Two or more mistakes

I got sucked into the first mistake by an e-mail from Borders inviting me to buy a $25 restaurant coupon for $3. It sounded like a good deal at the time, so I bought a coupon while we were still in Belarus last June. All summer long, I was thinking, “I don’t want to forget to use that valuable restaurant coupon while I’m still in the USA.” (This may have been another mistake, but who’s counting?)

We made the next mistake a few nights ago when we decided to find a local restaurant where we could use our coupon. We knew some of the restaurants on the list, but decided to try a new one in the Italian part of town. When I opened the restaurants.com page where I could customize my $25 coupon to the restaurant we chose, I was a little concerned to read several paragraphs of fine print about when and how we could use the coupon. Unfortunately, it was late at night and I didn’t want to waste any more time re-thinking our choice of restaurants. That decision didn’t work out so well this time.

When we got to the restaurant, we had a wide choice of tables. That is to say, there was just one other couple in the entire place. We thought hard enough to recognize that this is generally a bad sign, but we had our stupid $25 coupon in our hands and decided to eat there anyway because the reviews said the food was better than the service, and we felt pretty confident we wouldn’t have any trouble getting the waitress’ attention when we wanted her.

I won’t count any more mistakes, but I’ve got to say that the food wasn’t all that great and the coupon didn’t make it any kind of a bargain. After applying the coupon, our bill came to $61 for simple bland food based on less than $20 worth of ingredients. Let’s just say that we learned a few things this evening.