Complaint After Complaint

Unless it is a momentus occasion (ie. Your friend and you find out her last name is also a street name and you need to take a picture of her jumping up and pointing at the sign), there is no reason why you should be using your phone as a camera.
Andrea and I were at the zoo last week feeding the giraffes and we saw some woman taking pictures of them with her phone. It’s not like, “Holy shit. I’m in a location where giraffes normally are not seen. I should take a picutre of this because no one will believe me. But I did not bring my camera with me today because I did not forsee anything crazy awesome happening. I’ll just use my camera phone because I have no other options!” I packed my camera. I knew that I wanted to take pictures of animals, and I knew I was going to see them at the zoo. Duh.
I was buying a new cell phone, and the Verizon guy said the only downside to the phone was the picture quality is not as great as the other phones. I responded with, “If I need to take pictures, I’ll use a digital camera.”
It’s not like you can’t afford both. Teenagers can afford both. People also have birthdays. Ask some friends or relatives to pool together for one. A nice 7 megapixel one is around $150. Furthermore, you don’t need to upgrade your phone or camera every year so it’s not an unnecessary waste of money to have both.
Cameras are also smaller than wallets. It’s not like they are awkward to carry and a huge hastle to tote around. You bring newborns to the zoo—but that’s a complaint for another entry.
At the very least, buy a disposable camera. They are cheap, small, and when you get the pictures developed you can tell what you were trying to take a picture of. Unlike your camera phone. “I think that blur in the background is my friend’s new puppy.”

It’s July and it’s 90 something degrees out. Time to break out the jeans skirt and tank top. Totally appropriate for the weather. Totally inappropriate? Wearing leg warmers with your skirt. They do just what the name says. Why not just wear jeans if you don’t want people to see your calves? You’ll look way less ridiculous and way less like you can’t decide if you’re going to an 80’s dance class or the mall.
It’s not an oxymoron. You’re just a moron.
Even worse, wearing leg warmers and flip flops. In fact, let’s just say no leg warmers.

After another long weekend in the restaurant business, I naturally find myself with more to say. I’m gonna cut the bullshit right out of here and get straight to the goods:

When a server is taking your order, don’t keep your head down and speak into your menu. THE SERVER CAN’T HEAR YOU. I am not asking you to stand and shout, but speak at a reasonable volume and preferably don’t have something in or in front of your mouth that will muffle your speech. If you can’t order at a volume and clarity the server will hear, don’t act like you’re annoyed when you’re asked to repeat yourself. Wouldn’t you rather the server heard what you said and you got the right food? Help me help you. Jesus.

Ladies, why are your purses on the floor BEHIND your chair? Do your belongings mean nothing to you? Did you walk into the restaurant and immediately think “perhaps if I set my purse down in this walkway some waitress with sauce-covered shoes will step on it and destroy the bag and its contents! wouldn’t that be fun!?” If you don’t have an extra chair at the table to set it on, between seats or in front of you at your feet are probably more appropriate places than where people are walking.

Another question, why is your blackberry on the table? Even better, why is your $500 iphone on the table? Now chances are, the server won’t spill on the table – but you will. Furthermore, if you’re dumb enough to leave an expensive electronic device on a restaurant table, you’re probably dumb enough to cause the server to drop something, or to grab something off a tray causing the entire thing to pitch sideways…speaking of which…
I know you think the tray with allll the draft beers on it is heavy and you are trying to help, but there is a very careful balance going on when someone is carrying a flat tray with open glasses of heavy liquid. When the server removes a glass, he or she will adjust his or her hand beneath the tray to keep it steady, when you grab a glass off the tray – it falls. Let us remove the drinks from the tray, we’ll appreciate your help as you help us pass them out. Really.

The majority of American restaurants don’t have clamato juice to make bloody caesars. For all you confused Canadians, there is no plum sauce either.

