Dodge City: Hubby enters the tiltyard

So, night before last I received the nastygram below from the Dodge City owner:

Thanks for amending the service times recorded in your revised blog.

Dodge City staff mentioned that you were engaged in a loud verbal altercation with your husband outside the store before entering. Their impression was that you were being unreasonably abusive towards him. I would have thought that, as an objective and balanced critic of human performance, you would have added this snippet of information to your account of events - or is that you take pleasure in finding fault in everyone around you but are blind to you own deficiencies.

I would appreciate you amending the blog to add the objective opinion expressed above.

My response was:

Thanks for amending the service times recorded in your revised blog.
You are welcome.

Dodge City staff mentioned that you were engaged in a loud verbal altercation with your husband outside the store before entering. Dodge City staff is incorrect. My husband and I seldom quarrel and when we do, it is always in the utmost privacy. Their impression was that you were being unreasonably abusive towards him. There is such a thing as “reasonably abusive”? Has it occurred to you that the staff is trying to shift focus from their dismal performance by casting me as a querulous and abusive individual whose complaints therefore need not be taken seriously? Do you doubt the evidence of your own video footage?

I would have thought that, as an objective and balanced critic of human performance, you would have added this snippet of information to your account of events- Even if this slander was correct, exactly what bearing would it have on your staff’s appalling performance? The topic here is the performance of your staff, not my behaviour, particularly behaviour not directed to the staff. or is that you take pleasure in finding fault in everyone around you but are blind to you own deficiencies. Are you now saying that your staff’s performance was above reproach, that there was no fault in their service delivery? Or it is only people who are, themselves, above reproach who have the right to complain about substandard service? I asked you to provide me with examples of how your video footage differs substantively from my blog, since amendment is impossible if I don’t know what needs to be amended. Instead of providing the information I need in order to comply with your request, however, you respond with an ad hominem attack and gratuitous insults.

I would appreciate you amending the blog to add the objective opinion expressed above.
The opinion expressed above is far from objective and is, in fact, based in slander. I would appreciate your forwarding to me the names and contact information of the persons who have so egregiously misinformed you so that I may explore my options with regard to a defamation suit against whoever made these statements.

Hubby is out of town, but he does have email, so I forwarded the nasty email to him for comment. This morning I received the following message from my husband, a copy of the email he sent to the restaurant owner in response to the nastygram:

Dear Mr A________

I must profess to being quite astonished by your email…to my wife. A few things are clear from your message…:

1. Not only are your staff bad at delivering good service, but they are obviously hard of hearing and lacking in visual acuity to boot. I experienced no "verbal altercation" nor was my wife "unreasonably abusive" towards me. As an aside, I'd love to hear your definition of "reasonable abuse" - perhaps it’s what you subject your employees to to make them surly and unresponsive to customers? Or maybe it’s just the kak* service that you deliver to your customers? Or maybe it’s the sort of nonsensical email you have written below?

2. Your inference below is that one has to be an "objective and balanced" critic of human performance in order to have a valid complaint about service and that my wife's alleged "abuse" had some sort of bearing on your bad service. This is grade A bulldust. It’s quite obvious that you have no intention of taking note of the feedback, let alone acting on it. In other words, STOP avoiding the crux of the issue, which is that you need to improve your service!

3. I fail to see what my wife's deficiencies, whatever they may be, have to do with the basic facts of the issue which is that the service you delivered was sub-standard.

Thank you for confirming our decision not to patronize your establishment ever again. The memory of your bad service (including your missive below) is going to last far longer than the good taste of your hamburgers and milkshakes.


Kind Regards
N G________ ([Sweet Violet]’s un-abused Husband)

P.S: Please feel free to tear up your R50 "courtesy voucher". A free meal is too high a price to pay for your "reasonable abuse"

P.P.S: I will be recommending to my wife that she publish your response… and my reply thereto on her blog. I think it’s in the interest of diners to know what they can expect if they complain about service levels at Dodge City diners.

