It takes considerable effort on the part of a restaurant to hit the low end of my service scale, prompting not only no tip, but a LiveJournal rant. Ruby Tuesday of Chantilly, VA — congrats. You win the big loser award.
Monday lunch started out well enough, the typical indecision about where we were going to go, when we were leaving, who was gonna go, and who’d do the driving.
For whatever reason, the developers were craving salads. Personally, I think the only way for that to happen is if someone tampers with the water. Except as we all know, developers don’t drink water. They survive on sodas, caving only to diets when chicks start pointing fingers and laughing.
Ruby Tuesday came up, as it has long been our fall back plan for the utter stupidity of Bungalow Billiard’s royal screw over in which the more one tried to be kind to other customers, the more Bungalow charged.
I managed to talk a party of six into going, and we left early, like 11:15am, as to avoid the lunch rush. I was in such a good mood that a decision had been reached, that I even offered to drive.
We got there and were seated promptly. That’s where the geometric decay curve in service started.
For the astute, you may notice that you can’t put 6 people in a car. Well, okay, you can put 6 in Alan’s car, you can barely put 4 in mine. And, like I said, I was driving.
Consequently, four of us arrived minutes early, and the other two followed. Everyone ordered water, so this was not exactly difficult to screw up.
Four at the table ordered salads, and James and I were the only two non-salad-conformists and opted to get a cheap appetizer instead as the meal.
I might point out that the point of an appetizer is to serve two functions. One, to come out -before- the meal. And, two, to come out -quickly- before the meal.
The herbivores of our group managed to fill their plates, and I mean FILL their plates and return to the table. They leisurely ate their entire plateful, and went back a second time to refill their troughs.
To which they again returned to the table and took their leisurely time eating the second helping. With plates clean, they then sat in silence as they waited for the check.
The waiter never came by to see how things were, didn’t check on the food in the kitchen, and never brought any refills, much less the check.
We eventually had to have another waiter page him over, and James canceled our appetizers (which constituted our whole meal). The waiter just nodded, didn’t say a word, didn’t check back with the kitchen, and didn’t apologize.
In fact, that’s when we realized that he hadn’t said a single thing since we ordered the water.
As luck would have it, the manager was passing by and asked us how our meal was. My intention was to let James have the floor, but something snapped, and I explained how we had ordered appetizers about an hour and a half ago, and that we hadn’t seen our waiter since, and that the guys who came in last were done eating two servings of the salad bar.
The only reason they had superior service was because it was *self* service.
The manager offered his apologies. I said it went beyond apology, that this was downright embarrassing — we were leaving the establishment, not coming back for a very long time, letting our coworkers and friends know what happened, and in the meantime were going to go across the street to Wendy’s because a fast food joint that was filled with minimum wage immigrant workers that couldn’t speak English natively treated its customers better.
It seemed to strike a nerve, especially since I was making sure my voice carried over to the neighboring tables.
The waiter who served us was cowering in the back of the restaurant. If I had had any sense, I should have made him stand by as I chewed out the manager.
Now let me show you why Ruby Tuesday gets the dingbat award. When you mess up, especially involving public relations, you make amends to those you screwed over.
The manager, instead of providing some coupon for some food at a later date, offered to pick up the table’s meal.
At first it sounds like a nice offer — but check out what this really means. It means that the people who benefited from getting food got their meal free (and salad bars are cheap); the people who got nothing, got an additional nothing. What’s up with THAT?
Anyhow, I did get a rousing thanks and pat on the back from the coworkers who got free shuttle service and a meal. I suppose that was worth something.
For the record, I kept my word. We did drive over to Wendy’s, and to be fair, I placed a complex order and timed them. The time was now 12:30pm — mid-lunch in high volume Chantilly. A number one, super-sized, with extra pickles and extra onions — total elapsed time: one minute and 15 seconds, and that included paying.
As an added perk, I found a penny on the floor. All Ruby Tuesday had was discarded gum.
With that incident, Ruby Tuesday has been added to my list of places to avoid. The list is small, but I hope that when I vote with my feet that others who hear the tale also spot the illogic and avoid putting themselves in similar jeopardy.
So, that was Monday. How was Tuesday shaping up?
Well, Tuesday started off by getting up early to go to a Microsoft event. We had an invitation to come out and see a technical presentation of Microsoft’s new development platform! It sounded exciting and we’ve been waiting weeks for it. Obviously Microsoft, the king of innovation had much to show off.
It used to be, back in the early 90’s, that when Microsoft held such an event it would flood conference centers with geeks. We’d get a pile of goodies, and when the curtains parted, we’d get a sneak preview at some amazingly cool ideas. The event was fun and we felt special.
