mold is good… it’s the stuff that makes penicillin, right?

Sorry I haven’t been around a lot this weekend, but our friends Andy and Patti just loaned us every episode of the UPN series Veronica Mars, the classic Ed Wood film Plan 9 from Outer Space just entered the public domain by way of the Internet Archive, and the baby and I started swimming classes. (They closed off one half of the pool while we were there, marching around in a circle and dunking the babies while singing about the Grand Old Duke of York, when something “poop-like” was seen scooting across the bottom. I still don’t get the logic of clearing half the pool, as we were all still in the same water with it, but I’m not a professional lifeguard. (Linette says they moved us just so no one would step on it.)) I also think I ingested a ton of mold while eating at The Bomber, and that caused me to spend a good part of yesterday curled up in a ball of panic, just waiting for the diseases to start manifesting themselves.

I don’t want to criticize The Bomber. I eat there quite a bit, and I like the staff. And, up until yesterday, they’d never tried to pull a Yuschenko on me.

I don’t think you have to have OCD to appreciate the shock of finding two, little blotches of mold on the last piece of french toast as it enters your mouth. I think that’s got to cause universal recoil, the way that finding half a worm in an apple must… So, I notice these two furry, blue spots on the side of the toast. I considered running out into the parking lot and throwing up, but decide that it probably wouldn’t help anyway, as most of it had already made it’s way through my digestive tract, sped along by the coffee… So, I sat there, just staring at the mold, until our waitress came over. I told her what had happened and suggested that they might want to look at the other bread, just to make sure no one else was being served mold. I didn’t ask for my money back, or anything like that, but when she left, she took not only the toast, but our bill. A minute or so later, she reappeared to tell me that the manager had looked at it, determined that it wasn’t mold, and that she wouldn’t be removing it from my check. She handed the check back to me. (The bread, I assume, had been disposed of.)

I said, “So, what was it… in the manager’s opinion?” She told me that, “something must have fallen into the batter,” which didn’t make me feel a whole lot more comfortable, but we paid our bill and left, and I felt queasy for the rest of the morning as I wondered just how much mold I’d ingested… And, yes, I know mold when I see it. I’m an adult, and I’ve experienced moldy bread before. Before giving it to her, I’d split the bread in the middle of one of the spots and I could clearly see the purple-blue fuzz spreading out like a virus toward the center.

I don’t like to use this site as a stump from which to criticize local businesses. There are certainly some things I could say about other places, but I don’t think it would be in the best interest of our community. What pissed me off about this, however, isn’t that there was mold in the food, but that my suggestion to check the rest of the bread wasn’t taken seriously. It might seem like a little point, but it’s important to me. And, I didn’t like the inference that I was just pointing it out in order to have it taken off of my bill. I’ve spent lots and lots of money there over the past few years, and, until this incident, I’ve never said a thing. In spite of that, however, they gave the impression that I’d just pointed out the mold in order to get the $5 taken off my bill. It wasn’t good customer service.

So, how should they have handled it? Well, I would have done one of two things. I would have checked the bread in the back. If there was mold, I would have thrown the bread away, and thanked the customer for spotting it. I would have also apologized and comped the entire bill, but that’s just me. If, however, there was no mold on the bread in the kitchen, I would have brought the loaf out, shown it to the customer and said, “I don’t know what those spots were, but I don’t think they were mold.” I might have even suggested that the discoloration had been caused by blueberries that were being used in the pancakes, which are also cooked on that same grill. I would have handed the bill back to the customer, and thanked him for bringing it to my attention. What I wouldn’t have done, however, is just tell the customer that it wasn’t mold…

I can’t believe I just wrote three paragraphs on that… especially when there are so many more interesting local things we could be talking about, like the lovefest blossoming on Bretts’s site for local scumloard David Kircher, or the fact that our city is adopting a 1% income tax. But, no, I’d rather spend my time complaining about the mold in my french toast.