* “kak”: Afrikaans word for “shit” or “crap”

Whew! Like me, Hubby has a long, long fuse. He’s much more laid back than I am and it takes a lot to rile him up….but this did it.

I wonder if the restaurant owner gave any consideration to the subtext of his insulting little missive. Hubby and I each caught the “unreasonably abusive” comment: does the man really mean to imply that there is both reasonable and unreasonable abuse? Having already assassinated my character, what of his insinuations regarding Hubby’s? My sweet, reserved, good-tempered, well-mannered husband has been cast as a boorish lout who engages in loud public squabbles with his harridan of a wife rather than the man he is: one who would bite off his own tongue rather than publicly humiliate himself in such a manner. Paradoxically, he is concurrently portrayed as a pitiable character, a hapless wimp subject to public browbeating from the quarrelsome shrew to whom he is married.

The further subtext is that only those who are without personality defects of any kind are entitled to complain about poor or neglectful treatment: only those who are “objective and balanced critic[s] of human performance,” it seems, are entitled to take exception to less-than-perfect service. This, of course, is nonsense…as one of the comments on an earlier blog entry on this topic says: “Even if you and your husband had had a full on physical altercation outside their restaurant, what does that have to do with their service?”

The commenter, Kerryn, further observes: “It seems that demanding reasonable service, and getting annoyed when your waitron is inept is 'over reacting' and being 'unreasonable'.” It is interesting that she should bring this up…the next instalment of this saga (yes, there is more!) veers in that direction.

Insults and lies: Dodge City yet again

I spent a number of years as admin to the head of legal departments back in Silicon Valley. One of the things you learn in that kind of environment is to be careful what you put down in writing, especially if it can be perceived as unflattering (or worse) to another. It was with this knowledge that I undertook to write the management of Dodge City to express my dismay and displeasure at the abysmal service we received Sunday morning. (Copy of letter below, two entries down.)

My personal recollection is that we left the restaurant at about 10:20. I have this impression because my husband is diabetic, he was very late eating that morning, and as we left the restaurant, I was concerned about finding another one in the mall that was still serving breakfast, thinking we needed to find a place by 10:30 and feeling pressured as a result. The manager informed me, via email, that his videotape of the incident shows we arrived at 9:44 and left at 9:59, putting us in the restaurant for 15 minutes rather than the 30 that Hubby and I had estimated. With no reason to not take his word for it, I adjusted the time frame in my second blog entry on the topic (immediately below this one).

A subsequent email from the manager said “The 6 minutes it took to get the coffee to you was slower than standard time allowed. Problem was that the milk had not been foamed in advance. Re the Canderel - they did have the product in the store but could not find it. No excuses - staff should no known [sic] where it was kept… The Franchisee has been advised of your grievance and has assured me that remedial action will be taken to get product delivery times back to Franchise standard.” The email closed with a voucher for a return visit and an apology.

Silly me, I thought this was the end of it. We estimated a time incorrectly, we were corrected, I published a correction. So, imagine my surprise when I received the following email this morning:

“I would like to ask that you please consider the merits of amending your blogg [sic] regarding Dodge City.

The justification behind my request for amendment is as follows:
1) Video footage suggests that your blogg [sic] does not reasonably represent the facts or sequence of events surrounding your service experience.
2) It is reasonable to suggest that the blogg [sic], in its current form, would do unreasonable damage to the goodwill of the Dodge City brand and the investment of the Canal Walk franchisee.
I would really appreciate your understanding and co-operation in this regard.”

I replied:

“Yesterday I posted a follow up blog entry in which I corrected the time difference, acceding to your time of 15 minutes for our entire visit and 6 minutes for delivery of our drinks.

“In what way do “the facts or sequence of events” differ in your video as compared to my blog? Assuming that I am willing to make an amendment, I cannot do so without knowing the points of contention.

