Comedy Works: Experiencing a Ketchup Shortage of Epic Proportions

Last night I went to Comedy Works with my wife and our friends AJ and Bonnie. It was pretty good. It was a free night, which means the people on stage were kind of hit or miss. Some were very good, some were really painful, and the rest fell somewhere in the middle. the headliner was worthwhile, too. In any case, this is not why I've brought you here. I have brought you here to warn you about a plague that started at Comedy Works and may well be spreading to other venues near you.

This plague is a subtle, insidious demon. You wouldn't even notice it, maybe, unless you ordered a food item that is generally best served with a particular condiment. I really walked right into it by ordering french fries, I guess. Still, when my basket came, I didn't realize that I had been struck until I dipped a fry into...1/4" of ketchup in the bottom of a 1" diameter tiny bowl. For those of you playing at home, that's like a quarter of a cubic inch of ketchup. That's roughly .14 fl oz. For a basket of fries. It is approximately enough ketchup to properly dip three fries, assuming you dip once after each bite. It is enough to spread very very thinly over like 10 fries, if you dip each fry only one time and don't swirl it around to get better coverage. There is no possible way to get that much ketchup onto a whole basket of fries. There weren't enough ketchup molecules available, for each fry to have its own. I may seem to be going on and on about this, but that's only for this reason: when we asked for more, she brought us precisely one more tiny bowl with the same amount of ketchup in it, and charged us a quarter for it.

Let that sink in.

I am okay with paying $9 for a basket of fries at a show where I didn't have to buy tickets. That I understand. They need to make money, and overcharging for food is a way to do that. But charging for absolutely pitiful amounts of condiments to go with overpriced food? That's over the line. If we go back, I'm satisfying their two-item minimum by buying the two cheapest things on the menu. It'll still be $8, but it's the principle of the thing.

Also, this morning I decided to give my legs a rest and they're feeling much better. I may try to continue with a two days on, one day off schedule for the foreseeable future and see if that gets me where I want to be.