GrumpysMonkey

This past weekend, we headed out to dinner with some friends. We were going to meet their friends. But the place we planned to meet was very crowded and doesn’t take reservations. It’s basically a ‘each group for themselves’ scenario and if you see a table open up, you grab it.

So while we were waiting for the other couple, I went outside to call another restaurant we knew to see how busy they were as a backup. They have an automated menu that went something like this.

For information on our hours, press 1.

For information on our location, press 2.

For information on our beers, press 3.

To speak to someone in the restaurant, press 17.

…

Just think about that for a minute.

17.

1… 7

That was one of the most creative ways I’ve found to basically say “you can’t speak to a live person”.

(Oh, and I did call back the next day to make sure that there wasn’t a 7 option off of the option to hear about their hours).

This afternoon, I set out for lunch with a friend. I don’t drive much on the east side and while I’ve been to the shopping center where we were to meet, I had never driven there myself. My new phone has GPS, so I decided to punch in the address and let the phone take me there.

All well and good, the phone gave me excellent directions. The backlight didn’t even shut off (which is a nice feature when you’re not actually interacting with the phone but need to keep viewing the screen). The humor came when I arrived at the shopping center. You see, I had about 40 pounds of change in the trunk of the car in a piggy bank and my bank has a branch with a coin machine at the same shopping center as the restaurant.

So I pull into the far end of the parking lot and I decide to drive around the lot to find the bank and park as closely as possible to it. The bank is at the opposite end of the lot from the restaurant.

I have to go up one row of parking and down another and finally pull into a space. I look at the phone and it says:

"Are you lost?"

"Would you like to recalculate directions from here?"

I’m in the damn parking lot! I’m all of 300 feet from the restaurant. Apparently the phone thinks I need help navigating a parking lot.