This modern life

    Last night's gathering for Dad's 92d birthday was something of a fiasco, though fun in the end. We went to Outback Steakhouse, which is usually a pretty relaxed place of a Sunday evening, but not this time. Part of this may have been due to today being a national holiday; maybe some people treated it like a Saturday night. The main problem however was that at some point in the evening the computers at Outback had gone down, so nobody could pay, so nobody could leave, so nobody new could sit down. By the time we got there, the problem had been fixed, but the backlog was still having a little trouble clearing.
    As we were a party of 7, we had adventures getting seated anyway. They wanted to put us at a table for six with one chair on the side, but there was literally no room (less than a foot) for anyone to sit in such a chair. Then we talked our way into another table for 6 with a seat at the end which nephew James took, which pretty largely prevented anyone getting by in either direction. Then finally they gave us the table they showed us in the first place plus the one next to it (all told with room for maybe 12), so at least we were comfortable. Then we started waiting for our food.
    It was a long wait. It made us wonder how a giant corporation couldn't have procedures in place for handling transactions using pen, paper and arithmetic. At least some of those people must have been willing to pay in cash if computer failure meant no credit cards could be handled. But maybe the cash registers wouldn't work at all. On the whole, it was a very poor recommendation for the 21st century.
    It's also unclear why having no one able to pay for a long time would create a backlog for the kitchen, but I guess when we all did finally get seated, we all ordered at the same time, and thus a backlog followed a long lull. Anyway, that's the closest to making sense out of it that I can manage.
    When the food did arrive, it was mostly cold, though mine was fine. On the whole, we all agreed we didn't need to come back to Outback again ever. However, Dad was cheerful, and singing, and having a good time, and certainly felt a lot better than the previous evening when we went out after dialysis. And that's all that matters.