SANTROPOL - Worst experience EVER.

I'd like to relate an experience I had today.

I went to Café Santropol, today.

I've never had such a lousy experience anywhere.

The waiter interrupted us while Liz was ordering, so she only got so far as "I'd like the fruit cup" before he told us there was no fruit cup. So she ordered just the yoghurt with a bit of honey.

Then, about ten minutes later, he brings in yoghurt and fruit cup mixed together with the honey. It's the way they serve it and it's not the way she likes it, but since he didn't let her finish, the information wasn't communicated.

So technically, he probably thought he was doing a nice thing, because he thought there was no fruit (we were told they don't stock any fruit salad in the winter). We explained to him that we didn't get the chance to explain why we didn't want the fruit cup that way and we didn't want it.

So he gave us a sour look, told us it was too late and it was already paid for and that we would be charged for it anyway. We asked him to give it to someone else rather than waste it.

Ok, not a deal-breaker, but our good mood was certainly soured.

Then he brought us her cutlery minus the knives, explaining that there weren't any knives available. This was a bit of a sore point because Liz had ordered the basket of breads and spreads, which is a bit reliant on having something with which to spread the, um, spreads.

So we used the backs of her spoon and fork in the meantime. We're nothing if not adaptable.

Still, there was no butter for the breads, nor glasses of water. I looked around and every last one of the other tables in our area had pitchers of ice water and glasses for each guest.

None were offered in our case and we weren't asked if we wanted to drink anything with our meals.

The tomato and barley soup turned out to have no tomatoes in it.

All of these being relatively minor items, the list of collateral damage was definitely in a growth phase.

Forty minutes in, I still had not received my vegetarian chili with cheese.

I think this is what ruined the meal for me, because that's what I'd ordered. Everything else we ordered, mistakes and all, had been delivered.

But not the chili.

And the waiter just wasn't coming back to our table, not to ask if we needed anything or whether the meal was basically to our satisfaction or whatnot.

Just to reassure you all, we had been nice and polite throughout the entire experience, because we have plenty of friends who are in the service industry and we know that bad days happen.

But chili? C'mon. It's the single most elementary simple thing to serve up in a restaurant. There's a big cauldron of it out back somewhere, you get a ladle, pour some in a bowl, pull some grated cheese out of a bag and throw some nachos chips along the side.

30 seconds and you're done. It's the no-brainer of foods to serve: easy money.

So yes, 40 minutes in and I finally get his attention and we ask if it's possible that the chili might be coming soon. He gives us a semi-surprised look and goes off to check on it.

That's the last we see of him for about another 20 minutes.

The next time he's in our area, all I do it catch his eye and smile tiredly in his direction like "yep, sorry man, chili hasn't teleported in yet" and he does one of those well-telegraphed facial "crap, forgot AGAIN" expressions.

A few minutes later, he gets back to the table to let us know that he rush-ordered the chili and that it would be there soon, and about ten minutes after that it arrives.

Except he didn't bring me any spoon to eat the chili, so I decided to opt for the better part of valour, wiped off Liz's soup spoon and, starving as I was, finally had my lunch.

I finally asked if we could get some water and glasses, and those were brought to us as well.

Also to note: other people had arrived by then and they had received full sets of cutlery, glasses, and water from other waiters.


So let's sum up:

- Slow service
- No follow-up
- Poor bedside manner
- Miscommunication
- Poor knowledge of their own stock
- No apologies or compassion
- Charging us anyway for something we didn't want
- Sour looks
- Lack of two different kinds of basically essential-to-the-meal cutlery
- Forgetting to place an order. TWICE.
- No water or glasses for the table
- No drink requests were solicited or taken

And somehow we stayed pleasant through this entire experience because we have a historical fondness for Santropol.

I don't think I'll be going there again anytime soon anymore.

Over and out.

Back to Basics: Simply your life

Tonight was a nice change of pace, going out with a few friends and deciding to enjoy some glasses of scotch, brandy, and such at a nicer place than the usual dive bar pub fare to which I've grown accustomed. Granted, the price point was about three times the usual fare, but the buzz is essentially the same. On the down side yes, my wallet is lighter, but on the positive side of my mental chalkboard my bladder is also considerably lighter.

