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Saturday, November 5, 2011

Three Terrible Decisions

Could someone please point me in the direction of this Friendly's?

There are few things in life that are certain. Death, taxes, and up until this morning, being unable to go wrong with a meal from Friendly's, the place according to their slogan,"where ice cream makes the meal", or I as now like to say, "where terrible service and sub-par food makes me want to stick a red-hot poker in my eye rather than spend another second in your restaurant".

You may have heard recently that Friendly's has filed for bankruptcy and had to close sixty-three locations. Yea, tough economic times, right? Nope. Try terrible service and greasy plates of foreign-looking circles that half-resemble a pancake.

After another exhausting night of wedding festivities I found myself in the historic town of Sturbridge, MA on a crisp fall morning. I guess the first terrible decision of my morning was spending any more time in this dinosaur of a town than I needed to. But unfortunately my growling stomach got the best of me and I ended up in the depths of chain restaurant hell, where white trash runs rampant and water refills to relieve my burning tongue from unnecessarily hot Tabasco sauce are few and far between.

I ordered a coffee, I get some brown liquid that tasted like it was brewed in a used toilet bowl. I ordered a chocolate milk. Why did I order a chocolate milk, you ask? You'd have to ask God that one, because I couldn't even begin to give a reasonable explanation. Being as incredibly hungover as I was, milk is the last thing I could have possibly wanted to quench my thirst. This was terrible decision #2. I must have had my goddamn head screwed on backwards. However, that poor decision may or may not have had something to do with the fact that I was concentrating so hard on keeping my body temperature up since it was about 50 degrees inside the restaurant and my involuntary shivering was starting to take over my every thought. It was all starting to make sense that Friendly's had filed for bankruptcy since they apparently don't even have enough money to heat their fucking restaurants.

While waiting for what seemed like decades for my meal, I debated long and hard with myself whether to stand up and ditch the bill. I would have done it too had I not thought that our waitress was relying on our money to help maintain her Oxycontin habit.

So here I am, 45 excruciating minutes of migraine-induced misery after ordering my meal, trying to avoid slipping into a hypothermic coma, when everyone's food finally begins to arrive. One of my friends gets his delicious looking skillet, another receives their ham and cheese melt topped with maple bacon. All good stuff from what I can see. I say to myself, "Hey, maybe Friendly's ain't so bad after all". That's when my third mistake of the morning arrived.

Thank God this character's dead
Nothing could have prepared me for it. I've lived through my fair share of anticlimactic moments; Y2K, the series finale of Lost, the 2007 New England Patriots. But the delivery of my food order really took the wind out of my already weathered sails. Two pathetic bacon strips that looked like they were sliced right off a Sturbridge pig's back not more than 30 minutes prior and slapped onto my plate, eggs that made me so enraged that I wanted to chuck them at the wall and watch their grease stain the enclosures of that hellhole as they slide down to the floor. And don't even get me started on my cardboard Frisbee pancakes. If my friend next to me hadn't been so nice to lend me a triangular portion of her delicious Vermont Cheddar Melt, I was considering opening up my veins with my dirty, egg-yoked butter knife and ending it all right then and there.


Thankfully I regained my wits, threw down my hard-earned cash in utter disgust and hauled ass out of that concentration camp, never to return to Friendly's or Sturbridge again.  What in the name of sweet Jesus had just happened?

If there's a lesson to be learned, it's to not make decisions when you're hungover, tired, hungry, or a combination of the three that will leave you at the whim and mercy of a bankrupted chain restaurant. Stick to grazing cattle and being "historic", Sturbridge. Leave the chain restaurants to the towns that aren't run like third-world countries.

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