Sentences that begin with the word “gimme” are not made polite by the addition of the word “please” at the end. I am not saying that servers need to hear “may I please have…” in order to not think you’re rude, but if you’re asked what you want, simple replying with the name of the item and the word please is sufficient. Here is a conversation I had recently:
“Can I get you anything else?”
“Gimme a water and get me a plate of sliced limes to go with it…please”

You may feel the urge to tell me that I am being a little ridiculous about what I expect of restaurant guests, but here’s the problem with that. I never broke any of these rules even before I had experience in the industry. For most people in any normal situation, common sense kicks in and people find it effortless to behave completely appropriately. For every bad customer, there are five good ones, but the bad ones can trigger a chain of event that lower the quality of everyone’s experience. I’m just saying, your servER is not your servANT. Learn how to be. It’s not that hard.

I know there’s already a “smoking etiquette” entry but i don’t give a fuck because I do what I want. I’m a surly motherfucker. Anyway… on the real, I don’t give a shit where you smoke…at all. You can smoke you ciggs outside the door or in the nursery ward of the hospital. Whatever. What I don’t get is why do you have to throw your butts on the ground. I know its crazy, but there actually are people who have to sweep those little fuckers up. Do you understand how gross it is to have to pick them out of your flower bed or from the cracks of the sidewalk? Imagine if I went around nervously chain devouring pizza and throwing the crust in front of your business or home. That would blow… having to pick up nasty crust. You don’t know where my mouth has been. And don’t give me the “cigarettes are biodegradable” line. They aren’t and are more importantly annoying to look at. Cut the shit.

Let me just enlighten you here, THE ACTORS CAN’T HEAR YOU. I am sure that they are totally thrilled that you enjoyed the movie. The director appreciates that you bought a ticket and got your money’s worth. The other people in the theater (my friends and I) don’t need to be deafened by a round of applause at the end of the pre-recorded, edited, and screened film. As a matter of fact, the only thing we moviegoers need less than a round of applause at the end of the film is one right in the middle of the film. I know you’re pumped about Transformers and Optimus Prime’s first appearance was a big deal for you. Sit, enjoy it, smile. Don’t clap. I paid ten dollars to see whichever movie I am seeing and when you clap through dialogue you’re wasting my money and yours. I don’t want to sound like a total killjoy, but there is a time and a place for applause, and it’s not at any point during any movie.
Consider this post a warning to those of you attending screenings of Harry Potter this coming week. Your need to applaud people who are not in the building is ridiculous, and so is your need to wear a cape – but we’ll get to that another time.

I’m sorry, but have you had some sort of accident? Cancer patients aside, this is unacceptable. Did you really wax or shave your real eyebrows completely off of your face and then draw them back on in an unnatural location/shape/color/etc.? I can’t understand the motivation behind such an act.
In high school I knew a girl who did this and realized it was a bad idea after someone referred to her eyebrows as “the golden arches,” since she drew them in near-perfect half circles. Now, that was high school, and still most of us knew better. Just days ago I encountered a grown woman who was sporting some oddly shaped and clearly fake eyebrows. I had to have a polite conversation with her, all the while choking back laughter.
How am I supposed to take you seriously when you have clown makeup on your face? How? If you were a clown, a very successful drag queen, or perhaps some sort of very extravagant non-clown performer in cirque do soleil or something this look could be excusable, but chances are you’ve got no excuse. You probably looked in the mirror and thought you looked fantastic. Luckily for everyone, I am here to tell you that you that eyeliner is for your eyelids, brow liners are to fill in your existing eyebrows if they are very thin, and there is not a product really designed for redrawing the eyebrows you’ve removed because YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE DONE THAT.
For anyone who is currently trying to rock this look, I just want to say that every single smiling face you see every day of your life is smiling for the sole reason that it’s the closest they can get to pretending they aren’t trying their hardest not to have a laughing fit at your expense. Just shade them in in the right place, they’ll grow back in a few weeks.

