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Dinner & Show

He got a Dinner & Show, whether he wanted it or not.

Hubby is hungry. He is watching his phone intensely, facial muscles pulsing with the changing expressions of disbelief and annoyance.

Watching him, I’m transported back in time to 2007. More exactly, to the French city of Nice where I briefly worked for an incoming travel agency.

One of the perks of the poorly paid but very fun job was that my colleagues and I regularly got invited to attend fancy events that our fresh-out-of-uni budgets wouldn’t otherwise have allowed for. After all, you needed to know what you were selling.

One such event was a Dinner & Show evening at a cabaret in Nice with a tasty tournedos steak at a front row table.

Tickets and invitations often arrived in the mail or were dropped off by sales reps, nicely dressed women who were in no hurry to leave. They knew everyone and performed the obligatory round of bisous. Sometimes sales reps brought little treats or other bribes. They were always welcomed with smiles.

I’m pulled out of my reverie by hubby’s complaints. Still fixated on his phone, the kids have now joined him in watching the food delivery spectacle.

A dinner and show is what hubby got, whether he wanted it or not, I chuckle to myself.

The delivery guy has spent the last 15 minutes circling every pedestrian alley, backyard and park lane in this residential corner of Helsinki, utterly lost. And hubby has spent the same 15 minutes watching.

We have no contact details, so all we can do is follow the show provided by the GPS service of the poor guy’s employer.

Eventually, the food arrives, cold. The delivery man looks stressed.

(The end.)

As usual, the photos have nothing to do with the text. They are memories of a trip to Paris last year.

42 replies on “Dinner & Show”

I enjoyed this, thank you! Reminded me of getting a brand new home on a brand new estate with a brand new postcode and the curry delivery man could not find the place. The curry finally came stone cold and no discount, plus I had guests, it was not just for me. PS Quick typo alert, you mean invited not invented. Have a nice weekend!

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Sunny Paris! Yay! (I did think: Huh? Has the white cupola sunken that much? And where did the bridge come from? 🙂 ) You tell two stories that are intertwined in a lovely manner, Snow. I can imagine a movie scene in wich like in cartoons thoughts are floating above heads. What the f**k is he doing? No! Not that way, you idiot! The late afternoon shadows on the side walk… Wonder what they want us to watch. Do you think another glass of this not at all to bad Chablis would hurt? Then the camera fades out, an appartmentbuilding, a street, a neighbourhood, the sky, blue, a formation of geese passing by. The sound of cutlery. 🙂

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Hahah! The sound of cutlery is quite an optimistic ending to a movie about lost food, so I’m all in! I love a happy ending! Also, let’s just swap Paris and Helsinki while we’re at it, the cupola is almost the same, after all! 😆

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I know that feeling! Have spent many hours on the tracking page of delivery services (thankfully, not waiting for food though). Two weeks ago, I was waiting for a delivery that first said it would be on Monday, didn’t come, then it said Tuesday but I had to be in office so I asked to reschedule to Wednesday, but it didn’t come on Wednesday either. Finally on Thursday, I got my package. It oddly reminded of that saying “a watched pot doesn’t boil” 😉.

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Actually with online shopping, I frel that I spend much more time to buy something – comparing stuff on different sites 🤪. Jokes apart, I forgot to mention that I enjoyed reading your post and getting a glimpse of both your past and present 😀

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For the most part, I find tracking deliveries depressing. I’ve watched UPS drive around my area, passing my house over and over for hours. At least it wasn’t food.

I hope dinner could be reheated and was still tasty.

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I was wondering what the sheep were doing! Fun! Home deliveries are off the charts these days. I wonder what the stats are on the ones that don’t reach their destination? My daughter sent me flowers recently for my birthday- the address on the box was unit 11 not #1 – a simple error on the florist’s part so lucky I received them as I don’t know the residents at #11. I hear stories of grocery deliveries going astray continually – to wrong capital cities or even different states. One wonders whether there will be a community backlash once the tipping point of inefficiency of deliveries has been reached?

