Steak: It's What's For Dinner

Maybe I've got too much time on my hands, but I have noticed that there are just too many pansy-ass chain steakhouses trying to pass themselves off as legit these days. Between Outback, Lone Star, Black Angus, and Logan's Roadhouse, the casual-dining steakhouse market is expanding faster than America's waistlines. So what exactly is the problem with these restaurants? Allow me to elaborate:

By making steakhouses more accessible to casual diners, restaurant owners have increased their appeal to new markets and increased profits. On the other hand, they've filled their restaurants with all kinds of gimmicks that I don't want to see in a steakhouse. From side salads to families with little kids, steakhouses are no longer a place for adults to go and enjoy a hearty meal. They have become just as homogenized and cliché as every other fast-food chain out there.

When it comes to beverages, I think a good steakhouse should not even have a wine menu. I don't care if you fancy a glass of Yellow Tail or Shiraz with your top sirloin, go be a sissy at a bar somewhere. Steakhouses should only serve milk, water, lemonade, and beer with meals because soda is for kids and wine is for sissies.

Another thing that bugs me about steakhouses is when they try to act all intimate and fancy. You know, the ones that have an elderly couple holding hands at a candlelight table in the TV commercials. Black Angus, I'm looking at you and your high-backed booths and cloth napkins. The lights are so "romantic" and dim it's like eating in a damn broom closet. Cut that nonsense out! Turn the lights on and get real.

Perhaps the cheesiest steakhouse I've ever been to is Logan's Roadhouse. There's a brand new one by my house and the inside is so over-engineered I thought at first I walked into Chipotle by accident. The new-but-made-to-look-really-old decor does not impress me. I think the designers wanted the inside to look rustic and weathered like a local bar and grill, but it's not fooling me. I can just see the construction crews staining the wood panels to look older than they really are, as if it makes eating there more fun or something.

Every table at Logan's Roadhouse has a dish of peanuts waiting for you, and just to prove how badass you are, you can throw the shells on the floor when you're done. That's right, no napkins or trays for your shells. Come on guys. A real steakhouse like Bill Johnson's Big Apple has sawdust all over the floor. Not only is it a fire hazard, but it's probably in the food, too. That's what I'm talkin' about! I wouldn't have it any other way.

At Logan's, you can choose from no more than six cuts of meat while the rest of the menu has things like salads, seafood, and appetizers. Don't waste your breath trying to tell me that "those menu items are for the people who don't want steak." Ah, news flash, don't go to a steakhouse then!

If you want salad, go to Souper Salad. If you want seafood, go to Red f-ing Lobster. When I am in the mood for steak, I want to visit a restaurant that has a good selection of beef cuts on the menu! I want to choose from Ribeye steaks, T-Bones, Top Sirloin, New York Strip steaks, Porterhouse, and Filet Mignon! Seriously, what else do you want? A kids menu? Forget about it and get them a Happy Meal at McDonald's instead.

Probably the closest thing to a "real" steakhouse is the Miner's Camp restaurant in Apache Junction. The entire building is made of wood that looks weathered because it really is. It's been at the base of the Superstition Mountains for decades. The place looks like a strong breeze might knock it over before your food even arrives. I like that.

The dining experience is also very different from today's corporate-owned steakhouses. Instead of dining in dark, romantic booths, you sit at a long row of picnic benches with other customers. Nobody gets their own table.

The food is served on tin plates and cups which are delightfully noisy. Side dishes such as corn and potatoes come in small, cast-iron cauldrons (for lack of a better word). There's no jukebox playing today's top country music hits or any neon signs for Bud Light.

Although it doesn't have the sawdust or the best tasting food, the Miner's Camp is the realest steakhouse I've ever been to. If you're tired of family-friendly steakhouses that cater to families with small children and play piped-in Muzak while you wait for your cheese sticks to arrive, it's time for a change. Get out and find yourself a good local steakhouse where they take some pride in what they do. You'll be glad you did.

I'm not the only one who feels this way:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTHixb0p4go

Tech Support

I hate the idea of tech support hotlines. I don't like call centers, help desks, or support tickets. I don't like the idea of a person calling a stranger on the phone for help with a very technical problem as anything other than a last resort. Every time I suspect that people can't possibly get any more stupid and helpless, I am proven wrong.

For some reason, callers not only expect an easy answer to their problem, but they believe they are entitled to know the answer. They always think they are so very special and that they deserve to be told what to do. More often than not, they might have arrived at the answer if they had just tried to resolve it themselves.

The people who call tech support hotlines have the wrong attitude about problem solving. They don't even consider that 1) they might already have the answer and 2) they might be able to find the answer on their own. If it doesn't work right out of the box, they automatically assume it is someone else's responsibility to make it work for them. Never mind that the instructions are right there, these callers cannot be bothered to take a look at them.

Think back for a moment to the frontier days of wagon trains, gold rushes, and westward expansion. People during this time were much more adept at solving problems than people of today. Can you imagine if they had tech support hotlines back then? "Um, yeah, my rifle jammed up and there's a band of horse thieves coming this way. What should I do?" Ah, get the hell out of Dodge for starters!

