Tales of Takeout

Friday was a very lazy day around here, like a snow day except the snow hadn't started yet. The Logo channel was running a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon, and we spent most of the day switching back and forth between that and TiVo-stockpiled episodes of Mad Men that I'd been wanting to watch again before deleting.

Around 8 PM we got hungry. For a couple of years now we've been using a great online service called Foodler. Foodler has arrangements with restaurants to process online orders and forward them on, and they tell me what restaurants in my area are available for delivery service. The great thing about it is that I can place the order online, pay with a credit card, and include the tip, so when the person arrives at our door with the food, I just take it and say thank you.

Because Friday was a holiday, some of our usual places were closed, so I ended up ordering from a place we hadn't tried. But we had received takeout menus from them, so I knew of it and figured it was worth a try. I placed the order, got the email confirmation a few minutes later, and went back to watching TV. After a while I noticed that no car had pulled up in front of the house, but again, since it was a holiday I thought the place might not be at full staff.

A while after that, feeling a little growly in the gut, I went and looked at the time: it was 9:30. We'd had a couple of delayed deliveries, but this was unusual. I looked at the email and called the restaurant. I was put on hold for several minutes, and then was told that they had been having a problem with receiving their Foodler orders, that they would start on my order, and it would be about another 30 minutes.

I went back to the TV, but kept looking out the window. Eventually the Mrs. fell asleep, and I kept getting hungrier. (Sadly, we didn't have anything in the house other than candy and breakfast food.) When I finished the seventh episode of season two of Mad Men, it was 11 PM and still no food. I called the restaurant again, but they were closed (at that point I didn't have any confidence in their ability to resolve the situation anyway).

Feeling a bit light-headed from hunger and not sure what to do, I went back to Foodler to see about contacting them. I saw that another local place that we'd ordered from several times before was still open and delivering until midnight, so I placed a desperation backup order, then wrote to Foodler about the incident. Within five minutes I had received a response, and not one of those stupid computer-generated ones, but a real response, written by a human being, at 11 something on the night of a holiday. He assured me that the order had been confirmed by the restaurant at 8:05 PM, and apologized and issued me a refund.

I'm still hoping they can speak to someone there and find out what happened, but the important thing is that Foodler fixed my problem, and they did it right away. So, not that we're keeping score, but Foodler wins, and Eat at Jumbo's loses. And the other place, Caprese Pizza, did deliver my backup order, right around midnight.