My Restaurant Nightmare

Tuesday night we went to see Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers in concert up at the Lakeview Amphitheater in Syracuse. On the way home the six of us decided we were going to stop and get something to eat. Being that it was after midnight and now it was technically the 4th of July, a lot of the places we wanted to go to were closed. So we stopped at a 24-hour restaurant in Cortland.

We walked in and were greeted by a sign that said please wait for the hostess to seat you. We stood there for a couple of minutes until a waitress came out and took us to our table. There were probably five other tables with customers seated at them in the restaurant at that point. The woman gave us our menus and walked away without taking our drink order. She came back about 10 minutes later to get our drink order and we placed our food order at the same time. One of my friends pointed a sign they had right inside the door that advertised their featured special. He said I want that special. His wife said she would take that as well. We sat there conversing for a while. After we sat there for about a half hour, we started hearing music blasting from the kitchen. It was 1 in the morning at that point so maybe the cook was just trying to stay awake. After we sat there for approximately an hour, my friend Kathleen got up and asked the waitress what was taking so long. She explained that they had received a phoned-in order for five meals to go and that our food would be up shortly. After another 15 minutes passed, we finally got our food. My friend Tommy, who asked for the special,  ended up getting something else. So he and his wife told our waitress that their orders were wrong. They corrected his order by bringing out pancakes, but Kathleen told them she didn't want hers at that point. There were other issues as well like we didn't have enough silverware for all of us so we had to grab some off a nearby table, and we had to keep waving down the waitress to refill our drinks.

After we finished eating we had to wait another 20 minutes or so, just to wave down the waitresses to get our check. Meanwhile, the music started blasting out of the kitchen again. This time it was hardcore rap. The lyrics didn't offend me, but I could see where they would offend some people. The lyrics included the line "got to get my blank sucked" over and over. While we were waiting to get our check, another table of two got up and started to walk out. The waitress asked them if they were leaving and they said, "yes, we can't wait any longer this is ridiculous". The waitress told them she was "bringing their order out right now" to which and they said, "too late" and walked out without paying for their coffees.

Once we got our bill, Tom and Kathleen realized they overcharged them for the special they ordered. They were both overcharged $5 each. The six of us ended up standing at the register for another 10 minutes or so while the waitresses tried to figure out what they were doing. The six of us kept saying to each other "this feels like a dream and we're going to wake up to realize all this never really happened". The six of us have spoken to each other since, and we either all have the same dream, or it was the worst restaurant service we had ever experienced. I used to manage restaurants before I got into radio so I'm usually more understanding when it comes to things like this. But, if I was the manager at this place, everybody working that night would have been fired.

If we could go back in time we would just hit a drive-thru. As it was, we didn't get back got back to our house in Endicott until 3:30.