shantotto yet in Dissidia. I’ll just assume Shantotto is the best character ever and move on.
FF12: Balthier/Cid/Ogir-Yensa Sandsea
I don’t know why FF12 wasn’t fully represented in Dissidia. As long and as turbulent as FF12’s development was, I can’t imagine it overlapped much (if at all) with Dissidia’s — especially since they were apparently going to originally include FF13’s heroine as well.
Balthier is by far FF12’s best character, the gentleman thief with the old-timey guns. His nethecite-drunken father Cidolfus is in many ways FF12’s primary antagonist, and including him would have the added benefit of getting a Cid on the roster (another area in which Dissidia is sorely lacking). As for the sandsea, well, desert locales are FF12’s most iconic trait. Throw in some oil rigs and jawas and it’s a party.
So there you go, Squenix. I fixed Dissidia for you. No need to thank me, just keep it in mind for the sequel, yeah?
From 2005 to 2008 I maintained a blog about my experiences working in the drug test industry. Every Saturday I revive one of those experiences here. The following was originally posted April 26, 2006.
Disgusting jobs.
People always wonder how I can do my disgusting, filthy job. People wonder all the time how I manage to actually touch cups full of urine on a daily basis. Folks can’t wrap their heads around it, but the truth of the matter is my job isn’t all that disgusting. Mopping up a small puddle of urine (which is usually the most that happens, when accidents do happen) is no different than mopping up a small puddle of any other liquid.
Honestly, I prefer the smell of stale urine over some of the really rank cleaning products I end up using. Then there’s my air freshener on top of that — masking one smell with another, with another. If anything is disgusting, it’s the smell of Glade Plug-ins and bug spray mingled with disinfectant and Lysol, combined with the aroma of slime-like bluing agent, with perhaps the slightest tinge of urine as an afterthought.
Keeping my office clean generally means vacuuming and mopping, keeping my paperwork in neat little stacks, and keeping the water in my toilet as blue as a smurf. Until today.
I can’t sugar-coat this… the guy was fat. There’s no dancing around a thing like this. This man did not have a weight problem, he had a weight catastrophe. That he could manage to walk without a cane or some other kind of support was mind-blowing, though calling his movements “walking” isn’t exactly accurate. He would kind of swivel his hips and swing his arms as hard as he could to gain momentum, and any movement his feet actually made seemed to be incidental. One thing was for sure, when not in motion the man could not stand up on his own. He had to lean on something or fall over.
Please understand that I’m merely describing this man, not mocking him, although mockery was the least of his worries. He couldn’t string a sentence together without gasping for breath halfway through. He was sweating through his sweatpants. His odor was pungent and foul. This was not your average, run-of-the-mill fat man, the kind we all know and love. This was someone with a serious, immediate problem that needs to be remedied. This man, you look at and feel an instant and overwhelming sense of pity, but at the same time you try to avert your eyes and breathe through your mouth.
A quick aside about my waterless urinal: it’s basically just a drain on the wall with a little pocket inside for disinfectant (which, as noted above, smells worse than urine). It’s actually the ideal tool for someone in my field, since it can’t be flushed and puts the donor in a place where he cannot get any water whatsoever, running or otherwise. Furthermore, it reduces the chances of a donor flushing the toilet to exactly zero, which saves me from a lot of headaches. When a man asks to use the regular toilet, however, that’s generally a red flag. Some men are incapable of doing so, and that’s fine, but some simply want to cheat and need a readily avaialble source of water to do so.
I was willing to make an exception in this man’s case, though, because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how he was going to be able to aim the stream into the waterless urinal. He had seen the two men in front of him use the waterless urinal so he knew it existed, and when I asked if he needed a regular toilet he became embarrassed and said no, he could do it just fine.
This did not turn out to be the case.
While he was in the men’s room working on filling his cup I was in the lobby filling out paperwork for the two donors behind him. Just as I was finishing up the second set of forms I hear a loud crash from the bathroom. I rushed back and asked if he was okay.
“I made a mess,” he said.
It took him a few minutes but he eventually got up, and cracked the door open. He didn’t want to open it all the way and reveal the fruits of his labor, but at the same time he couldn’t fit through the half-opened door. He was beet red, but whether that was because he was completley out of breath or utterly mortified, I have no way of knowing. Probably a combination of the two.
