It's just me I guess

[johnridley]

(warning, this is a pointless rant and nobody will enjoy it)

I don't feel particularly(*) grouchy today but this is getting on my nerves.

We get some money every year for team food, and since our team is basically a collection of hermits, we never go out anywhere and never use the money until the last minute, and always wind up trying to blow it all on carry-out food in the last couple of months of the year.

So we get emailed a menu from some food joint or other. They've got burritos. Great. They give them some fancy hipster name but whatever. Gimme that. "Well, what do you want in it?" "food. the menu doesn't really go into specifics." I take another look and see that it's choice of meat. "OK, chicken." "What kind of beans?" Hell, I don't care. The menu doesn't say I have to pick that. Flip a coin. Black. I won't know the difference anyway, if you put one of each in front of me I'd guess that the darker one was a "black" bean but that's about my limit.

Why food has to be so damned complicated is beyond me. I guess it must be a game with some people, or something. People spend a lot of time thinking about it and go way out of their way to go to places that ask you about every little thing you want on your plate. I just want to have something I can digest so I can get on with what I was doing before. I was having fun before they demanded to know what kind of god-rotted friggin beans I wanted in my packet of calories. People can choose to be interested in almost anything, but everyone's expected to be highly interested in exactly what's in their food.

I swear I'm going to just skip the whole thing and go to Taco Bell for the rest of the year. At least there I can get the choices down to "hard or soft" - not that I care there either, but that's about as simple as it gets.

I think whenever I get a menu from a place that has cute names for their damned food, it's time to bail and look for someplace with a drive-through window.

Maybe I am grouchy today, despite thinking that I wasn't. Where's my Futurama-branded bachelor chow?

(*) beyond my usual level, that is.

Comments

[tceisele.livejournal.com]

The thing is, they ask for all those details that don't actually matter, but the one thing they *never* ask is actually a pretty key point - "How much do you want". And I don't mean "Small or Large?" I mean something quantitative, like "1 cup" or "250 grams"

Whenever I get food someplace I've never been before, I don't know if that sandwich they offer is going to be some little tea-sandwich thing, or some monstrous hunk of bread and meat half the size of my head. I don't care whether it has mayonnaise or not, I care whether it is going to be half as much as I want to eat, or three times as much.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

That's a good point.

A friend here at work was listening to me rant on this topic and said that she used to go to a deli where they had a sandwich called the "Spiro Agnew" - you never knew what you were going to get.

I would actually enjoy that. I'll come in and sit down and put a $20 on the table, you surprise me.

[mbcrui.livejournal.com]

And the beauty of small, family owned restaurants is that you can go in and say "What's good today" and they tell you. Or, if you want your potatoes on the side, onions on them, and one egg you can change the 'standard'. My 'dining out' experience lately has been the little restaurant around the corner. I was there with Todd and ML not long ago. The waitress said to ML "Your usual?" yup. They arent here that often... but the waitress remembers them and what ML has... You need to cultivate a "usual", John, so you dont have to deal with choices that dont interest you.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Well, I eat out maybe 20 times a year total, mostly fast food joints to-go. I sit down to eat somewhere non-fast-food perhaps 3 times a year, and that's because if I go with Jenn to see Kate in college, we'll take her out to eat after whatever event we're there for.

The only restaurant that I've been in more than twice within 5 years is the one that we take Kate to at college most times.

It'd probably be a little counter-productive to start eating out a lot in order to find a solution to the fact that I don't really care what I'm eating.

I do quite like to go out and have a meal with people and on those occasions I do enjoy picking what I eat, but that only happens for me maybe 3x a year at most these days. If I'm by myself or just getting food for lunch so I can get back to work, I don't care what I'm eating.

[mrs-sweetpeach.livejournal.com]

I don't know why, but many folks on my flist are grumpy today and I'm one of them. In my case, I'm disappointed with the new version of ubuntu and Unity in particular. Last night jebra told me that Linus Torvalds has given up on ubuntu and now I'm wondering what OS he's using. Because Unity really is that bad -- I wouldn't care if I could easily switch between my apps but I'm finding it tough to go where I want and it's taking much longer to switch than it did when I used the old interface. Come to think of it, I think I'm so grumpy I'm going to post this to my own blog.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

People take operating systems too seriously. I really don't care what OS I'm running, as long as it's relatively transparent and runs the software I want to run. Beyond that I just pick whatever's cheapest, as long as the performance is decent.

[traveller42.livejournal.com]

I don't mind the variety, but I would like them to have a default. There are times when I want to tell them to just give me the "standard" version.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I think that's pretty much where I am too. I don't mind when food becomes an event, but most of the time I just want food.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Lobby for making the team food event pizza, and make sure there's a pepperoni pizza (or whatever your fave is) and the problem is solved.

K.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

That solves the problem for 2 of the 14 upcoming food events between now and Dec 31. Having 14 pizza events in 3 months would get voted down.

I am tempted to solve the problem by simply opting out, but I suspect that I will not be quite this grumpy most of the time.

Me and grumpy are apparently like idiots and idiocy. Idiots can't tell they're stupid, and I can't tell I'm grumpy. I don't feel grumpy, I'm walking around with a smile and a spring in my step, but snarky stuff sure comes out when my pie hole opens up.

Maybe it's just the weather.

[renniekins.livejournal.com]

I generally say "whatever's best", or "give me your favorite." Let them make the decisions!