In honor of Restaurant Week in Chicago, we consider the lure of warm bread, half-price wine, and other ways I’m trying to turn my restaurant meals into a deductible “research expense” for this blog. What could possibly go wrong?

1. Whenever I’m in a restaurant and they bring warm rolls to the table, my opinion of the place improves. Warm bread says, “Welcome home,” while cold bread says, “We couldn’t be bothered.”
   
   
2. Speaking of which, I hate it when a restaurant proclaims proudly that a dish is “deconstructed.” If I wanted to put it together myself, I’d have gone to Ikea.
   
   
3. Shouldn’t steak tartare be a lot cheaper than a hamburger, since they don’t have to cook it or slice a tomato? I suspect a pricing cartel is at work.
   
   
4. Every so often, I’ll ask for a different table in a restaurant and they’ll tell me it’s reserved for someone else. When I call for a reservation, though, they’ll tell me they don’t hold specific tables. This is one of the many ways restaurant operators tell you they think you’re an idiot.
   
   
5. We went to New York a while ago and a friend recommended a specific restaurant as the most romantic place she had ever been to in her life. So we went and we had dinner and it was okay, but…I think the difference was whomever she was, um, dating at the time.
   
   
6. On half-price Mondays, you end up with a bottle of wine that costs about as much as you should have been paying the other six days of the week.
   
   
7. Sure sign of a restaurant that’s not going to last very long: The staff wants you to know how lucky you are to be there.
   
   
8. The best way to immunize your kids against every possible disease is to let them draw on their place mats with the restaurant’s crayons.

 
And on that appetizing note, we wish you a great week of fine dining, with warm bread, great wine and a staff that knows how to mix the *&^%($%# salad. 
 
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​Every so often you get a brilliant idea. You wake up in the middle of the night and say, "GADZOOKS, THIS IS GENIUS!!" And maybe you grab a note pad by your bed and write down your $billion$ idea and then, when you wake up the next morning, you look at the note and try to figure out what you meant when you wrote, “put it online and phzilkygiiisz.”
 
I know how you feel. My penmanship, which is somewhere between doctor and dachshund, gets even worse in the middle of the night. If I could have read the notes about all my great ideas the next morning, I’d be so rich right now that I’d have someone sitting by the bed all night, just waiting to take dictation. 
 
Until then, I’ll just have to content myself with the recognition that some of those billion-dollar ideas might not have panned out quite as well as hoped. For every idea that hits it big—Pet Rocks, Hula Hoops, carpal tunnel syndrome—another 500 turn out to be expensive flops. I know, because I invested in most of them.
 
There is something much worse than a bad idea that flops, however. Far more expensive and irritating are all the bad ideas that succeed. We are plagued daily by timesavers and solutions that cause much more trouble than they’re worth. They might have seemed like good ideas at the time, but they come from a box labeled Pandora. My own Hall of Shame includes:

• Automatic faucets.  Okay, just move your hand a little closer; no, just a bit more. Oh, did the water just soak your sleeve? Bwaahahahahahah. Automatic faucets seem like such a convenience, but we have no control over the water temperature, how much water comes out or, in some cases, whether the water comes out at all. If only there was some kind of manual override for these things, maybe a handle of some sort that could turn the water on and off and adjust the temperature? Someday, perhaps, such a device could be invented.

 

• Voice mail. Voice mail is the greatest wealth transfer mechanism in the universe, bigger and more far-reaching than Nigerian princes, airline fees, or taking your kids to Disneyworld. Millions of companies save the cost of having people answer phones and take messages; then pay their few remaining employees to leave messages for somebody else. Is anybody actually saving money here?

 

• Rolling luggage. It’s luggage without the lugging. What could possibly go wrong? Well, for starters, the rollers and handles add weight to the bag and take up storage space, and the boarding process is delayed at least ten minutes while people try to figure out how to put their bags in the overhead bins wheels-first. And then we burn up fewer calories than when we carried our luggage, so we’re too fat to fit into our seats on the plane and…

 

• Reply All. Reply all is a shortcut in name only. Send an invitation to ten people and nine will hit reply all to announce whether they intend to show up, ask about the dress code, mention that they’re lactose intolerant and make a snide comment about someone else on the distribution list. After a few cycles of this nonsense, nobody has a clue about the situation being discussed.

 

• Coffee sleeves. Let’s see, we want to save a few trees by making the coffee cups thinner, but now they’re too hot for mortal hands, so we need to kill some trees to make an oven mitt for the coffee cup, and now we have to pay the staff to stock and stack both cups and sleeves. Problem? Solved!!

 

• Social Networking. I’m spending about two hours a day scrolling through Facebook entries and Linkedin entries and checking out tweets. Most of the stuff is boring, so I don’t bother responding. Meanwhile, thanks for calling, but I can’t take an hour off to meet you for lunch today. I’m too busy being social. All alone. At my desk. Surrounded by friends I’ve never met and strangers I used to know.

