I've been meaning to post this story for a few days, but I wanted to have some kind of conclusion. Unfortunately after almost a week I still don't have one, so I figured I'd go ahead and at least begin the story. It starts last Friday evening when my wife and I had friends in town that wanted to meet us for dinner. When you live in the tourist center of the United States, it's inevitible that a friend will be on vacation and want to say their hellos while they're in town. Not a bad thing at all. Usually we'll meet up and take them to a local spot that the tourists don't know about or we'll hit up a restuarant at one of the big theme park hotels and enjoy something there. Not this time. You see, these people, while very nice, don't exactly have the most sophisticated palattes and they wanted to go to Olive Garden.
<insert eyeroll here>
My wife tried to protest a little, but they were insistant and it was their vacation so we relectantly agreed. Now for anyone outside of the US, you might not be familiar with this a restaurant, and I use the term restaurant very lightly here, allow me to give you a quick explanation of it. The Olive Garden is a nationwide chain of Italian restaurants that has a lovely southern Italian atmosphere. Their philosophy is to offer good breadsticks and salad, and then have everything else on the menu be just good enough that if you wind up in an unfamiliar area and see an Olive Garden you'll go in there because you know its safe. At least that used to be the philosophy. Over the past decade the quality of their food has really gone down to the point where when someone recommends going there, they're just going for the joke. No one wants to eat at the Olive Garden.
And just to be clear, I'm no food snob. If you give me a choice between The Waffle House and any other restaurant, I'll take the Waffle House 2 out of 3 times. The Olive Garden is just crap. It's Italian food for morons or for people who have never eaten food before.
So, you can imagine how excited I was to go back. Here's the funny thing though. The food wasn't terrible this time. It wasn't great, but I wasn't offended. The last time I went about 2 years ago, everything came out cold and tasteless. This time.... it was the old slightly-better-than average Olive Garden. Dinner with good friends and almost good food. Not a bad way to spend an evening. But you know what's a really bad way to spend your morning? Shitting your guts out.
Yep, the meal that started with the never ending pasta bowl finished with never getting off the toilet bowl. Yes, Saturday was not a good day. Not since Gaming Geek visited the exotic sub-continent of India has one man shit so much. I had planned to get through a big chunk of Kingdom Hearts that day. It wasn't meant to be. Apparently only Hearthstone and other cell phone games could be played. Sunday wasn't much better. How I wasn't completely hollow at this point was truly a mystery. I can only assume that amongst my dish of tortolini was a small wormhole that lead to the feces dimension, and it still hadn't gone through my system.
The rest of the work week hasn't been much better. I've been keeping it to soup, crackers, and stuff like that in hopes that it would end. While the constant barrage has ended, I'm still having bad moments. Today while I was driving home, I had to stop and use the bathroom at a Home Depot. For the record, lets take a moment and thank the fine men and women who keep those bathrooms sparklingly clean. I hope that was the last of it, but I'm not really sure. My current theory is that I may have completely shit out my colon and lower intestine, and this is just how the rest of my life will be. Guess I'll find out tomorrow.
At any rate, hope you guys enjoy reading this over breakfast, lunch or dinner.
Man, I never thought I'd have to dust this thread off, but sadly I do. This week I accidentally ate Olive Garden food and the result was pretty similar to the last time when I wrote the original post last year. Lots of bowel and toilet trauma.
This week was my company's annual strategy and planning week. All the employees from across the country all fly into Orlando where most of our employees are located. We rent a hotel with small convention facilities and we get together for 2019 planning, the holiday party, and group exercises and stuff like that. Anyway on Wednesday we had some meetings and during the lunch break we had Italian food that was set up in the hotel lounge in buffet setting. It was fine, nothing special, but what do you expect from standard hotel food. Except for the breaksticks.... those were pretty damn good. And once lunch was over I figured out why. Our lunch was not actually catered by the hotel. It was just served by them. The food was actually from the Olive Garden.....fuck.
So yeah, that night was spent in the bathroom. As were many hours in the morning and evening the next day. And some of Friday morning as well. Forunately it seems to have passed quicker this time around and yesterday was fairly normal, but fuck this fucking restaurant.
You have become allergic to Olive Garden.
You have to eat there more often so as to build up an immunity.