It was at one of these conferences, I had a chance to talk with the lead guy for Microsoft’s C++ compiler. When asked about the long term plan and release cycles, he explained that the Microsoft compiler was more like Jello. When it stopped jiggling, you took advantage and shipped it. It was this hackery that led them to try a “subscription” model, which evolved into MSDN as we now know it. He further added that they had pretty much exhausted all their ideas, and while Borland was jamming on new features and innovation, Microsoft just added some simple dialogs around cut’n’paste code –nothing clever– and called them Wizards. He couldn’t believe how the masses bought into this so easily; there was no logic – nothing special – it didn’t do anything – and it was amazingly small. However, give someone a ‘wizard’ and it must be magic.
The tone was different this time, however.
I was the first to arrive in the room, and there was no one to greet people. Others came in a while later, and there was no one around. Eventually someone showed up when the room was full and said we needed to do registration, so could we all exit and re-enter?
They were serious. Rather than calling roll or passing a sign-up sheet around, we all had to get up, exit the room, stand in line, say our name, and re-enter again, taking the very seat we left.
Then the presentations started. Except they had audio problems. The speakers on one side of the room weren’t working. And rather than going for a conference room (not a conference hall or center, but a room) that was deep, they went for wide.
The speaker tried shouting, but it didn’t work. The correct solution would have been for him to go to where the speakers were malfunctioning, talk in a normal voice, and let the working speakers do their job. No such luck.
The speaker asked us what language we used, and by a show of hands, well over 99% of the room used C#. He proceeded to tell us how Visual Basic was his favorite language of choice, and spent a full hour going over the new features that were added to it.
Bad move.
VisualBASIC to a C# person is like public transit is to a bulldozer driver. Sure, if you have limited knowledge and only want to go where someone else has planned a route, you can do so with minimal effort on your part — but if you have to forge new and better ways for those that follow, you need a serious tool that puts you in control, not one that takes you along for the ride. Besides, C# has had since its beginning all the features they were showing off. And what were the new features? 1) It didn’t reformat your code (oh, like every other competing product knew not to do since the start of time). 2) You could document your code. 3) Look — wizards that gave static templated code fragments. Meanwhile the live demo we got had on a number of occasions crashed or hiccuped.
We almost busted out laughing. This was a repeat of the C++ discussion from ten years ago.
Then things moved from bad to worse. The next speaker didn’t use a microphone; he softly mumbled. His big thing was about how Visual Studio was great for doing architecture work. He spent a whole, boring, monotone, slow-paced hour drawing six boxes and five lines.
A software architect, for those not in the field, is more like the guy who comes up with the blue prints. He’s got the big vision, and a high level way that it can be implemented. The actual designer, who’s stuck with the supplies, people, and raw reality may have to make engineering tradeoffs and changes so that the equivalent structure gets built. So, for the most part, architecture is about communication about the conceptual design of a system. Get that? Communication. Visual Studio, however, is a tool. It’s the backhoe. It does the work. This is like someone putting a word processor in a screwdriver. It doesn’t belong, but it does jack the price up.
The next person up was the marketing person who was gonna tell us all about licensing this new product. And to say that they’ve over complicated, split up, recombined, renamed, and screwed with the pricing and product model so that you can’t tell which way is up is an understatement. Bottom line is that if I want all the tools at my disposal, the new price tag is $4,500. Hold tight — per person.
That’s right, my junior developer, who never got any architecture experience in college because Microsoft licensing wouldn’t let him or his professor buy a discounted educational copy, is now costing me more because I’m supplying him with tools he doesn’t need. If I’m driving to the store for a quart of milk, I do not need the booster rockets of the space shuttle. Geez.
Microsoft has got to be out of its mind. This is getting insane.
For a recap, if you buy Apple’s latest Tiger operating system you get with it *ALL* the development software and documentation Apple has for *FREE*. And for each additional developer you add, the cost per head is roughly $17.50. You read that right, less than $20.
What’s REALLY sad? The XCode tool which comes with Tiger is better!!! And if you don’t wanna switch to Apple, go with Eclipse (www.eclipse.org) — it’s FREE, commercial grade, extendable, and open source. And if you want BASIC, of all things, get RealBASIC, at least your source code will work on Windows, Apple, and Linux/FreeBSD, not just Microsoft only.
It used to be that when you attended a conference, you’d also get complimentary personal copies of the compiler. This was sheer genius. You’d go home, install it, learn it, and go to work and ask for it. Microsoft in their jab-everyone now gives away a timebomb trial copy so you can “eval” whether or not you want it. Once it explodes, it can’t be reactivated or upgraded. And let me say, Microsoft’s uninstall of such things that intertwine with an operating system doesn’t normally go smoothly. Consequently, you need to buy MORE software just to run the TRIAL software so you don’t screw up your system running THEIR software. Arrrggghh!
What is it about the world that makes Ruby Tuesday and Microsoft experiences like this so common? Why does the general public put up with it and keep going back?
As for me, I’ll be eating my cheap food while I work on my free software… oddly enough, those that take a peek seem to be really impressed with the graphics and capabilities, not of the burger, of the machine.