Just the same, if your printer is not printing black ink, wouldn't your first step be to check the black ink cartridge you just installed? Wouldn't you check to make sure it has paper and that it's connected before calling someone for help with a print error? For some people, this is too much of a stretch for their minds. For whatever reason, tech support callers are not imaginative people. They never ask "What if...?" because if they did, they would not need to call.

In the frontier days, if you didn't figure out how to trade for or hunt for food, you would die of hunger. Simple as that. Being able to "figure it out" without being told the answer is a critical skill for survival. If nobody ever showed you the best way to trap food or hunt, then you had better learn real quick because the price for failure of this task was a hungry death.

Back then, people were willing to do something that people today are extremely reluctant to do: figure it out for themselves. Today, there are no consequences for being ignorant and lazy. You won't die if you are unable to set the clock on your DVD player or install your own printer drivers.

It seems like nobody these days can be bothered to sit down and read the directions. They just want to call someone up and tell them the answer. Most of the time on the phone, the technician is reading from a copy of the same manual that shipped with their equipment.

This "cannot be bothered to" mentality has created a problem in modern society: the people who are too stupid to survive do not die. In fact, they always seem to end up inconveniencing the rest of us by driving 35mph in the high-speed lane on the freeway or bringing a full shopping cart through the express checkout lane. These are the people who cannot send email attachments and blame every computer error message on a virus. Please get a fucking clue, guys. It's not that hard and you really can solve your own problems. Just TRY.

The bottom line with tech support is that it's never smart people with broken equipment who call in. It's always the loudest, dumbest, most irrational hotheads with brand new equipment that works fine who decide to pick up the phone.

I'm not the only one who feels this way:
http://notalwaysright.com/
http://blog.crankingwidgets.com/2008/04/21/get-fantastic-tech-support/
http://callcentersurvivor.blogspot.com/

Why I Hate Twitter

One of the most popular social-networking sites of the past few years is Twitter. Members of the site post brief, 140-character long messages known as "tweets" whenever they feel like it. This allows friends and family to keep up with the user's activities throughout the day. Twitter is free to use, explosively popular, and utterly stomach-churning to me.

There are lots of reasons why I hate Twitter, starting with the absolutely awful name. If Twitter is the name of the website, does that mean its members are all "Twits?" Last time I checked, that was a pretty undesirable thing to be called.

The second reason I hate Twitter is the nature of the service that they provide. By posting "tweets," your friends and family can know what you're doing at any moment throughout the day. I guess the telephone, the answering machine, the cell phone, the voicemail box, the text message, the letter, the handwritten note, email, instant messaging, MySpace comments and messages, blogs, and good old fashioned talking to your friends just aren't enough to keep in touch in these modern times! With so many ways to communicate with one another, is one more really necessary?

Third, the type of information that people post on Twitter is so boring, useless, and inane that I cannot believe anyone cares about this stuff. Does my cousin across the country really care that I ate a burrito for lunch today? Is it critical that my friends and co-workers know when I am procrastinating on my homework? Does anyone at all need to know that I got a new pair of shoes or got my car's oil changed this weekend?

The information people post on Twitter is beyond trivial; it has no value to anyone. If I did something truly noteworthy like get engaged, move to a new house, or change careers, I'd let my friends know with a telephone call, email message, or other form of communication mentioned above.

When people make a post such as: "Just got dressed, heading out to work now" it is really not noteworthy. What do you want, praise for accomplishing a simple everyday task? Do you expect a pat on the head for that meager accomplishment, or are you just a whore for attention?

The whole Twitter phenomenon reminds me of the popular catchphrase of the 1990's: TMI, or Too Much Information. In context, the expression is used when someone tells you all the dirty details and it makes you uncomfortable. I certainly don't think strangers on the Internet need to know that I'm heading out to the library to return an overdue book or that I was late to work this morning because I had to clean up a big pile of cat barf on the rug. I hesitate to tell those things even to close personal friends, but apparently some people have no shame (especially when it comes to very personal medical problems).

The fourth reason that Twitter sucks is its 140-character limit. With an email or telephone call, I am free to say as much as I want to, whether it's ten words or ten thousand words. I am free to add pictures, video, and anything else I want to get my message across. The Internet is all about removing boundaries on creative self-expression, unless you're on Twitter in which case you are required to stay in your 140-character corral. After all, you don't want to get too detailed or anything.

Finally, I hate Twitter because it is made for the laziest kind of people. I view Twitter users as people too lazy to place a telephone call, compose an email, or tap out a text message because it takes too much work. For them, Twitter is a quick and easy way to say "Hey world, pay attention to me!" without the effort of picking up a phone, writing a blog, or doing anything creative that takes real effort.

To summarize, Twitter has a terrible name, it is unnecessary in our thoroughly-connected modern society, it is full of useless information, its members have no shame about what they share, and it's the quickest path to becoming an attention whore ever devised. Fuck Twitter.

I am not the only one who feels this way:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18445274/ 
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1877187,00.html 
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1879169,00.html
http://www.zazzle.com/i_hate_twitter_tshirts-235256829573788183