thoughts, words, deeds

the bad luck Chinese restaurant

Fun Fact Friday! On this day in 1984, the first McDonald's franchise was closed; a new location was opened across the street from the old one in Des Plaines, Illinois. Have you ever worked in fast food (or the restaurant industry in general)? Tell us about your experience! Good, bad, ugly, and/or fun! And if you haven't, I'm sure you've got an entertaining restaurant experience from the customer's perspective you'd be more than willing to share.

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I have never worked in the food service industry. Well, let me take that back. One day in the summer after my first year in college, I spent bussing tables at a Mexican restaurant. I was tired afterwards and was glad when another opening happened, this one to be part time nanny (five hours a day, five days a week) for my mother’s boss’s three-month old. This job paid more, and although it involved cleaning up after the baby, it also involved a lot of down time when the baby was asleep and I could curl up on the couch and read my book. She was a cute baby. So, I got a check from the one day’s work at the restaurant and played with a baby all summer.

I really don’t have many restaurant stories—the one that immediately springs to mind is more a car story than a restaurant story . . . but here you go.

I live in a city with storm sewers that can’t always handle the volume of water that is common in the city. This means, when a particularly nasty thunderstorm runs through, there is the potential for flooding in the streets. This happened one Sunday when the heavens opened. We had a car (little gold four door) parked out in the front of the house. Across the street, a new hotel had been put in, with a storm drain between us and them (on the other side of the street), but apparently, it wasn’t totally working.

So, when we got home from church, the street was basically three feet deep in water stretching from the hotel, across the ditch with the storm sewer to half way up our lawn. The car itself was at one of the lower points in this system, and had so much water that the cup holders were filled.

The water drained within two hours or so. Dad got a shop vac and cleaned up the car. It started. We thought everything was fine. So, the next Tuesday, Mom and I use the car to go to a little Chinese buffet not far from campus (we were both working on campus at the time—Mom at the library, me in IT, Dad was a professor—and so we spent our lunch hours together when we could). The food was good, the atmosphere was good.

When we got out of the restaurant, the car wouldn’t start.

We spent two hours at that restaurant smelling the food and waiting for the tow truck and then a ride to get back to work. The people were nice, but I have to admit, spending that time there made both Mom and I a little leery of going back. Bad vibes.

Turns out, flooding is an automatic total. The wires got wet, something shorted, and that would involve rebuilding the whole car, so we bought a new car (again, little and gold—my parents are kind of stuck in a rut).

Fast forward a couple of months. We haven’t been back to the Chinese because Mom has bad vibes, so she’s on jury duty, and Dad wants to prove to her there isn’t anything bad luck-y about the restaurant, so he and I go to the Chinese buffet. Again, good food, good experience.

We go out—a Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving. The car starts fine. We’re driving back to campus, minding our own business, when an SUV pulls out of a parking lot in front of us, loses control, and hits us (the other driver’s fault, she’d borrowed her son’s car and didn’t realize how it handled). Airbags deploy, my face looks like someone used me as a punching back, I break my glasses, Dad misses his class (and the students probably rejoice because he was going to give a quiz), and I miss the rest of the work day. The SUV drives away. We’re totaled (airbags mean automatic total). The car isn’t six weeks old.

We never go back to that particular Chinese buffet again. We can’t afford another totaled car.