“It is not reasonable to suggest that my blog, in its current form, will do any kind of damage whatsoever to the Dodge City brand. The blog is not a restaurant review site nor does it have a high search-engine page rank. A negative review appearing on such sites as Food24 or What2night, both of which allow patron reviews, could potentially be very damaging as they target the South African diner and also appear on the first page of a Google search for Dodge City (restricted to South Africa), whereas my blog doesn’t even show up on any of the first ten pages. If a negative review appears on Food24, which is much more likely to influence a diner’s decision about eating at a Dodge City location, will you suggest that they amend the review to cast your establishment in a more favourable light?

“You have concurred that your staff’s actions were below your own standard and you have further concurred that your staff could not find the sweetener: should I amend my blog to imply something else? The service was poor…so poor that we left rather than endure more slow service en route to getting our meal. Are you expecting me to amend my blog to indicate that the service was swift, positive, and without flaw?

“Part of being in the restaurant business is getting reviews, both formal and informal. Our experience was negative…should I have blogged positively anyway? (You may want to note that I remarked favourably about the food…the burgers and shakes are among the best in town.)

“We had a bad experience. I blogged about it. To the best of knowledge and recollection, my blog is correct. If you can demonstrate where it is not, I will take amendment under consideration.”

Frankly, I expected the whole thing to drop right there, since he had to be bluffing. I hadn’t stated anything untrue and I had corrected our error in the estimation of the time, so there couldn’t be anything wonky about either the facts or sequence of events in the blog.

I have to admit that I was rather taken aback at the suggestion that my little blog, which does not draw a readership of people looking for restaurant recommendations and which has a very low search engine page ranking, could do any kind of damage to the franchise, unreasonable or otherwise. The thinly veiled threat…praise us or get sued…left a bad taste in my mouth. How dare he try to hijack my blog and demand that I publish untruths!

But I am a reasonable person and, if he could demonstrate to me where my facts or sequence of events were contradicted by his video footage, then I am just as interested in correcting the errors as he is.

Unfortunately, his most recent email did not supply me with any discrepancies between his videotaped “facts and sequence of events” and those in my blog. In fact, that next email didn’t address the correction of errors at all:

“Thanks for amending the service times recorded in your revised blog.

“Dodge City staff mentioned that you were engaged in a loud verbal altercation with your husband outside the store before entering. Their impression was that you were being unreasonably abusive towards him.

“I would have thought that, as an objective and balanced critic of human performance, you would have added this snippet of information to your account of events - or is that you take pleasure in finding fault in everyone around you but are blind to you own deficiencies.

“I would appreciate you amending the blog to add the objective opinion expressed above.”

First of all, this is an ad hominem attack and has no bearing whatsoever on the issue at hand, the dismal service we received on Sunday morning. “Ad hominem abusive (also called argumentum ad personam) usually and most notoriously involves insulting or belittling one's opponent, but can also involve pointing out factual but ostensibly damning character flaws or actions which are irrelevant to the opponent's argument. This tactic is logically fallacious because insults and even true negative facts about the opponent's personal character have nothing to do with the logical merits of the opponent's arguments or assertions.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem The ad hominem attack is usually employed by the losing party in an argument to change the subject and put the opponent on the defensive.

Secondly, the assertion is a complete and total fabrication, an unmitigated fiction, a bald-faced lie. My husband and I seldom quarrel and when we do it is always in privacy. We won’t even argue with each other if another person is in the same house with us! My husband is a reserved man who would eat glass before he would engage in a public quarrel, and I was raised in the Fifties, when little girls were imbued with the belief that one did not do such things as making public scenes. I may be many things, but I am not a drama queen and I simply would not embarrass myself or my husband in such a manner.

The truth is, my husband and I were walking together and we were either holding hands or my hand was tucked into his arm, and we were discussing the relative merits of one chain restaurant over another with respect to breakfast. We stepped into Dodge City and, once seated, resumed our conversation. It was no more and no less than that.

I haven’t responded to this latest salvo. I haven’t decided what I want to say. I cannot allow it to go unchallenged, however, because silence is tacit consent, even in the law. I’d like to say I was open to revisiting the location and give them another chance, but after this last email, I’m not so sure that would be a good idea.

