Peevish...

     Sometime in the past twenty years or so, it became de rigueur for a restaurant server to check in with a table after the food arrives, and ask, "How is everything tasting?"  This has irritated me from the first time I ever heard it.  I could never quite put my finger on why it bothers me so much.   Does it focus too much on the food and not enough on the rest of the dining experience?  This is a possible factor.  As a server myself, I have probably wondered about this far more than any rational person should.  I have not-so-silently nursed this pet peeve for many years, and deeply pondered the way it annoys me.  I have been waiting on tables (and cars) off and on since I was 15, but I have never drunk this particular Kool-Aid.  I ask my customers, "How is everything here?" or some variation on that theme.
     We'll go out to eat, and inevitably, the question comes: "How is everything tasting?" My longsuffering husband will smirk at me across the table, knowing full well what's happening in my brain.  I find myself creating, and then (usually) stifling, snarky retorts.  "It's not tasting anything (anymore); it doesn't have a tongue." "It tastes great, but it's cold," and so forth.   I have been known to write tirades about it on the back of a guest check (note:  I am always careful to rest blame on whoever taught the server to say it, not the server, personally, unless the service also sucks; then, all bets are off).
     Last night, as we sat at a Perkins, the unwitting server dropped the "tasting" bomb, and after he walked away, everything came together for me. It was something I had known all along, as evidenced by those retorts I created, yet the reason rattled around, unarticulated,  in my subconscious just out of my grasp until it finally decided to reveal itself last night.  The phrase bothers me so much because when servers say it, they are using a transitive verb in an intransitive manner.  It was a headslap moment.  Duh!  The reason for my undue irritation all these years is that this particular infraction takes place at the intersection of my superior server and grammar Nazi personalities.  To get more complete information, you can go here, here (This one has "snarky" in the title! Bonus!), or here. Allow me to sum up with a couple of examples: I am tasting my food; it isn't tasting anything, unless I am a very bad hunter, in which case, my (intended) food might actually be tasting me.  When you use the verb "tasting," it needs to take an object or it just doesn't work, no matter how often you repeat it.  It tastes (intransitive) just fine, thank you (or maybe not, but I digress).
     This epiphany will not stop me from continuing to rail against this grammatical infraction; in fact, it will likely rally my spirit to fight against the verbal abomination with renewed vigor!  Now, dear reader, you will hopefully never hear it again without recalling this information, and it will bother you, too!  Together, we can stop this grammatical travesty from becoming further ingrained in the vernacular.  This use is not as firmly lodged as "15 items or less," so we should yet be able to undo the damage.  Twenty years is but a mere blip in the evolution of language.  There's still time to nip this in the bud, one poor, unaware server at a time.

Fewer days like this, please...

Holy cow. I had to snake out the basement drain again. I accomplished that successfully, but when I was rewinding the snake, I pinched the heck out of the underside of my arm in the spring-loaded feeder.
Now for a bit of a flashback. One day at Job 1 I was visiting with a regular customer, when I bobbled a dish I was carrying, but made an impressive save. When she commented on it, I remarked that I had dropped many dishes over the course of my 23 years hauling food, but I had never dropped anyone's order before they got it. Not two weeks later, I flipped an order of nachos with an impressive spin that rivaled the coin toss at the superbowl. We fast forward back to tonight, when Murphy must have decided I was due to make up for lost time. As I came into the dining room at job 2 with two plates, my right shoe caught the loop of my left shoelace. I had on some real speed, and as I felt the solid tug of my dignity being yanked dead in its tracks, one thought had time to flit through my brain before I hit the ground: this cannot be happening. I did a rather impressive belly flop. I was carrying mexican, which is huge and double plated on heavy duty platters. The ridge under the plates landed solidly on my inner knuckles, sandwiching one firmly in bruises and slicing the other open. The other side of that platter fell across my other forearm and left a bruise under a minor burn. I have rugburn on my elbows, and every time I turn around I notice a new battle scar. My back is already stiff and I must have jarred my jaw to give myself a lovely headache. I will be so sore in the morning. My almost-40-year-old body is not meant to carpet dive. For all the comments I suffered about being so generously endowed that if I ever fell forward I would bounce back up, I was sadly let down. I hauled myself up and made sure no customers were in the blast radius, then hobbled off to bandage my finger and my pride. I guess I should look on the bright side. The sympathy tip bounced up to 25% for a while and at least I wasn't carrying cast-iron fajita skillets.

More waitress rants

If you are in a hurry, don't snark at me for not taking your order sooner when I have been to your table three times to try to get it but you are yakking on your cell phone!

We love it when buses come. Just call first. (We rocked it anyway)

I have bibs, colors, paper and crackers for your kids, but no bottle warmer. Ditto for dropcloths. Eternal gratitude to the poor mom on her hand and knees picking up baby flotsam.

And I leave you with this. At a previous job, I worked with one of the other waitresses at Job 2. After one particularly long night I said, "My dogs are barking!" To which she replied, "Why? Did your neighbors call?"