Just a couple of random bike trips for food.  The first was to a place I’d not heard of before, although there are a few locations around here: Village Inn.  I hoped this would be like a King’s or Eat & Park from the northern area, but was a bit disappointed.  I tried the staple meal – burger and fries – but the burger had some seasoning or spice that wasn’t suiting me very well at all.  I could only eat a few bites of it.

It’s not all bad.  I gave up on the entree and went to dessert.  The chocolate pie was excellent and made up for most of the meal’s failure.

Then I went out to tourist country and ate at a Ponderosa.  It’s a location I’d been to before when I was not a local resident.  Interesting how differently you act towards attractions when you could go there every day…  Not that Ponderosa is an attraction, but Old Town is right there and it’s Halloween, which means they have a big push on the haunted house.

This meal I was treated to the excellent stories of a very special person behind me.  My impression is that he sees himself as some sort of consumer superhero.  As I understand the story, superboy was performing some bank transaction through the automated telephone service and answered some personal verification question wrong.  This immediately locked his account.  To resolve this, he called the bank directly.  I have no idea why, but he felt it necessary to disguise his voice, taking on the tone of an agitated old man with respiratory issues.  “Yes, this is so-an-so *cough cough hack snork* and you have locked my *cough COUGH* account with your damn computer *gag hack*.”  During this trial to get him verified, he answered all the questions correctly.  If he didn’t know one (and I’m not sure why he wouldn’t know his personal information), he would have a coughing fit to buy time.  Using typical hyperbole, he said they asked him a hundred questions.  Then using some sort of hybrid of hyperbole and stupidity, he said they asked him for his grandmother’s maiden name, but he answered using her married name.  The only thing I can deduce from these facts is that he was faking access to his father’s account (which would be his father’s mother’s maiden name).

Superboy goes off on a tangent.  Now he’s pissed because everything’s a ripoff.  Drinks are $2.50 (“that’s where they get ya”).  The onion rings cost an extra dollar (“That’s a scam.  They asked me if I wanted onion rings but never said it’d be an extra dollar.”).  But like my Village Inn dessert, it wasn’t all bad (“The 10% coupon I used paid for the extra charge for onion rings”) , but at the same time, he wasn’t letting go.  He somehow changes gears and relates a story about how he had to give a 7 cent refund to a customer because they felt they were incorrectly charged tax on a dollar item and how stupid and petty it was.  He somehow fails to relate his current bitching about the dollar upcharge to this story.

Please let me out of here.