Friday, Dec. 27, 2002 | 8:56 a.m.
Susan Snyder's column appears Fridays Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at [email protected] or (702) 259-4082.
We sat in one of Las Vegas' better restaurants Christmas night wondering whether our water refills were to arrive by reindeer or wise men.
We'd have settled for dumb man or beast. But our glasses remained empty for the duration of the meal.
Eating out on Christmas may seem blasphemous to those who haven't tried it. But with our families scattered across most of the United States and only two of us and a cat at home, it seemed ridiculous to cook. So we opted to let someone else destroy a kitchen.
We realize, of course, that Christmas Day shifts are reserved for the B-teams. We realize that everyone's a little more lax because it is a holiday. We also hope the wait staff realizes that many diners figure a restaurant is either open or it's not. Service is deal, and if you're open you're hawking it.
The food was fabulous. We ate better than many that evening, and we had the money to pay for it. We opened more gifts than two grownups should be allowed to open Christmas morning. We did it in a warm house and topped it off with a fine breakfast.
So why, then, would we fester over a couple of empty water glasses and a wait staff that couldn't quite figure out who had ordered what at which table?
A new Gallup Poll says it's because we've become a nation of whiners. A January survey showed 65 percent of Americans were happy, but one completed this month showed our satisfaction had dropped to 46 percent, a USA Today report says.
It seems life's a bummer for the average American. We niggle over the person with 17 items in the 15-item grocery line. We sigh loudly and roll our eyes when an older person wants to count out 67 cents from a coin purse.
We grumble about traffic, our jobs, the guy across the street who left his garage door open longer than what association rules allow. We mistreat telemarketers and quibble over an Internet connection that takes two minutes longer than we want to wait.
Cripes, we're spoiled.
Need more proof? We have a whole website devoted to just crabbing about stuff. It's called compliants.com. You can search for griping on any topic from lousy restaurant service to cars to potato chips.
There are 23 complaints involving socks. Many have to do with socks that have been lost inside luggage that vaporized once it was placed aboard an airplane. One of these is an hourly play-by-play spanning a week's worth of frustration sustained by a man whose bag was lost on Spirit Airlines. Seems after buying underwear the $25 daily clothing allowance left him "only $5 to buy (expletive) socks!"
Another complaint was a 345-word essay regarding a mail-order assortment of socks that did not meet the buyer's expectations.
"What outraged me is that 12 socks are white, 12 socks are red, all of the same type but of two different colors."
"Outraged"? Over socks?
Spoiled is hardly the word for us.
We should forget about fraudulent footwear and focus on what's important -- such as being glad we don't live in Venezuela. They're out of beer. The nation's top producer stopped brewing Dec. 2 in the country's general strike against President Hugo Chavez.
It's harder to get a beer in Caracas than it is to get a glass of water on Christmas Day in Las Vegas.
You want some fries with that crab?
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