Last night I was in a celebratory mood. It had been a really nice day. (I should have known that this meant that the world would fall on my head today, but that’s a separate topic.)

The William & Mary football team, which for 20 years I have followed with an inappropriate amount of emotion, had just been given the #2 seed in the national championship tournament. We’d finally gotten Beatles Rock Band working again, and the kids and I killed “Come Together.” Byron did the grocery shopping and the Costco run. All seemed right with the world.

In the late afternoon, I took the three boys for their swim team practice. I never approach swim practice with much optimism. In the past, the boys heartily complained before, during, and after every workout. Aidan often has been pulled out of practice for “time outs,” due to his inability to keep his hands (feet, belly, groin, etc.) to himself. Mack used to treat each practice as a delicious idyll, where others might be concerned with going fast and working hard, but he took more of a “what a lovely day for a leisurely glide” approach. And Reid…well, Reid is only four years old. He is the youngest and smallest kid at the workouts and, although he is proving to be a total rock star at this, I worry every week that he will suddenly realize, “Hey! I am in preschool! I can’t be expected to swim laps for an hour.”

But yesterday, all three boys had great practices. Aidan stayed focused, Mack went hard, and Reid even tried to do backstroke. My little fishies had put the cap on a lovely day. I decided to reward them by taking them to our favorite restaurant, Red Robin, for dinner. Our family’s love for Red Robin is a deep and mysterious thing. It can’t really be fully explained in a single blog entry. So I’ll just say “bottomless steak fries” and leave it at that.

We got to the restaurant and, as I usually do, I let the boys order their food first. They always know what they want, and it is just easiest to get their orders in right away. A few minutes later, Byron met us at the restaurant. He and I placed our orders, with Byron asking for an appetizer with his – but saying that everything should just come out whenever it was ready.

I know, this is riveting. But I have a point.

The kids’ meals came out fine, and they dug in. Byron and I expected ours to come soon, but they didn’t…not even the appetizer. We sat and waited, and waited. Meanwhile the kids were in the middle of their meals. Our server finally stopped by and said that the appetizer station was backed up, and he was sorry, and the onion rings would be out in a minute. Byron asked, “You’re not holding the meals back too, are you?” The server assured us that he wasn’t.

At last, the appetizer came out. We had that, and then waited some more. By this time Mack and Aidan were done eating. (Reid will never finish eating. We could sit for three hours and he would just drink his chocolate milk, pick at his food a little, and then go back to coloring.) Finally, the server approached to say that he was sorry, again, but there was a “mix up” in the kitchen and our meals had been sitting there for a while. So they were making us new burgers, and it would be just another few minutes.

He walked away and I asked Byron, “So, by ‘mix up,’ he means, ‘I didn’t pick up your food’?” But I have to say, through all of this I wasn’t really annoyed. We come to this restaurant probably 40 times a year. The kids love it, I love it, Byron tolerates it. They are always nice to us, and usually very quick. Mix ups happen…no big deal.

Finally, they brought our burgers and both of us realized pretty quickly that they were undercooked. I guess the cooks hurried, because they knew we had already been waiting a while. But again, I didn’t really care that much. By that point, I had been snacking on bottomless baskets of steak fries for the better part of an hour. I couldn’t eat much more anyway. When the server came to clear stuff off our table, he asked if there was something wrong with the burger, and I told him honestly that it was too pink for me.

Next thing we know, the manager stopped by our table to tell us that they had comped the whole meal. I was shocked! All of the kids’ food was fine, and I personally had eaten about $45 in french fries. We never even complained (although the sever could probably tell we were getting annoyed when he was clearing away the kids’ plates and our food hadn’t even come out yet).

I have had much worse service in restaurants and stores (not to mention doctor’s and dentist’s offices) and not gotten even an apology, much less a freebie. So the point of this whole story is to commend Red Robin for treating its customers right. They made a couple of minor mistakes, and we weren’t even really put out about it, but they did the right thing to make sure we keep coming back.

To be fair, the manager probably realized that if they lost our business, the franchise would go under by the end of January. So it really was a wise business decision for them.