Pardon Me While I Whine

New Orleans – Day Three/Austin – Day One (Monday)

Our plan for Monday morning was as follows:

8:00am. Wake up, shower, and check out of the hotel.

9:00am. Grab breakfast at the famed Old Coffee Pot.

10:00am. Leave for Austin, TX.

What really happened:

9:00am. Meredith and Stacey roll out of bed (Allison has already been up for over an hour. I don’t know why.)

10:00am. We cruise into the Old Coffee Pot. It’s barren, with heinous décor. Trusting that the line of eager patrons-to-be yesterday morning couldn’t be wrong, we sat and ordered. Actually, we sat, received glasses of water, and waited. For a Long Ass Time. Allison passed the time by spilling her full ice water all over Stacey’s (ridiculously expensive) camera. Only then did a server appear… to reprimand us for giving her additional work so early in the morning. We thought she was joking with us to build rapport. Later we would learn that this was not the case.

If you don’t know me well (or maybe even if you do), you might guess from the following statements that I’m a raging bitch. Let me take a moment to explain.

I’ve worked in food service for years. I’ve worked in dive bars and more upscale venues. I’ve served and bartended while I was hungover, nursing a cold, in the midst of a break-up, and with wine/ketchup/butternut squash soup splashed all over my front. I’ve been triple-sat, covered multiple sections because of under-staffing, and dealt with bullshit from the kitchen boys. But I have done my very best not to take these tragedies out on the customer. A polite, cheerful attitude is a server’s bread-and-butter. I don’t care if your cat just got eaten by an alligator, I expect good service. I’ve done it. It’s not that hard.

Back to my review of the Old Coffee Pot o’ Shit.

We waited nearly 20 minutes for our server to take our order, despite the fact that we were one of two tables in the entire restaurant… and there were three servers.

Receiving our food took forever, as did a coffee refill. (The waitress had the nerve to ask, “If I pour this, are you really gonna drink it? Or are you gonna waste it?”) When we finally finished eating our mediocre meals, we received the check and noticed that she had automatically added 18% gratuity, even though we didn’t split our check and we’re only a party of three. Busch league.

But I digress. The point of this story is that the service took so long, including the return of our credit card after we paid the bill, that we actually forgot that we hadn’t received it back. So we left.

11:30am. After the mile-ish walk to our car, Stacey realized that:

1.    She left her pillow at the hotel. And,

2.    Her credit card wasn’t in her purse.

We quickly deduced that the missing card was still at the Old Coffee Pot, so we drove through the maze of one-way streets to retrieve it. Our plot was foiled, however, by a backhoe parked in the middle of a one-lane, one-way street. We were trapped for 25 minutes or more, while I assume the driver of said backhoe tipped back a couple brewskies to celebrate the noon hour.

12:30pm. Credit card in hand, we finally got on the road to Austin… only to sit in traffic for EVER. The journey should have taken 8 hours. With severe traffic on and off all day, it ended up taking 10 hours.

Cool bridge. And one of the few times we were
moving at more than 35 mph.

After my bitch-fest, y'all deserve some bloopers.
Here's me trying to climb onto the construction wall thingee.

Success!

Fun fact: at some point, Stacey felt led to check her credit card activity – and that slut bucket at Old Coffee Pot had run her card for exactly $20 more than our already-auto-gratted total! Ol’ girl is damn lucky that we were already in Texas by that time.

Recounting this day is making me cranky. Suffice to say, everything was pretty shitty.

Our first Texan sunset