One thing, though…considering that the information in that last email was a series of whoppers, I am now calling into question this alleged video footage. I haven’t seen it, after all, and I accepted the 15 minute service time from the manager, thinking there was no reason to lie to me about it and Hubby and I had simply not correctly estimated the time. In light of the lies and insulting personal attack to which I have just been subjected, however, the truth of that 15 minutes versus my original estimate of 30 must now be called into question.

Revisiting Dodge City...

So, I got a reply from the manager. I sent him another email and I got another reply. I don’t think we are going back. We may stop at the location in the V&A Waterfront for lunch (their hamburgers really are good, and their milkshakes are excellent as well), but definitely no Sunday breakfasts. And we aren’t going back to the Canal Walk location at all.

Apparently the place has video and the whole incident was captured. Based on his email, the manager who contacted me viewed the video. I was incorrect about the time…it was 15 minutes, not 30, but bear in mind during that entire time we had not even been able to place a complete food order and there was only one occupied table besides our own…and there were at least six employees on the floor!

The manager says the coffee took so long because the milk had not been “foamed in advance.” Well, if it was supposed to be foamed in advance and it wasn’t, then that is a fault against the restaurant. And, if there was a problem getting us our drinks in a reasonable time, why didn’t the server come to our table and inform us? “I’m sorry it is taking so long, but we still have to foam the milk. Your cappuccino should be here in just another minute or two.”

The manager says it took six minutes to get the drinks to us, which is slower than the standard time allowed. OK, so if we were there for fifteen minutes and it took six minutes to serve the coffee, that leaves nine minutes during which we waited for sweetener and were still unable to place a food order.

He says the restaurant was not out of sweetener but nobody could find it!! Then he contradicted my statement that our waitress left the place to borrow some from a neighbouring restaurant, saying it was a manager who did it. Sorry, but I had gone up to the front counter to ask the manager what was going on with the sweetener and while I was standing there, our server came walking in the door. If a manager got the sweetener, where was the waitress coming in from? And, again, why didn’t someone come to our table and say “We seem to be out of sweetener, but someone has gone next door to get some for you. It will only be a minute more and we really appreciate your patience”?

Seems scrambled eggs really are not available as a normal offering! That’s enough to keep us away for breakfasts because most restaurants massacre fried eggs and we only eat scrambled when eating out. But it seems that if the restaurant is not busy, Dodge City will prepare scrambled eggs…but you have to order them through the manager. WTF? Every place I’ve ever been to eat breakfast offers scrambled eggs without the drama…you can even get scrambled eggs from McD’s for heaven’s sake!

The manager did not address the kerfuffle at the till, so the reason that two members of the staff…one of them presumably the manager…couldn’t promptly process a simple cash transaction remains a mystery. I’m guessing they usually deal with credit cards and the ice cream lady who eventually rescued them was used to selling ice cream cones for cash and knew how to do it.

By way of apology I was offered a voucher for R50 (about $6.25…enough for a hamburger and a drink): “Once again thanks for taking the trouble to bring the matter to my attention. As a token of appreciation for your effort, this mail serves as a R50 FREE product voucher that may be redeemed at any Dodge City outlet. The voucher is valid until 30th October and please note that it is not exchangeable for cash.”

I appreciate the gesture, but I’m not entirely certain that presenting an email exchange in which I am clearly identified as a person who narced on the staff of one of the restaurants is such a great idea. Besides, if they couldn’t figure out how to process a cash transaction, what are they going to do with an email that claims to be a voucher??

Getting out of Dodge...

Dodge City is a small chain of diners/restaurants in Cape Town. They have spectacular hamburgers and this morning we decided to try them for Sunday breakfast. Herewith, the letter I send via email to the management of the chain later in the day:

What is the point of having a great menu and eye-catching décor if the service is so poor your patrons walk out without ordering?

My husband and I were at the Canal Walk Dodge City at 10 this morning. There was only one occupied table at the time we walked in, and there were five employees and a manager on the floor. You’d think with those odds…three employees per occupied table…our service would have been stellar, wouldn’t you? Well, you’d be wrong.

