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So, yesterday was Mother’s Day. I got my mom a chocolate gift basket-type deal from Hersheys.com. Pretty good chocolate, which included a one pound bar of chocolate with a custom message hand-written on it. Way early in the morning we went to the Mother’s Day brunch at Chandler’s for Chris’s family. That was pretty good, with a hell of a lot of food. My only problem was the one and a half hour maximum seating time, which, thankfully, was loosely enforced. Also, the waffles were a little chewy, rather than light and fluffy. And then came the attempt to have a nice dinner at Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen. Read on to read more about my mixed feelings about that experience. To start off, Saturday Michelle had made reservations for eight at Pappadeaux for 5pm on Mother’s Day. Yes, that may seem a little late, but they didn’t say anything indicating it would be a problem. Sunday, Michelle calls early in the afternoon to inform them that there will actually only be five of us. Her experience as a hostess told her that informing them of a reduction in our party would be a good idea. Sunday evening, we actually arrive on time. I drop off my mom and my sisters at the door, find a parking space, and head into the restaurant with Chris. I walk into the restaurant to find the lobby packed with people who have waited nearly an hour or even more without having been seated! When Chris and I finally find my family, I found that we were number 842, and there would be a ten or twenty minute wait on our table. Ten was understandable, and twenty was stretching my limits, but I could wait. Well, the twenty minutes comes and goes, and no table. Chris politely asks why we were still waiting for a table. One of the idiot hostesses tells her that they are cleaning off a table for us right now. So, Chris come back and we politely wait. It must take something like half an hour to clear off a small table there, because after fifteen minutes of waiting, we still weren’t seated <G>. Michelle was the next one to approach the podium to interrogate the hostess. The hostess tells her that one of their large party events coordinators was coming to talk to her about getting us a table. Michelle waits politely for ten minutes, but nobody ever comes up to talk to her. Meanwhile, we’ve already waited forty-five minutes for a table for which we had a reservation! Finally, my mom was got so irritated she told these dumb bitches behind the podium to just split us up into two tables: one table for two and one table for three. We wouldn’t be able to sit together for Mother’s Day, but at least we’d be able to sit and my mom’s diabetes wouldn’t put her into shock. They gave us new numbers, 871 and 872, and we waited some more. After a total of one hour of waiting, we finally see our numbers come up on the crude LED display that sort of reminded me of a lottery. We won! Err, actually, we finally got seats for two separate tables after having waited longer than some people, including larger parties, who just dropped into the restaurant without a reservation. Apparently, there is a downstairs bar and dining area. That is where one of the hostesses finally brought us. When we got downstairs, the hostess brought us to a table for four that was cleaned off, at which my mom and my sisters sat. Right next to it was another table for four that had yet to be cleared. Is that where they sat Chris and me? Nope. We were seated across the room at a different table, with a different waiter. Thinking it can’t possibly be a problem to join the two tables that were right next to each other, my mom asks the hostess if we can just wait for the one table to get cleared and join the tables so we can actually sit next to each other. The hostess replies that it can’t be done because the two tables that are next to each other had different servers. We all think to ourselves, “That is beyond fucking retarded.” As if it would be impossible to shift table duties around a little so that a family that had reservations could sit with each other. Michelle then asks to talk to the manager, seeing that the hostess obviously doesn’t know how to please the restaurant patrons. My mom and Michelle explain that we had waited for an hour for a table for which we had a reservation, and now our party of five was split up and sitting across the room from each other. The manager, luckily, understood how to make his restaurant’s patrons happy. He came over the Chris and I and told us that they were going to put two tables together so we could all be with each other. Little did we know, our table had yet another server assigned to it (yes, that’s three different servers for three tables). The funny thing was that rather than move the table that was right next to my family’s table, they moved the table where Chris and I sat across the room and put it together with my family’s table. So, finally, we were seated together, after almost an hour and fifteen minutes of waiting and discussing with management about getting a single table together. The nightmarish part of the evening was mostly over. I’ll post more about the actual dining later. Right now, time to get ready for work.