I don't see nothing wrong with a little bump and grind?

The weekly night out for Mancouver has come upon us once again, and this time around our choice was Library Square, another Donnelly Group establishment. We chose this location due to our Vancouver Canucks bringing their #WINNING streak back to this great city of ours, and what better place to watch them in action than a location that is stumbling distance to Rogers Arena. If you can’t go to the game, might as well place yourself somewhere that’s pretty close to it.  

We seemed to have arrived at prime time, the place was packed which is always a pretty good sign, and we also got to keep our #WINNING streak of good table mojo by grabbing a sweet spot in a booth against the wall in the general bar area. We could have a double shot of excellence here – ALL the TV’s to see the game, and a perfect view of almost the entire bar so we could scout the talent.  What more could you ask for? Well we probably should have thrown good service in there, because that definitely went by the wayside as the night wore on.

Not too sure what started the bad service trilogy that we were soon to experience, but I’m going to throw it out there and say that it could have begun with the apparently unreasonable table turn that we initiated. Not wanting to have my back to the action, how could I possibly write about the men if I couldn’t see them, we decided to turn our table in such a fashion so that it could house both myself and LM behind it on the booth side. Yes this move would put us both on the same side of the table as tragic as that is, but it was imperative to the task at hand so for one night I could handle it. Well I guess I was the only one handling it, because later on we would find out that this kind of behaviour is unacceptable at Library Square.

Table finally adjusted to our liking, we settled in and happily placed our orders for the fabulous $5 Heineken pint special. The other special for the night was $6.50 specialty cocktails but when you are watching hockey, beer is totally where it’s at. I didn’t make this rule, but I will certainly follow it like a good Canadian girl. While we were waiting for our frosty treats, we scoped the room and after a assessing the situation for a few moments here’s what we noticed – the first of many rounds of awful shooters being ordered by the colleagues and associates sitting to the left of us, an array of men, some young, some an appropriate age, some with some very unusual fashion choices to attend a hockey game in, a possible UNSUB, of course our “dads” and their friends, and lastly the very distracting mixed bag of Canucks jerseys.

This last item is where we came up with a business plan for the Canucks...so listen, I understand that you’re really attached to your jersey for whatever reason it may be – it won the Stanley Cup in a heated game of NHL 98, it’s seen its fair share of beer league hockey tourneys, you accidentally got roofied at the Roxy in it, whatevs – however, the team changed the jersey colors a few years ago now. It’s time to let go of the past and ghosts of players past and get a NEW ONE. Now I’m not talking about the Flying V 

or the Flying skate, 

those jerseys are fucking awesome, I’m talking about the old blue, red and white ones

with names like Bertuzzi and Messier (he never played here as far as I’m concerned). So that being said, what we thought the Orca Bay sales team should do is that upon entry to the hockey game if you are spotted in old jersey that isn’t on the ok’d list, it is promptly ripped off your back and you are then given a 50% off coupon to go and purchase yourself a new one. Hey buy two if you think spending more money will cover up the shame of having your old jersey torn from your body in front of your fellow hockey fans, first date or impressionable young son. At least your son will now grow up knowing the important life lesson of keeping your jersey up to date. Everyone wins here. I think this could be a big success.

Now having that business plan sketched out and put to bed for the time being, we got back to our other business – men. The crowd was starting to thin as people made their way to the game, and by this time our waitress still hadn’t cracked a smile or even given us half a fake laugh despite us trying our damnedest to get her on our side so we could ask her about her thoughts on the men situation at LS. Now I understand if you’ve had a bad day to end all bad days, we’ve all been there, but when your job is in customer service really the only important thing you have to do is be nice. That’s it. Fuck everything else up, who cares, just. Be. Nice. It’s simple really. I know this because I have to do it every day myself, and no matter how many times a day you desperately want to tell people to fuck off and die, you just don’t do it. Instead you smile and say “Thank you so much!” or “I would be glad to do that for you!” Easy yes? 

No. Not for our waitress. Having given up on trying to win her over, we decided to move on with our lives as this was clearly a lost cause. Even asking her for wet naps proved to be too much, because instead we were given scalding hot water to wash away our wing sauce, and any chance of ever having be finger printed as well. It didn’t even come with the standard lemon garnish. Just a lonely bowl of super hot water. Strange, but the wings were pretty good at least. Not quite as good as the Buffalo Wild Wing goodness of Portland, that’s going to be a hard one to beat, but the Guinness BBQ sauce, was yum, yum, yummy.

