One of the managers on our team from Austin is in RTP this week, so he joined our department and 2nd Line Manager for a lunch out at Uno Chicago Grille in Brier Creek. Service was incredibly slow and there were issues with the restaurants credit card handling system. As a result, we were there from about 11:45 to 1:45. I am relatively new to my department and, aside from a Christmas lunch, I had never been to lunch with them. So I learned a couple of things in those two hours.
My new department is really into food. I mean really! Like "order everything off the desert menu at one sitting" into food - which one of my colleagues had actually done at the restaurant we were eating at. Another colleague discussed with passion his recent trip to Austin where he and his buds did the Food Network Man Vs Food Austin challenge - Round Rock Donuts (complete with the famous 2 pound donut), Salt Lick BBQ, and Juan in a Million. Oh, I also learned from my 2nd Line Manager of a really cool place to get good Western New York and Coney Island-style hot dogs in Apex, NC. Though I had been to Salt Lick (Driftwood Location) on my last trip to Austin a few years ago, I'm afraid that I didn't have much to offer in the conversation - I don't eat out much and don't seem to share the passion surrounding food that my colleagues do.
(I thought about countering with some smack about Texas Hot Dogs, but it would have been pretty lame - everybody else was bringing it strong.)
The other thing I learned is that lots of people apparently still go to the movies. As in physically go to a movie theater to watch first-run movies. I guess I am projecting a bit, but for the life of me, I can't see (with affordable 1080p displays, AV receivers, Blue Ray players, and Netflix in the convenience of your house) why anyone would want to go to the theater and put up with high prices, obnoxious patrons, expensive and bad food and (most of the time) improperly calibrated projectors and sound systems. To each his own I guess. I get the "larger than life" appeal of the big screen (my mini theater room is still unfinished, sigh) but that isn't compelling enough for me. I'll just wait out the delay until the movie I am interested in is available on Blue Ray.
Finally, I found it interesting that in the second week of March, smack dab in the middle of Tobacco Road, that not once was the topic of college basketball discussed during two hours with this collection of a dozen or so people. Yes, it was a really long two hours.
