Thursday Blues

Oooooh, it's Thursday. That means a visit from the creepy payroll guy is imminent. And no one is in the office today to help me look busy. My back-up is to pick up the phone when I hear someone at the door & hit time & temperature on speed-dial. Then I pretend to be engaged in animated conversation. It's actually a lot of fun to manufacture fake conversations & I enjoy having the opportunity now & then.

This weather is kind of depressing. I'm not getting enough vitamin D, I guess. Life has been very boring this week. I haven't seen or heard much of interest to write about. I have a new favorite blog to share. If you haven't visited Overheard in Pittsburgh, do it now. It's one of the funniest things you will ever see. The stuff they find to post here is great & will have you in stitches.

Now that we're both avid readers, Mr. Steph & I are wondering if snippets of our own conversation will someday grace their posts. In discussing the hilarity of OIP, we realized how strange some conversations must sound if a passerby were to hear just a snatch. Yesterday for instance, I had occasion to say something along the lines of, "Well I'd much rather have squid juice on my noodles than know that Crab-Gobblers' drool is all over the plate I'm eating from."

He pointed out that if someone had overheard that, it likely sounded sexual & extraordinarily perverted. But nothing could be further from the truth. We were discussing the horrifying news that a local Chinese buffet has received multiple health code violations. Among them, inspectors found that some foods were not stored properly & there was a risk of cross contamination because bowls of rice & noodles were left in such a position that juice from squid & shellfish may have dripped into the carbs. Another violation was that the dishawasher has no sanitizer! Eeeeew!! Perhaps most disturbing of all is that they caught employees touching food with bare hands, but the employees hadn't washed their hands before touching it.

The details were vague & that doesn't sit well with me. I mean, maybe someone wiped off the counter & didn't wash their hands after handling the rag. Kind of gross, but unlikely to make the diners ill. Or maybe someone swept the floor & didn't wash their hands after touching the dust pan. Kind of icky, but again, not a very high-risk situation. But it could mean just about anything. Maybe the employees don't wash their hands after they use the bathroom or maybe they caught a cook scratching his ass then touching that chicken. Who knows?

It hardly matters because we stopped eating there a long time ago, with good reason. The last time we visited this particular buffet, there was a couple sitting nearby that ate like cavemen. Normally, this can be easily ignored, especially because they were actually behind me so it's not as though I had to look at them. But in this case, the noises they made were loud & horrifying. These 2 people did not simply "eat", they attacked the food. And the food in question was crab legs.

They piled so many crab legs onto their plates that they couldn't get back to their table without losing some. I've never witnessed anything like it but they had to hold the food onto the plates, it was piled so high. Other diners were crossing the restaraunt to get a glimpse of the freaks & even the employees were coming out of the kitchen to see the show.

They ate like monsters, ripping the legs apart, crab meat flying. It sounded like something from animal planet & I expected to turn & see grizzlies eating a seal or something along those lines. The noises were really strange & very loud. Mr. Steph lost his appetite because the only way he could avoid seeing this freakshow was to hunch over his meal like a dog & who wants to eat like that? It was like a car crash & you just couldn't help but to look.

We called them the Crab-Gobblers & still crack up about it even though it was at least a year ago. Thanfully, we were already eating by the time they arrived so I don't have to live with the concern that I've eaten from the same unsanitized plates.

So that may be the kind of thing that inspires the fantastic quotes on Overheard. But it's great not to have an explanation & to simply revel in the hilarity. Share your own crazy dining experiences here. We can all use a good laugh on a yucky day like today.