So clearly we weren’t getting any info on men from our waitress, it looked like we were going to have to fend for ourselves. There were a few attractive men milling about, along with 2 or 3 more rounds of shooters for the team of booze fueled office workers a few tables away from us... something tells me that the majority of those people didn’t make it in today, and a lot of bad decisions were made. A lot. Among the attractive dudes was a cute guy in a plaid shirt (one of my favourite varieties) sitting at the bar, and a very attractive man sitting farther on the other side of the room in questionable lighting. What’s questionable lighting you ask? Questionable lighting is something that makes you say “Is he hot? Is he fucking ugly? I just can’t tell!” Luckily for us, he was sitting on the route to the washroom, so we both confirmed that yes, he was indeed hot.  Also sitting at the bar on route to hot guy much to our very delight, was Claude Windbreaker part 2, herein named Kevin Kangol Kap.

Now I’m sure that Kevin was a nice enough guy, but Kangol hats will always make me think of Samuel L Jackson, and that’s never good. I know that LL Cool J rocked them first, but he has since been over shadowed by Samuel L, so it’s just not a good look. Especially if it’s lime green and you have coordinated the rest of your outfit around it. Color coordination is a rocky road to travel down; you have to become a master at that shit before you can apply it in your everyday life. You can’t just idly decide to do it, it’s an art form, and it’s not for everybody. Also around Kevin’s general area were two fellows, one who was sporting a velvet blazer and the other a tuxedo jacket, both of them wearing a different variation of a wide leg jean. One of the jeans also came in a light denim wash. I don’t have enough time to tell you what’s wrong with wide leg jeans, let alone any jeans that come in a light wash. I just don’t. However, there ain’t nothing wrong with any kind of velvet and tuxedo fashions, you just need to pair it with something a little less ridiculous and a little more of the year 2011.  

Wow I really strayed from the story there, but let this be a lesson learned that there is some truly amazingly epic people watching to be had and enjoyed at Library Square. I probably should have started earlier in the day if I knew it was going to be so good. Anyways, back to the two attractive men... here’s where we complete the trilogy of bad waitress service.

After ordering the blackened chicken sandwich to share, again offensive apparently, we made the mutual decision not to ask our waitress for anything else if we could help it. Because she didn’t really want to get it for us. That didn’t last long as we also had to ask for ketchup for our fries. Trust me when I say we were scared. We also got wind of the convo going on next to us about how you are NOT to turn your table in such a fashion that two people can sit behind on the same side. DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS.  

I don’t know why we weren’t told the same thing, but as I said before this could have been where the waitresses hate for us stemmed from.

Anyways, this is when we started to notice the all time worst waitress shenanigans that we have ever been privy to. While we were enjoying taking in the good lookingness of CGIPS at the bar and AMIQL across the room it was brought to our attention that we weren’t the only ones enjoying them. Turns out cute guy at the bar was being molested by one waitress every time she walked by, I’m going to assume that they knew each other as they acted in a friendly manner – CLEARLY - but while you’re working, do you rub your body all over your customers before going to take your next order? Turns out you do, as this was beginning to be kind of a thing here...over at hot guys table a different waitress was sitting down at their table having a jolly old time chatting and hanging out, and later on also rubbing her body all over various guys at the table. I didn’t know this was a thing? I know getting tips is how you earn your money, but really? Actually maybe our waitress should have done that too, I would have taken grinding up on me over being angry any day.

Now I’m all for rubbing your body all over a hot man, I would never take that luxury away from someone. Hot men are a dime a dozen, if you find one do exactly that. However, there is a time and a place for things of that nature, and I’m just not sure it’s during your waitressing shift at Library Square. And yes they were both still on shift. Having worked in customer service for way too many years all I could think was “Is there a manager around? Because this shit would never fly at the places I’ve worked, that’s fo’ dayum sure”. You have one waitress that is angry as fuck and two more almost fucking the customers. It’s madness! Because we were curious, we pulled aside the poor waitress that was STILL carrying massive trays of horrible shots to the office workers – baileys, lemon drops, broken down golf carts? Are these people trying to make themselves barf and hate their lives in the morning? This waitress was quite pleasant which as a nice change of pace and told us that the manager wasn’t there at the moment...ahhhh yes. Well this explained so much.

And that was that. Though it was extremely fascinating, we were spent from having to look at all the dry humping going on around us, and from anticipating the group vomit that was about to happen in our vicinity at any moment. I didn’t want to be here to see the final outcome of either of these events.

Having been to Library Square before I knew that it was a great spot – it’s always busy on game nights, the weekends have fun music, there are fantastic drink specials, the food is pretty yummy – but the one thing lacking big time on this particular night of course was the service. I can’t recall how it was on the other times I’ve been, but this night was truly a disaster. And that’s always kind of a downer isn’t it? Having a great waitress/waiter is indeed a bonus, and I know now not to take it for granted.  I of course will return, I can handle another disaster, because you never know who’s going to be molested under the questionable lighting....

 It could be you!

Until next week...