I admit it, I eat at Old Country Buffet. I like that the food there is normal food, the kind your mom used to cook. Nearly all restaurants these days have some sort of gimmick: the waiter pours olive oil into a dish on the table, instead of offering you butter; the bread you dip in the olive oil is strange; the desserts are all some “Chocolate Decadance Orgy” idiocy, which is offensive both in its misunderstanding of the meaning of the word decadence and because it’s usually no good.

Old Country Buffet, on the other hand, is incredibly gimmick-free. They serve ham, and roast beef, and vegetables, and rolls, and — this is the really exotic thing — ordinary chocolate cake (among other things) for dessert. I suppose the fact that you’ve got to go schlep the food from the buffet yourself — and can thus have three entrees if you like without seeming like too much of a weirdo — is a gimmick of sorts, but at least the food is normal.

OCB’s menu varies from day to day. On Thursday, they have banana splits, and this appears to give them license to go crazy. A person in a giant bee costume roams around (he’s the O.C. Bee, get it?) shaking hands with kids and handing out balloons.

Last Thursday night, at the OCB in Manassas, Virginia, the balloons were exploding. Spontaneously. Tino was there at the time, trying to eat dinner — trying because these balloons were popping, quite loudly, every five minutes. At first, I thought that kids were popping these things, but when the fifth balloon went off, I happened to be looking right at it. The balloons were either defective, or they were being overfilled, or both; they were exploding on their own, at somewhat predictable intervals.

After the fifth balloon went off — and after I threw peas all over the place when I jumped at the noise — I went off to find the manager. When he finally appeared from the kitchen, I told him that these balloons were exploding spontaneously, and that this was cramping my dinner style.

His response: “What would you like me to do?”

This is a standard customer-service line. I get asked this all the time when I point out that I’ve been waiting for my entree for thirty minutes, or that it’s impossible to find prices for any of the items in the store, or that my pizza has the wrong toppings on it. “What would you like me to do?” I think the point is to convey to the customer the idea that his wish will be the manager’s command: “What wouldst thou, O great one?” Aside from the fact that the customer is being asked to do the manager’s job for him, one problem with this approach is that the question is perilously close to “What do you expect me to do about it?” — the difference between them is largely in the tone, and the presumably overworked managers at these kinds of places very often deliver the line to sound like the latter.

So, anyway, there I am being asked to manage the OCB by proxy, giving commands to the manager. (See Rules For Retailers #3, “Don’t make customers work for the privilege of giving you money”.) I tell him that I’d like him to see to it that no more balloons explode before I leave. I actually say that: “I’d like you to see to it that these balloons stop exploding, by getting rid of them if necessary.” I don’t think that this is an unreasonable request: “Please stop that startling BANG noise that fills your restaurant every so often.” I point out that I’ve been exposed to balloons in the past, and that these explosions were not a necessary consequence of having balloons around. I point out that I’ve been in the presence of balloons in the presence of that very restaurant before and that there were no explosions. Basically, I said, balloons != explosions, there must be something else wrong, and it’s interfering with my enjoyment of the experience for which I have paid Buffets, Inc.

His response? “It’s only one night a week.”

His response, expanded to what he really meant: “We only have balloons one night a week, so if you don’t like to eat dinner in an atmosphere of loud BANGs, I suggest you don’t come here any more on Thursday night, you miserable fucking customer. Either lower your expectations, you asshole, or don’t spend any more money here, because we cannot be bothered to ensure that the place is even minimally commodious. Fuck you, fuck your patronage, fuck your money, and fuck the horse you rode in on.”

This, of course, is the route to profitability. I left immedately — I don’t need to spend time in a place that so clearly does not want me there — and I’ll give him what he wants: he’s won. I will not go back to that Old Country Buffet for some time, if ever (which, in practical terms, means I won’t go back to any Old Country Buffet for some time, if ever.) Eventually, if Mr. Joe Pina continues with his customer-service practices, all the potential customers will be equally disgusted with the place, and he won’t have to bother with us at all. From the looks of the place Thursday night — there were only a few people there for dinner — he’s well on his way to that happy state already. Golden Corral, a competing buffet chain, has a restaurant right down the street, and on Thursday night they had a line out the door. Perhaps Mr. Pina is a Golden Corral fifth-columnist.