So, went out to dinner tonight. Not to eat there, but to bring it home. They took the order just fine. Took my money, too. Trouble is, that’s where the trouble started.

I’m standing around waiting for my order to be filled. And turns out it was filled. Filled and waiting. I was waiting too. For them to call me. They didn’t call me. And so I waited…and waited. Until I didn’t want to wait anymore. So I went up to the counter to ask them about it when I noticed my order sitting there. Waiting on me.

So, I grabbed my order. At this point I literally could have walked out. Without paying. Literally nobody would have noticed. But I didn’t do that. You know, that whole honest thing. What a bitch, am I right? I take my bag up to the counter and say, “this is my order. It was sitting over there, but nobody called me. I would like to pay for it, please.”

One employee looked at another employee and asked them, “we don’t call them anymore?” To which the other employee shrugged their shoulders.

I paid for my order and walked out. A thought occurred to me that maybe I should check my order. Yup, good thing I did. My order came with an entree and two sides. The plate holding my order had three spaces in it. One for the entree, and two for the, you know, two sides. To my lack of surprise at this point, only two of the three spaces had anything in it. The third space, you know, for the second side was pristinley empty. Not soiled by so much as a crumb.

I went back inside and explained my lack of enthusiasm for their performance thus far. I said I’m missing a side. I explained to them that their first clue that something was wrong was the pristinely empty space on the plate. At this bit of verbosity on my part they looked uncomfortable. This made me happy.

The end of the story is I got my food and I got home. The food was cold by this time, but I no longer had the energy to throw myself against the increasing tide of incompetence and mediocrity that increasingly seems to be the norm in this country.

It was when I got home that I noticed on the receipt, stapled firmly to the bag, the quality control form at the bottom of the receipt. The purpose of which was to prevent the very set of events I just went through. The form was pristine in its emptiness. Not so much as a single stray ink mark to mar its vacancy.

Systems in place to assist or otherwise compel people to do the job they have been hired and most certainly paid to do are ignored and disregarded.

And there’s your problem.