Oh ha ha, I know. Another fast food complaint from Mike. But here’s the thing, I don’t often eat fast food but is it too much to ask for that they get my order right? I’m not one of those people that asks for more of this, less of that, extra this, with a side of this but ordering something straight off the menu as is should be the easiest possible thing to get correct. But no. Out of the last half dozen times I’ve gone to Burger King, that they have gotten my order wrong four times . No pie twice , no tomatoes once, and the worst of all was forgetting my French fries and if anybody knows me they know not to mess with my French fries. So what we do ? I know that the obvious answer would be to get a more competent customer service staff but what happens to the people that are the work at your local fast food restaurant? Do we ship them off to somewhere with even less of a learning curve ? I have worked in food service for many years and I understand what it is to get an order wrong but if I go and get my order wrong consistently, I know for fact that there are hundreds of orders that are going out incorrect and guess what, I’m not made of money. So when I go and I place an order , I expect it to be right and I don’t think that that’s a far fetched demand since that is what your job entails . I’ve tried to give you the benefit of the doubt multiple times but you keep screwing me . I had Wendy’s on a three year boycott because not only did they always get my order wrong but I got ridiculously sick and decided that I was no longer going to frequent their fine establishment. I have since lifted that boycott, but I believe I will lower it right down on Burger King . That is a very difficult thing for me to do since I love Whoppers and their French fries are also pretty good .

So here we are in the 21st century and you drive up to a fast food restaurant and you place your order and get it pleasantly display it to you on a monitor so that you can see what you’re going to get. No onions, extra tomatoes, large Sprite , small fry , and a cheeseburger . You pay the woman with exceptionally large fingernails and she hands you a bag or two of your meal. There is no need to check the bags since not only did they read your order back to you but it was printed on that screen and you have paid for the food that was printed on that screen and read back to you. So when I get home to discover that there is spaghetti mixed with a sprite and a hamburger with bacon and orange slices on it, I get tremendously irritated that I just blew money on a meal that sucks .

In closing, pay more attention . I know that you work at McDonald’s or Burger King or Sonics or White Castle , but you’re on the fast track to getting your ass canned because you can’t put out a correct order . And don’t ever forget my French fries again or I may kill you .

I can not believe that this is still happening. It never looked good. It was never acceptible and never once did I think to myself, “You know Mike, I think that I am going to let this collar stay up.” I mean come on, you know that it happened one day when some lazy a-hole decided to just leave them up. They come up all the time. Use more starch to keep them down. Remember wearing a collared shirt and having a friend or co-worker say, “Oh hey, buddy. You’re collar is up.” and you would say, “Thanks” and then put it down? That’s the way that it should still be. Not something disastrous like in this following made up scenario.

“Hey man, you’re collar’s up.” to which you respond with, “Oh I know. And I like it.”

You’re f’n fired, brother. Now you’ve got your girlfriend poppin’ that collar? I don’t know what’s worse. Probably still the guy because female fashion changes so frequently that next week no self-respecting woman will have one because it will be such a faux pas that you will be excommunicated from the female race if you do. It’s that harsh. What a harsh world we live in.

God bless T-Shirts and Jeans. I am always, at most, moderately in style.

It upsets me that I have wasted far too much time trying to figure out the worst form of communication in regards to bumper stickers. There have been too many times when I have been at a red light trying to figure out what “gjh” means. It can be amusing making up your own but most of the time it’s just irritating. Showing the drivers behind you who your favorite Republican/Democratic candidate may be is one thing, but throwing any random abbreviation into an oval is completely meaningless.

Also, who decided on an oval? It’s hard to believe some asshole is actually making money off of placing Arial Black abbreviations inside of an oval, and adding a border.

Overall if you are trying to communicate that you enjoy a certain national park or something, this is not the way to do it.

This upsets me every time I go and I have now beat it by ignoring it. Here’s the situation. You want a quick meal and you don’t have time to go inside so you have to go through the drive though. You get to the speaker and a lovely voice says, “Welcome to Burger King, how may I help you?”. You instinctively tell them what you want…only to find that it’s not a real person. It’s a recording to keep you busy until the person that is alive and employed comes to the speaker. So by then, I have already placed half an order and then I have to repeat myself…I hate repeating myself. So no, I have outsmarted them by not answering the initial message. It’s a simple solution to a problem that never should have existed. Goddammit I hate that voice. Why is it even there? Who thought that it was necessary? Who said, “You know what, let’s have a voice that talks to people that doesn’t listen and then, 10 seconds later, have a real person ask you the same question after you’ve placed an order. That’s a good idea. I am a genius. I am going to go get one of my perk blowjobs that my high paid position offers me as a benefit. God I hate my wife.”

PS: I love your Whoppers.