The waitress was pretty prompt when she came to our table to take our drinks order, and my husband, who is diabetic, was very specific when he asked for Canderel or sweetener with his coffee. How long does it take to make a cappuchino and pour a Coke? The kitchen could not have been busy…there was only one other occupied table in the place and we hadn’t placed our order yet. I was beginning to wonder if the girl was hand grinding the beans, one by one, when she finally arrived with our drinks.

We had studied the menu and as soon as the drinks were served my husband gave his breakfast order. The waitress immediately informed us that scrambled eggs were not available. What?? What kitchen cannot prepare scrambled eggs, particularly when the restaurant is deader than Bob Mugabe’s ethics and the kitchen staff are surely contemplating their navels for lack of orders to prepare?

My husband changed his order and, just as I was about to give mine to the waitress, he noticed that she had forgotten the sweetener. He asked again for sweetener and, without taking my order, she left the table. We waited. And waited. And waited some more. Finally I asked my husband if he had seen where she had gone and he said she had left the restaurant!!

I approached the manager, who seemed absolutely clueless about the whole affair. Obviously, Dodge City was out of sweetener and the waitress had gone elsewhere (a neighbouring restaurant, perhaps?) to secure some. But she was gone so long that the conversation between me and my husband went something like this:

Hubby: What do you say that when she gets back, we just pay for our drinks and go someplace else for breakfast?

Me: You are reading my mind again…that’s exactly what I was thinking.

Hubby: So, when she gets back we just ask for the bill?

Me: if it takes this long just to get a cup of coffee and a coke, you’ll be in a diabetic coma before the food gets here.

When the waitress returned with the sweetener and delivered it to our table, we asked for our bill and she quickly delivered it to us. She did not, however, return to fetch the money/credit card and I finally got up and went to the register myself with cash. Nobody seemed to know how to make the register work to accept a cash payment. After two people fumbled with the machine (one of them the person I assumed to be the manager) the woman who had been fiddling with the ice cream display stepped up and put the transaction through.

All in all, this ridiculous experience took the better part of half an hour. Worst of all, it never should have happened.

Why on earth was the restaurant out of sweetener? Your menu includes slimmer’s meals…don’t you think those people will want sweetener with their coffee or tea instead of sugar? And no scrambled eggs? What kind of nonsense is that? How difficult is it to break two eggs into a cup and stir them around with a fork? Especially when the restaurant is empty and the kitchen staff is not under the pressure of multiple orders? And what is with the waitstaff standing around jabbering with each other while customers sit there waiting?

I’m sorry, but as much as I like Dodge City’s food, especially the burgers, I don’t think we are coming back. The service at this location has never been stellar, but quite frankly, today it just stank. I cook and serve a full breakfast to my husband every weekday morning and 30 minutes is enough time to prepare, serve, and eat the breakfast and that is without any staff at all to assist. There is just no acceptable excuse for this kind of shoddy service and lack of attention to inventory of such front-end staples as sweetener.

The only bright spot in the experience is that my husband, on my caution, decided not to inject his insulin before we placed our food order. Had he done so, he could very easily have passed out in the restaurant due to low blood sugar because the service was so unimaginably bad.

Whiling away the weekend...

Yellow star: my house. Green star: the vlei

Racing season is upon us. In the stillness of a late winter afternoon I can hear the distant drone of the straining engines as they circle the track. It's one of the signs...Spring will soon be here.

But the weather station is predicting rain in two days time, confirming the message my back and hip have been giving me for two days. The vleis are carpeted with wild calla lilies and the Namaqualand is blooming despite winter’s grip having only loosened. More storms brood in the wings, awaiting their cue to lash us with yet more wind, rain, and frigid temperatures.

Soon we will be out in The Baby, her top down, cruising alongside the coastal waterways, admiring the views and basking in the South African sun. But for now we huddle in the warmth of our bed, coddled with quilts and duvets, and nap away a Saturday afternoon to the lulling buzz of the distant races.