Now I understand why my European friends consider Canadians to be gluttonous drunks. After visiting a friend in Switzerland a few years back and drinking five pints in a pub I was greeted with your basic reactions of horror. I would have thought it was due to the amount I drank, but it was over quite a lengthy period of time, and she and her friends had been pounding down shots of grappa with dizzying speed. No, as it turns out, drinking a pint of beer is what was disgusting to her. Five pints even more so.

I have to interject that she and her friends were all waify euro-goths who weighed about five pints between the lot of them, and that they had about ten ounces of 160-proof nut-flavoured aquavit each before driving home. That's where my reaction of horror kicked in. Gotta love cultural relativism.

Yeah. Anyway, all this to say that I feel considerably lighter than I usually do coming home from a pub, which is a nice change. :)

I heartily recommend a change of pace for you too. And wouldn't you feel nicer too if I could bring a levity to your unbearableness of being?

Well I can, and I mentioned it a post back when I said I never wanted to buy another DVD again. Scratch that. A blank one. And don't scratch that. The DVD I mean. They look a lot sturdier than they are. You breathe on the damn things and they warp and you lose a file (just the one if you're lucky). Got forbid you handle them wrong, get a fingerprint on them, or let them anywhere near a toddler (ooo shiny!).

Yes. A 5 1/4" diskette floppy from 1985 had more staying power, AND you could use a hole punch to make them double-sided. Does anyone else remember using that trick? These days we just alter the frequency of the laser, tack on about a thousand dollars worth of "development" costs and call it a blue ray instead of a red ray.

BEST. SCAM. EVER.

So do you feel like you life is being taken over by these things? Do you have too many of them heaping around the house in random piles, in jackets, sleeves, folders, books, cases, or just being used as coasters?

Do me a favor. Go buy a half-terabyte hard drive ($125) and a twenty-five dollar enclosure. Spend your money on something small and solid instead of spending it on the sixty-odd 8-gig disks for the 480 gig and countless hours of searching for lost discs that lie in your future. The $150 you spend will net you a paperback-sized paperweight to stick on top of your tv or desk, and you can put it in a bag and carry it with you for crying out loud.

When was the last time your hard drive had a sector error? Do you want to move all those disks onto a hard drive termporarily and then recopy them all to blue ray or HD disks or whatever flavour of the year we'll have for media in a year or two? Do you reall want to spend your time polishing them and using CD cleaner kits every time you sratch one and can't play a file? Or do you like opening up shoeboxes full of old disks and reminiscing about them like boomers and eight-tracks?

Is it really worth it to you to save a few bucks now for all the inconvenience it will cost you down the line? Do you want your kids to laugh at you in ten years because you have a ridiculously small hard drive with hundreds of low-res movies or would you prefer they ridicule you because you have hundreds of pieces of shiny outdated media, each with one lousy low-res movie on it...maybe...if you could just polish the thing the right way and find an old copy of VLC to play it...

And do you REALLY need to carry around 8 gigs of temporary files with you sometimes to give to a friend? Fine. If you do, buy an iPod or something and use it as an ancilliary hard drive, or just carry around a few flash sticks. Hell, they take up about as much room or less.

Enough soapboxing for now. That's all I wanted to say. Just my two cents worth for the environment.

Y'all excuse me now while I go and try to build a REALLY BIG Star Trek Phaser disk launcher.

Nostalgia - Oh how the ghost of you clings...

I have a half-terabyte hard drive. I use it to store handycam movies and other large files among other things. One of the things I have been doing in an attempt to simplify my life is offloading all my video files onto it; so far it's working marvelously. I have an entire binder full of CD's, DVDs, and double layer DVDs even, all flipped over shiny side up to show I've transferred them over, and whenI'm done with my storage project, I'm going to give them away or find some constructive use for them.

And then I'm gong to try really hard to Never. Buy. Another. Blank DVD. Again.

I'll get to my nostalgic point in a second. I thought it was the primary focus for today's piece, but I feel a rant coming on, so I'm slapping my inner elbow hard a few times to get that heroin junkie feeling going. Beware....

