Musical Chairs

I met Ben's friend who recently moved to D.C. last week. We went to a restaurant/bar/book store. I picked the place -- I had been there twice before. According to history, the service is so-so. Sometimes the waiter or waitress shows up at the table more than once, sometimes not.

The service was extraordinarily bad this time. It wasn't so much that our waitress chose to ignore us throughout the evening. We moved from a table in the corner to one that was in the open. The reason? A small mouse scurried around our table. We thought the center of the room -- with so much activity -- would discourage the mouse. When our waitress asked why we had moved, we told her we wanted to get away from the mouse.

Her response?

"Oh yeah, we're trying to get rid of those."

Huh. If I wanted to dine with pests, I would have stayed home.

On the bright side, I thought we might get a discount or a free piece of pie out of it. No such luck.