Soon it will be spring.

Photo from http://www.geocities.com/russell_sheldon/tobaccowars/T_001_Killarney.jpg

Invisible genetic programming

If you are commitment phobic…or simply like to have your cake and eat it too…you have one more reason to be afraid…very afraid.

Scientists studying voles (mouse-like rodents) discovered that transferring a single gene, the vasopressin receptor, from the monogamous prairie vole into the brain's reward centre of a promiscuous meadow vole, would cause that meadow vole to become monogamous. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-06/euhs-rmp061504.php

Meanwhile, Swedish scientists have studied more than 500 twins and their spouses/domestic partners and have come to find that the vasopressin gene seems to have a similar effect on humans. “The researchers found that men with a particular variant of the AVPR1A gene (that codes for vasopressin in humans) scored lower on the bonding questions and were less likely to be married compared to men who did not have the variant…Also, men with two copies of the gene variant were twice as likely to report having had a relationship crisis with their marital spouse or partner in the last 12 months as men without the variant.” http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/120395.php

This discovery does not bode well for the playa and his exclusivity-seeking partner. In the vole study, the gene was not transferred through surgery, it was transferred via a “harmless virus.” OK, speaking only for myself, I find it a little scary that genetic engineering can be so easily…and transparently…effected. And, considering that this particular gene implantation completely changed the social life of the recipient vole, spectres of social engineering via undetectable gene transfers loom in the mind.

I’m not coming out against genetic engineering…it’s a valuable tool that may one day be used to reverse such devastating conditions as autism…but I find myself greatly relieved that the religious right-wing nuts are so vehemently opposed to this kind of science…um, well, science in general, actually. Otherwise we could look forward to the country being flooded by a spate of “harmless” viruses carrying engineered genes that will turn off our reasoning centres and turn on our sheeple tendencies, giving over control of the nation to right-wing theocrats.

Oh…wait…

Did you hear what she said?? Run, dude, RUN!!

Here in South Africa we have satellite TV that brings us a lot of American and British programming. One of the channels we watch regularly is TSN…The Style Network…plays some of the longest and annoying commercial breaks I have ever had to sit through. And they play them often. And they don’t air new ads, they just play the same ones over and over and over again.

Apparently the TSN programming folks like weddings as their offerings include “I propose,” “Married Away,” “Vegas Weddings,” and “Whose Wedding is it Anyway?” I’m not big on weddings so I don’t watch these shows, but I’ve practically memorized a few of the ads due to sheer density of exposure and some of them are just…well…appalling!

The “Whose Wedding” ads are the most cringeworthy. Sarcastic, nasty wedding planners, control freak grooms and diva brides…even missing mothers (for whom they search at the reception bar), populate these ads. Not being a fan of watching adults throwing tantrums…or exhibiting smug, gleeful schadenfreude…I don’t find the ads motivating me to watch the programs but having quite the opposite effect.

One, however, stands out from the crowd as being the jewel in the crown of odiousness: a toothy blonde with her thin tresses cut in an unflattering, needing-a-trim long bob smiles into the camera and waves a hand in a prematurely world-weary manner. “I can be high maintenance,” she twangs in a nasal whine. “I’m bossy…” Her fiancé sits beside her, besotted and oblivious to what the woman is saying, a stupid grin on his face as he slowly nods, his ears clearly disengaged from his brain.

Don’t you hear what she is saying? Run, dude, RUN!! People are on their best behaviour during the courtship phase of a relationship…do you have any concept of what marriage is going to be like to self-confessed “high maintenance” woman who actually admits to being bossy? How good are you at taking orders…and criticism? How emotionally masochistic are you…high maintenance people are just that…they require endless resources directed at them. And nothing you can do will be right because that is what high maintenance is all about.

What happens when the new wears off? What happens when the carnal pleasures cease to overshadow everything else? In the immortal words of my old friend and lover, Tiny, is the f*cking you’re getting worth the f*cking you’re gonna get?

Run, dude, run…and don’t ever look back!