See, here's the thing. It's great that we can buy cheap DVDs now. Buy 'em up by the spindle, they're so cheap! A hundred at a time!

Now, granted: the more available a medium is, the longer it has been around, the easier it is to duplicate, the cheaper it gets. DVDs are dead cheap, and you can buy a hundred of them for $27.00. Canadian, even. That's, like, $25 American, but you can blame that on the Bush administration. Just you see. By the way, as a completely random aside, I've been reading comics again online (it's amazing what you can find if you look hard enough) and Firestorm, one of my favorites from the 80's, has been ressurected, jacked-up, pimped-out, urbanized, and made hip. On top of which, their progressive, Democratic party senator Lorraine Reilly is starting to look increasingly like Hilary Clinton, and she's spouting anti-establishment propaganda.

Hmm...Interesting way to get the attention of a liberal-leaning vote-weak section of the population, isn't it? DC Comics interjects anti-Bush administration speeches by way of plot devices in a parallel-universe and makes the highly sympathetic and charismatic recurring lady character look like a younger, actually attractive version of the lady who's declared herself a hopeful for the upcoming presidential race.

Pretty ballsy move on the part of our friends at DC Comics. I might have expected that from Stan (The Man!) Lee, but this was a reall bucket of cold water in the face.

Hey, funnier thing. I just did a random search on "Clinton" and "Lorraine Reilly", which is the name of the aforementioned anti-Bush senator, and found this. Scroll down to the bit that starts with "Firestorm Is Shriiiiiiiill " and you'll see the reference (fyi, it's in French). So I'm not just imagining things, someone else has seen it too. And that means that there's a buttload of other folks who haven't bothered blogging about it but have just tucked it away into their subconscious in the meantime.

Here's a quick picture I found of them both, one from the comic, and one from Hilary-ious real life.



The picture on the right is from a 2001 address to the graduating class at Yale university. DC even kept the earring in. Shameless, I love it.

I want to transcribe her words to the youth of America. I'm pretty impressed with the message, and I think it's fantastic that DC decided to express itself this way:

---

"When my father was young, they had a saying; "Never trust anyone over thirty. It sounds silly, but it was avery serious response to the times. Back then, a group of older men had a stranglehold on the federal government. They were deeply entrenched and very powerful. So my father, and his brave friends, moved heaven and earth -- and forced them out. And then, somewhere along the line, my father's people thought: "We've won. The old men are dead and gone."

Ladies and gentlemen, they were wrong. Today a new group of men controls all branches of the federal government. Men of power. And just as their predecessors did, some thirty years ago, they treat us like children.

They lie to us about weapons of mass destruction. They run crucial government agencies with shameless cronyism, then watch as our cities flood and die.

They preach morality while they steal our jobs and bankrupt out future -- all the while grabbing more money for themselves.

And when we speak up, when you, the people, raise their voices just slightly, asking them to explain some obvious lie -- what do they say?

'Trust us. Trust Daddy.'

Well...I don't trust them anymore. I trust you. I know that the politics of hope can triumph over the politics of fear. And I know with all my heart that we will win our country back...TOGETHER."

---

Damn, that's one fine speech. And now that I look at the Lorraine Reilly charater, she's more of a cross between Hilary Clinton and Princess Diana (yowza!). There's some fiiine manipulation going on in that bit of wordsmithing. There's tugging at heart-strings and patriotism (you, the people... oh YEAH baby...that's hitting them in the stars and stripes) and a poke at a few notable Bush administration cockups. Very nice. And a good clean finish, wish a subtle call to action telling the comic wielding youth of America (which, by the way, has a substantial representation in the voting-age apathetic absentee voter crowd).

I never thought that comic books could have a political agenda, but this blows me away. And I love it. I can hardly wait to see whether there's any impact, or whether there's other signs of this sort of thing out there. Please, please, please, feed my conspiracy theory! I'd love that!

But this whole spiel is a random aside, because I really wanted to tell you about the economics of never buying another DVD again.

Look, I think I've just upstaged myself, that'll have to wait.

I have to go and be a bastard somewhere. You wait here, I'll be back in a bit.