Asking to speak to a manager vs. Just peeing on the floor

Went out with the family to On the Border in Cary tonight. The food was awesome (mmm...avocado enchilada) and the drinks were pretty good, too. Unfortunately, that's where the praise ends.

The problems started when we got there. We arrived on the early side of the dinner rush, since Friday night restaurant waits are notorious for their length. We asked for a table for five adults, two high chairs, and a sling (for a carrier carseat). This is a few people less than when the whole family goes out, so we were pleasantly surprised to hear that the wait was only 20 minutes. Awesome. So we snagged some chairs, and commenced with waiting.

20 minutes passed. The kids were starting to get a bit fidgety. Okay, no big deal, they underestimated the wait a little bit. Maybe if one of the four hostesses standing around up front was actually serving or bussing tables, and not just holding the wall up and chatting, but, okay, cool whatever. We'll give them a few minutes.

30 minutes. My son has started to throw intermittent hungry/bored tantrums, and my niece keeps trying to wander off towards the bar, and I'm very tempted to follow her. My 2-month-old nephew is starting to stir, and my sister had really hoped we'd have a table before he woke up so she wouldn't have to feed him on a booth in the entryway. We ask the one hostess who actually appears to be working if they have any idea when our table would be ready and, oh, don't worry, a big group just got their bill, they'll be clearing out in just a few minutes.

We finally got sat after forty minutes of waiting. Now, I know that forty minutes really isn't a terrible wait for a Friday night. The problem is that it was twice as long as they originally told us. If they had just told us at the beginning the wait was forty minutes, no problem! And I'm not just hating on restaurant workers, here. I've waited tables, and I know that you always tell the customer the worst-case scenario on wait time; you never undershoot it!


Once we were finally at out table, the waiter came by fairly promptly and took our drink orders. He arrived with our drinks equally promptly and took our food orders, which were brought out not too much later. And...that was about the last we saw of our waiter. My enchilada was delicious, but spicy. Which wouldn't have been a problem except that my glass sat empty for so long.

Towards the end of the meal, we realized that my son had dropped a deuce and, since my husband had gotten the last one, it was my turn. So I grabbed a mini-pack of wipes and a diaper out the diaper bag, and I grabbed my baby, and we headed to the changing table in the ladies' room.

As to the sticky green mess that had accumulated in my son's diaper...I can only assume that the avocados I shared with him were somehow digested at the speed of light and transmuted into the world's stinkiest guacamole as they exited his rectum. The mini-pack of wipes was hardly standing up to the level of rank that I had to clean as, just as I was getting the last few patches of goop cleared off his bum, he did something he hasn't done since he was 6-months-old...

He peed mid-diaper change. And I'm telling you, it was like he'd been holding it in since he was in-utero. It went everywhere; him, me, the changing table, the floor, the trashcan next to the changing table. I held my phone away from the stream and called my husband, letting loose a stream of curses among which the phrase "diaper bag, now" was interjected. He brought the diaper bag to the door of the women's restroom and, intimidated about actually entering (it was a Friday night after all, and it was pretty full), tried to toss the diaper bag to me.

It landed in the puddle of urine.

Eventually, my stepmom came in to help me get myself and the little man cleaned up (fortunately we had a back-up set of clothes for him), and I cleaned up the ladies' room as best I could. But, all things considered, I felt like On the Border and I had broke even.

My son peed on their floor, and I didn't ask them to comp anything on my dinner.