Dinner, the easy way

There are a lot of nights (pretty much every night) that I decide to have an easy dinner. You know, warm up the left-overs, eat a frozen burrito, make a sandwich, have some cereal. It is just so much quicker than making from scratch for yourself every night. However, when I go out to eat I expect my meal to be prepared for me. One could argue that a cooked meal is indeed what you are paying for. Of course, atmosphere and not doing the dishes are included in the price, but the meal is really the primary reason for going out to eat.
It is no surprise, then, that I was somewhat aghast when my dinner came looking like this:In case the picture does not do justice to my dish, I will describe what I ordered and what arrived. I ordered the "Pear Salad". Doesn't that sound good. A nice salad with fruit. I love salad, and I love pears, so it was a match made in heaven. However, what I got is not something I would ever describe as "salad," even in the most liberal sense of the word. The plate that came to me consisted of a head of iceberg lettuce (still in it's head form) with a slit cut in the top and three pear slices placed in the slit to give it a mohawk look, around which was sprinkled cranberries and almonds, with a bit of dressing drizzled throughout. Don't get me wrong, I am willing to work to eat food (i.e. I will cut my steak myself, I will even put the condiments on my hamburger), but seriously, I was there to order dinner, not ingredients to make dinner. I was at a restaurant, not a grocery store. I was tempted right then to ask if they could just box up my "salad" throw in some carrots and tomatoes and send me home so I could make a salad out of what they brought me. Instead, I laughed. I was still laughing when the waitress came back to ask how the food was. I was laughing so much that I couldn't even tell her what a joke of a dinner she brought me. And, I hate it when people complain about what the ordered and ask for something different. So, I cut up my head of lettuce with my fork and knife (how else would you eat it) and sparingly added toppings to my fork-fulls of lettuce. The amazing thing, I was as hungry when I left as when I arrived at the restaurant, because it turns out that iceberg lettuce is really just water with a lettuce shell. The sad thing is that I didn't even get good atmosphere for my money- they sat me in the aisle at the end of my table, and people kept bumping into me as they walked by because there was not enough room for me and foot traffic. The nice thing, my friend paid for my dinner for me. This was possibly because he felt bad because I started out the evening by crying. Oh well. A free meal is a free meal. Beggars can't be choosers, right.