Fear of Square Plates

It has been a hugely busy day today. I was trying to cram in as much as possible before heading out with Mom in the morning for a short road trip. With some help from Brian F., I was able to get over halfway through a massive project that I have been working on all week long. The rest will just have to wait, although I don't think the general public will notice the missing parts of what we've been working on.

The Square Plate Incident

In a sort of mini-celebration of my mini-vacation, I took Walter out for dinner at O'Charley's this evening. Now here's when things got very interesting for the evening. We placed our order no problem and things were going along just fantastic until the waitress brought out our main course. Walter, being a smart alec asked her what was up with the square plates. She told him that they just like to get new ones from time to time. He asked if anyone ever had any problem with them.

She did get an odd look on her face, but said no. To which Walter said, "Do you want to?" She jumped at the chance. She told him that she would be happy to have them put his meal on a round plate.

When she got back from the kitchen, she was about to bust a side. She told us that she had gotten three different comments and they though had never heard of anything like that. She also told us that they had asked out table numbers, so we would probably be seeing other waitstaff and managers milling about to see who had 'raised the fuss'.

It wasn't too long before one of the managers came strolling by to check on how we were doing. We only said that things were fine and never mentioned that anything odd was happening.

Our waitress brought by our bill and we asked if they had a comment card to fill out, they didn't so in lieu of that we got her to bring us back a bit of extra paper when she brought our receipt. She said that she had had a great time serving us and that it had been quite fun.

Oh, that little slip of paper, I left a note for the manger basically telling how wonderfully that the server had handled our odd situation and that Walter had had this problem since an incident in his childhood. I finished it off, stating that she had handle the situation with the utmost care and compassion.

We left her a better than normal tip. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall to hear what was said after we left.

Oh one more thing...on the way out I tried to get Walter to carry the take out box, and he gave me this frightened "are you crazy look". I'm sure that this only was icing on the cake of the performance of the night.

We were talking about it later and can only image how long that this will be talked about. Then you never know, the next time you go into a O'Charley's if the menu has a note on it that says, "round plates available upon request" you'll know why.

Have a great evening!