Side salads

I happen to be pretty big on salad. I just love the taste of assorted fresh vegetables perfectly coated in a flavorful dressing, sometimes graced with a light sprinkling of croutons or bacon bits to truly titillate my taste buds. The thing about salad, though, is that it doesn’t always allow me to achieve that “comfortably full” feeling I like to get when I go out to dinner. Therefore, I usually have to opt for a more substantial main course and get my salad fix on the side – a solution that presents its own share of issues.

See, the problem with side salads is that these days, most restaurants think that it’s okay to slap a little plate down in front of you filled with nothing more than iceberg lettuce covered in mounds of dressing with a sad little token cherry tomato on the side. Sometimes, if they’re feeling generous, they’ll also throw in an old, wilted, paper-thin slice of cucumber, two croutons, and a few centimeters’ worth of shredded carrot mush to make the plate look more colorful and pretty.

Really, is it so unreasonable to expect that a side salad actually consist of these things called “assorted vegetables?” I’m not asking for anything crazy like broccoli florets or butternut squash, but how about a few pieces of green pepper mixed in with a slice of onion or two? Or, how about giving me more than that one cherry tomato, or, better yet, throwing in a bunch of cucumber slices? Cucumbers, at bulk rate prices, come out to about seventeen cents per cucumber, and considering that you’re charging five bucks for that side salad, it wouldn’t hurt you to include a little something extra for me to crunch on.

Oh, and what’s up with that pathetic pair of croutons? Can I please point out that croutons are usually made out of old bread that’s about to go bad? In other words, I think you guys at the salad station could afford to be just a tad more generous with your fried bits of leftover soon-to-be mold.

Finally, I would appreciate it from both an intellectual and cardiac standpoint if you people on salad prep duty would stop trying to mask the obvious lack of produce by smothering the plate in heaps of dressing so dense that you might as well serve it with a spoon and call it “salad bisque.” As delicious as certain salad dressings might be, I’d rather that the majority of my caloric intake for the day not be derived from condiments.

When it comes down to it, I think that the side salad truly makes a statement as to how much a restaurant values and respects its customers, so the more vegetables on that plate, the more likely I am to come back. Of course, there’s always the option of simply eating salad at home…but if I did that, then I’d have one less thing to complain about, and I wouldn’t want to risk growing complacent and losing my edge.

Technology

The worst part of technology, in my not so humble opinion, is that the more advanced it seems to get, the more attitude it tends to give you. Case in point: just the other day, I was leaving somebody a voicemail when the stupid system cut me off mid-message. Not wanting to sound like an idiot by only leaving half a message, I selected the option to record a new message, to which the system bitch replied “to re-record your voice message, start speaking at the tone” – as if to say, “because you’re an idiot who screwed this up the first time around, I now have to be burdened with recording your message again.”

I’ll admit it: that nasty tone really pissed me off. It’s bad enough that I get attitude from GPS every time I make a wrong turn, but now the voicemail lady is giving me crap for wanting to leave a message that doesn’t end in the middle of a word? And the best part: the voicemail bitch was the one who cut me off in the first place. It’s not like I decided to randomly just stop talking. No, bitch, you cut me off, so not only should you not be giving me attitude about leaving a new message, you should actually be programmed to say something along the lines of “if you’d like to re-record your message because I am a dumb bitch who ran out of patience, then start speaking at the tone.”

Maybe I’m way off here, but shouldn’t technology serve to make our lives easier and not frustrate the piss out of us? And with that, I’ve got some phone calls to make. Wish me luck.