In no uncertain terms, this man had fallen over somehow in the bathroom and lost control of his bowels. Green, murky diarrhea covered the back of his pants and most of one arm, not to mention my bathroom floor. His sample cup was discarded amidst his leavings. It was empty, not because he had spilled it, but because he hadn’t filled it in the first place.
He forced his way past me so he didn’t have to see the look on my face as the mess came into full view. He choked out some apologies on his way out the door. I was left with the task of cleaning up after him. The two people in my lobby had begun to wrinkle their noses, the looks of disgust impossible to hide. The young lady excused herself.
I set about my undesirable task, armed with everything in my cleaning arsenal. Fifteen grisly minutes later my men’s room was back in pristine condition. It was the most horrible mess I’d ever cleaned up in my life.
I still felt extreme amounts of pity for this man, but now I was angry with him as well. It’s rather common for men to not be able to do number one without first doing number two, I’m sure it happens to everyone. But I had offered this guy an out. Had he been sitting on the toilet he would have never slipped and, even if he had somehow, clean-up would have been as easy as flushing. Sure, his drug test would have been ruined. But isn’t that better than the alternative?
I’m aware he was just embarrassed and sensitive about his weight, but I’m betting that after leaving here he went straight through a McDonald’s drive-thru for some comfort food. I sometimes wonder if incidents like these form the catalyst in someone’s life, where they clearly identify a change they need to make and then get motivated enough to change it. But somehow I think that only happens in movies. As it stands this man is in seriously bad health and is at best a horrible inconvenience to the people who have to put up with him. Nobody can help him but himself, and even in situations as silly as drug testing he’s unwilling to do even that.
As for me, for the rest of the day there’s an odor lingering about that drowns out even the disinfectants and Pine Sol. And it’s hard to be excited about that.
When the young lady came back in she blurted out, “I didn’t leave because of the fat — because of the obese guy, I mean — I just wanted a cigarette.” At that point, I would have welcomed the smell of a cigarette.
Like everyone else on the internet, I once teamed up with an artist to make a webcomic. It didn’t get very far, but I’ll share one here each Friday until there aren’t anymore. Enjoy.
Every once in a while I’ll retroactively understand a reference. There’ll be something weird or out-of-place in a movie or a book or a game I enjoy, so I’ll kind of already know it’s a reference to something. Since it’s amusing or interesting enough in context, though, I won’t hunt down the source, and eventually forget about it. Then my travels will bring me across the original thing the reference came from and my crazy head will be all “Ooooh, now I get it.”
So was it with Twoflower the tourist from the first Discworld book. My mistake for not exposing myself to Discworld until a couple years after playing Nethack. Nethack is a fantasy-style computer game with warriors and wizards and elves and such. You pick one of these fantastic characters to play and battle hundreds of monsters. One of the classes you can pick is the Tourist, who starts the game with an enormous amount of money, a camera and a Hawaiian shirt. Such a hilariously out-of-place character in the depths of a dungeon always tickled me, but of course I was being tickled in a different way than the people who had already read Discworld and knew about Twoflower, the hilariously out-of-place tourist visiting the depths of every dungeon on the Discworld.
Well, now I’ve read The Color of Magic and I get the reference. Retroactively.
Discworld has always existed in my peripheral vision. I played through the old PlayStation games years ago, have always enjoyed the characters of Rincewind and Death, and understood the dream-world logic behind concepts from the role-playing game such as “plans with a one-in-a-million shot at success succeed nine out of ten times”. I even once admired an exceedingly yummy-looking Discworld cake. Picking up and reading the books is something that’s occured to me from time to time, though it’s not until just now that I’ve actually done anything about it. I wasn’t at all surprised to find that The Color of Magic was every inch as entertaining as I figured it would be.
The Light Fantastic is sitting here on my desk, ready to go, and I figure the rest of the series will follow suit. I figure there’s about a one-in-a-million chance I’ll have read them all before the next A Song of Ice and Fire book comes out.
I forget if I ranted on here about why this Beatles Rock Band game is going to suck. I won’t go into that. I will say, though, that the stuff that’s coming out about LEGO Rock Band more than makes up for it. Initial reports of it being a “family friendly” music game led me to believe its playlist was going to be something out of Kidz Bop, but that seems to not be the case. This song list looks very solid and contains the Ghostbusters theme. What kind of stone-hearted monster wouldn’t want to plastic-guitar out to some Ghostbusters? A damned mongrel, that’s what kind.
