As our year of newly-wedded bliss continues, we have been making it a point to celebrate our marriage as often as we can. We had good reason yesterday, being that it was our three-month anniversary!
One of our yearly traditions is to go to Red Lobster's "endless shrimp." This is literally something Brandon waits for all year long. And as soon as he saw the commercials this year, he was making plans to get there.
So we went Friday night, to celebrate our anniversary and give ourselves a break from all of the household chores and busy work schedules. We were going to take some time to just be together, celebrating us and all we have accomplished in the short three months since we have been married.
Oh, but Red Lobster gets busy on Friday nights during endless shrimp season...
We walked in and were told that the wait was about 15 minutes. Well, we didn't mind that. We grabbed a drink at the bar and began to enjoy ourselves. 30 minutes later we still had not been seated. I wondered if we shouldn't ask the hostess if somehow we had missed our call. Our buzzer had never gone off, but maybe it was broken? But not wanting to be those people, we opted to wait just a little while longer before getting up in the hostess's face.
But about 15 minutes after that and 45 minutes total, we couldn't keep quiet any longer. Brandon went to ask the hostess if something might have gone wrong because we had been waiting three times longer than we were told we'd have to. She looked at us like we were the biggest idiots on the planet, not because we were wrong (our turn had come up 30 minutes ago, but our buzzer had not been working) but because we had waited so long to ask. Brandon kindly told her that we simply hadn't wanted to seem rude, and she shot back some remark about how "when we tell you 15 minutes, we mean 15 minutes." Obviously.
So after waiting (as I said) three times longer for our table than we should have, the rude hostess who had apparently missed the inservice oulining the details of the concept that the customer is always right (especially when he really is), sat us in the bar. Now, at this point, I should have spoken up; but, while Brandon had been trying to politely and pleasantly deal with the idiots running the establishment, I had reached my boiling point. I wasn't in a frame of mind to argue, although I remember thinking that we could have sat in the bar an entire 45 minutes ago, without having to wait at all. Why did we wait 45 minutes to be put there?
But we had already sat down and I'd already shoved two of those delicious cheesy biscuits into my mouth before I could formulate these thoughts into coherent sentences. And they weren't the stuff of pleasant conversations you should have on your three-month anniversary.
Brandon saw how upset I was and asked if I wanted to leave. And I definitely did want to leave, but not before I ate my shrimp. I didn't wait 45 minutes to be abused by the hostess and sat in the bar; at least I was going to get my shrimp before I went home to write a nasty letter to the general manager.
But having made that decision required that we also make a decision to get over what had transpired in the past 45 minutes and try to enjoy the rest of our evening together. It was hard. I was mad, and I wanted the hostess (who had a great view of our bar table from the hostess stand) to know it. But I also didn't want to further ruin our three-month anniversary celebration. So I put on my big girl panties and put in my first order of shrimp.
It was delicious, the waitress was nice, Brandon was sweet, and the night was eventually redeemed. It wasn't what we had envisioned, but I knew there was a lesson in it somewhere.
I haven't quite gotten it down, but maybe it will sink in after I write that nasty letter.
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