​ 

• Drive-Through. I don’t have to get out of my car to pick up the dry cleaning, buy my breakfast, drop off a deposit at the bank or mail a letter. I’d be saving tons of time, except that idiot in front of me can’t decide whether to get the hash browns or the tater tots and the guy before him didn’t like the foam on his latte and I had to wait five extra minutes while they re-steamed his non-fat yak milk. Meanwhile, that family of four that was going inside when I pulled up here is done with their breakfast and heading to their car. I can’t understand why they didn’t take advantage of this convenient drive-through lane.

 

• Loyalty Programs. Booking a plane ticket on the company’s dime and earning free trips as a result? Now that’s what they mean when they say ‘something for nothing.’ Except that the flights aren’t available and there’s a fee for cashing in the points and the number of miles needed for a free trip keeps rising. Whether its hotels, airlines, book stores, restaurants, hardware stores or grocers, I’ve been seduced and abandoned by half of corporate America. I’d stop the madness, except I’m only 3,200 points away from a free pencil. Without a doubt, points are the crystal meth of marketing.

 
The list goes on and on, but all this whining is tiring me out. Time for me to go take a nap and dream about some great new ideas to improve our lives. If we’re really lucky, I’ll forget all about them before I wake up.

Of course, the best idea of all is to subscribe to dadwrites.com and learn all the things we'll be mumbling about on the subway in the coming week. Just click here, or maybe here, or even here, and all your problems are solved. 

​Some days, you just marvel at how crotchety you’ve become, although in my case there has been a veritable landslide of provocation behind my agitation.  To wit…

1. The other day I deleted an ad from Facebook and got the message: “Thanks for your feedback! Your response will help us show you better ads.” Because I was worried I wasn’t seeing the best ads possible.
2. Whoever invented speed bumps should be tied to the bottom of a sports car chassis…
3. Unless you’re planning to put a Jumbotron on your ass, could you just sit down and let the rest of us watch the game?
4. I generally oppose capital punishment, but when it comes to the engineers who decided everything in my house needs to beep, I’ll make an exception.  
5. I spend way too much of my life listening to updates about a person I met once, or maybe not at all, who is a third cousin of another person I met once, or maybe not at all, who is now a success/failure/movie star/governor/dead. As you would expect, I cannot wait to hear what happens next.  
6. How hard should it be to unsubscribe? One site asks for a password, others ask me to prove I'm not a robot, and others leave about four inches of white space to scroll past before you come to the unsubscribe line. Because they think all this aggravation will make me decide I love the site after all. 
7. Air travel must be getting increasingly popular, since I invariably end up boarding behind people who are taking their first flight. 
8. And while we’re on the topic of transportation, it turns out that hundreds of people in Illinois have been given death sentences recently. I know, because I end up behind them while they are driving to their executions.

 
End of rant, at least for now. Stay tuned for the next time I’m really cranky.

BTW, I get really cranky when people fail to subscribe to our weekly outbursts.  You can help me become a much better and reduce my need for meds, simply by  clicking on this link and signing up for our weekly posts. 

 
Please save me from all the financial experts shoveling good advice on me for the new year, especially as the bar keeps getting set lower and lower for whatever constitutes “good” advice. As I read the papers and the blogs and the news sites so far, here’s the gist of it:

• Don’t spend money on things you can’t afford.
• Invest for the future.
• It’s better to pay a low interest rate than to pay a high rate. (Now they tell me!!)
• Be employed. (Bonus points if you have a job with a salary, health care and a pension, along with a pet unicorn.)

 
The list goes on, but you get the idea. It’s all the kind of stuff you knew when you were in high school and, if you haven’t paid attention until now, there’s no reason to expect that the click of a calendar is going to change things.
 
No, what we need is new advice, advice for the life we live today and the world as we (wish we didn’t) know it. To get you started, here are a few suggestions to make you more financially successful:

• By the time you hear about a hot new investment, it will no longer be hot or new. The people who got in on the ground floor have a smart exit strategy: dumping it on you.
• No great investment idea ever arrived by e-mail. If the investment is that solid, it’s going to the guy who can write one $10 million check, not to ten million guys with a dollar each.
• Speaking of which, it’s too late to buy gold. The next hot commodity will be Pontiac sedans. As Will Rogers said about land, they ain’t making any more of them.
• After you have a couple Pontiacs in your garage, start filling the trunks with plastic straws. The black market for these things is booming.
• Forget staycations as a way to save money. The next big vacation trend will be weekends in a bed and breakfast—except that you have to be the host.
• Scrapbooking is out. Quilts made from plastic bags and recycled newspapers are in.
• Hot new job: iPhone lost-and-found clerk. The hourly wage is low, but the tips are great and the blackmail opportunities are even greater.

• Hot new retirement destination: Whatever small town your grandparents came from in 1897.
• If you have enough extra junk that you had to rent a remote storage facility, it’s time to learn how to sell on eBay.
• Don't expect to make much money on eBay, because pretty much everyone you know is trying to empty their storage facility, too.
• If the remote storage facility is heated, consider whether you can downsize just a bit further and live there.

 
Following this advice will guarantee you a prosperous New Year, a comfortable retirement and, quite possibly, immortality. Let’s see you get that from one of those name-brand experts.

Speaking of immortality, subscribing to the dadwrites blog is a perfect way to ensure that this website lives forever, or at least until we miss a payment to Godaddy. If only there was A LINK TO SUBSCRIBE.