Best of all, it’s all going to be exportable. That wild swooshing sound you’re going to hear on November 30th is a million gamers buying a copy, using the export code, and then immediately selling the disc back to Gamestop. Except me. I’ll be keeping mine for two reasons: first, I’m an achievement whore. And second, I’m holding out hope that the export feature works both ways, and that my playlist will function inside LEGO Rock Band as well. I could totally get behind the idea of little LEGO guys being my default band.
A quick calculation reveals I’ve spent almost $250 on Rock Band DLC in the past year. Every dime of it was well-spent. I can’t think of another game I’ve played this consistently; Rock Band gets picked up at least once a week in my house. Not even World of Warcraft had that kind of track record.
My work schedule makes putting vlogs together during the week impossible for the time being, so I’ll be moving Vlog Day to the weekend. That way I don’t have to kill myself shooting video in the middle of the night and risk anything coming out slapdash or haphazard. (Or, rather, more slapdash/haphazard than usual.)
(Also we should all use the word “slapdash” more often. Fo sho’.)
So! We hate Gary. Let me tell you about Gary.
Gary works as a server at T.G.I. Friday’s at Tampa International Airport. We happened to be at TIA last Friday, just a hair after 11am. Our flight was set to begin boarding at 11:35, so we figured we had time to pop into Friday’s for some appetizers so we wouldn’t starve to death on the flight. Gary agreed with our hostess’s sentiment that as long as we didn’t order something that took forever to cook we should have plenty of time.
I ordered the mozzarella sticks.
Within ten minutes we were eating our food, and at 11:30 or thereabouts my handsome brother handed Gary his credit card to pay the bill. We knew we were cutting it close, but lines were light and our gate was a quick monorail jaunt away.
Twenty minutes later we realized Gary had never come back with the card.
We began to panic. He hadn’t so much as entered eyeshot. We got up from our seats and went looking for him, eventually finding him in the kitchen preparing to take some food out to another table. “Oh yeah, there was a problem with your card. I need to get the manager to fix it.”
The process of getting the manager to fix whatever the problem was took an additional four or five minutes, leaving us with pretty much zero time to make our flight. By the time we made it through security the plane had already left. Our only options if we wanted to travel were to sit around the airport until 7:15pm for the next flight, or buy tickets on a different airline to the tune of $465 per.
My mozzarella sticks were pretty good. I’m not sure they were $465 good.
Now, maybe it’s true we shouldn’t have tried to cram lunch into an already tight schedule. I’m willing to accept responsibility for my part in the farce, which was putting my travel plans in someone else’s hands and not expecting delays.
Still, I can’t help but feel like the whole situation was Gary’s fault. What kind of server makes an error at the register and then doesn’t try to clear it up immediately? Or, at least, inform the guests of the problem right away so they aren’t sitting in your restaurant forever wondering what happened? Doesn’t this go double for guests who inform their servers they’re on tight schedules? Doesn’t it go quadruple for servers working in restaurants at airports?
Ah well. If server incompetence costing us $1000 is the worst thing to happen to us this year, I’ll declare 2009 to be not as bad as everyone is saying. I’m curious to see whether I’ll get a response from T.G.I. Friday’s guest relations, though. Maybe a gift card or something, or a coupon for some of their delicious microwavables available in your grocer’s freezer section.
Hey ya’ll, I’m back from my sojourn to Ashtabula, Ohio. Which might be partially responsible for my use of the word “ya’ll”. We flew up to surprise my dad on his 50th birthday, and he was surprised indeed. We did some partying, played some board games, had good times. We’ll do it again when he turns 100.
However, it’s now 1:15 am, I just got home from the most uncomfortable flight in my life, I’ve got two slugs of NyQuil in me and I’m about ready to go experience the righteous fury of my bed. Here’s a quick anecdote for you, though: laying around this morning wondering what we should do to kill a few hours before we had to be at the airport, my stepmother suggested we get on the computer and search “Ashtabula + tourism”. We laughed it off, pretty sure that Google would respond to “Ashtabula + tourism” with a confused “eh?”
Turns out, though, that we would have found covered bridges. Ashtabula county happens to be the “Covered Bridge Capital of Ohio”. In fact, they’re Covered Bridge Festival is so off the hook it takes up two days. So there you go, Internet; now you know where to go if you like your bridges covered.
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