What If I Were a Vegetarian?

 

Today I saw a meeting on my calendar for Friday, and it had a room listed. This is an infrequent meeting a committee I am on has to discuss campus protests, and the last time we had one, it was online. I emailed the organizer to ask if it would be online again this time, or if it would be in person, since there was a room listed. I said, "I generally work from home on Fridays, so please let me know if I do need to come into campus this Friday." For most of the day I heard nothing, then suddenly I got a request to remove the meeting from my calendar because it had been canceled. Makes sense, since I don't recall any protests on campus since the last meeting. Unless they were only canceling the meeting for me so I didn't have to come to campus... I mean, I would have come in for the meeting. Maybe I could have worked from home on Thursday instead. My new boss seems more flexible about these things than the former one was.

One odd thing about yesterday at the Nitty Gritty was that I ordered a falafel burger, and it came a choice of a side. I asked about the soup, and the waiter said it was cheesy vegetable soup, so I said, "I'll take that." You would think he would assume I was a vegetarian if I'm ordering falafel and vegetable soup at a burger joint, right? When the soup arrived, it was that Italian wedding soup that is creamy with spicy sausage, and it was really good, but it struck me as weird that the waiter didn't think to warn me that it was not the vegetarian soup he had described but a completely different soup that contained meat. Maybe not many vegetarians go to a burger joint, but it is the "birthday bar," so you would think some would come just to join friends on their birthday. What if I had been a vegetarian? I'm not, so it wasn't really a big deal, but I just found it strange that the waiter didn't consider that maybe I didn't want meat. What do my readers have to say about this? Am I making a big deal about nothing? After all, I didn't ask him to specify that there was no meat in the soup. Still, even ignoring the meat issue, you would think the waiter would come tell me, "Sorry, I was really wrong about the soup - it's Italian wedding soup. Do you still want it, or would you rather have fries or a side salad?" Is this bad customer service?

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