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I don’t know, perhaps! Food delivery is still a novelty over here, so it might take a while before people start being more demanding. It still feels like a luxury more than a given. Well, perhaps not to me personally, but in general.

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Interesting that it is still a novelty. Thank your lucky stars that people still cook most of their own food. The are a few households here and there that own no cutlery or plates as they order uber eats daily….

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Oh, people eat a lot of ready-made meals here, ie meals made in factories packed with preservatives. They are a staple of Finnish cuisine! Sure, there is some home-made cooking too, but a lot of alresdy marinated stuff etc. Really hard to be completely home-made these days unless you have a passion for that kind of thing. The fact that delivery is a novelty mostly has to do with the small market – small city, not much demand. People here aren’t used to that kind of restaurant service, everything is do-it-yourself, so they didn’t really know they needed it until Covid hit.

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The photos may have nothing to do with the text, but they always seem to go well with it. I hope you were able to salvage the food. Often, when we get deliveries here, the package is left with a neighbor and considered delivered. Then we get to go on a treasure hunt to see if we can track it down. To me, delivered means it’s at your house, not somewhere in the neighborhood!

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Oh yes, those are my very least favourite type of treasure hunts! I once got a Whatsapp message from a neighbour who had my cosmetics delivery, but I never did find out how he got my number!! We had never met but he lived downstairs and I managed to pick up my box. When I got home, I noticed, however, that it was actually someone else’s stuff. We shared a first name but she was from an entirely different city. I would have thought the cosmetics company would’ve said, oh never mind, just keep it and we’ll send you your stuff (and vice versa for the woman who got my delivery). After all, I could see all her personal info in a very non-GDPR way. But no. They made me send it back and wait for ages for my package, which included nothing extra, no compensation. Of course I didn’t order from them again!

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That’s kind of disturbing about your neighbor. You get your stuff (or someone else’s stuff) and now have to worry about how creepy your neighbor is! Welcome to this modern world!

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Oh, your dinner and show perks remind me of film markets, where my company would always reserve tables at the most exclusive, expensive restaurants in advance–the better to take customers there to seal the deal. They would put down hundreds of dollars in advance to hold tables and that deposit would go down the drain if no one went to dinner. So at about 5 PM, some frantic assistant would be offering tables at exclusive restaurants to other assistants or non-execs for free dinners: “Autumn! Can you take a table for four at Brennan’s?!” Anyone who was standing near me would get invited. Half of the time it would be a random student or an aspiring filmmaker who needed a good meal, and the fancy restaurant would discretely supply them with a dinner jacket. That was actually my favorite part of those film markets: playing fancy restaurant fairy godmother!

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That sounds so lovely! And in a way, a bit similar! I wonder if they still do that? I think most of the perks I ever had at different employers have all faded away. And the younger generation who had entered work life is okay with this since they never knew anything better!

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I was chuckling but if it was happening to me and I was hungry, I think I would’ve been like your husband. We were delivered the wrong meal at our most recent food delivery order. It was like a mystery box of dinner (came from the same restaurant we ordered at least).

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Does it seem to you in Finland that most of this falling apart of delivery systems has happened since Covid? I feel like the world sort of worked before then, and now almost everything does NOT seem to work as planned or expected! When our daughter was getting married in 2021, I remember watching delivery updates for crucial items and getting utterly panicky. By the end, I had learned to stop looking!

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Hmm, I guess the popularity of deliveries has exploded since Covid, right? Causing chaos in its wake. Our main shopping areas are completely deserted now and I, for one, have moved almost entirely online for clothes etc. But it’s nicer, too, because the selection is of course so much larger than it used to be for us living in a small city. As for food, before Covid there were no delivery options at all!

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I am surprised that Finns don’t cook more at home. My Danish family and friends eat home cooked food and only eat out at special occasions. In the Danish countryside it is hard to find a place to go to eat out and when you do, they close up early!

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Well, I mean it’s hard to draw stereotypes like that! Finns and Danes aren’t very closely related, and then people in the countryside have a different lifestyle than people in the city, vs young singles/families/retirees, etc. Over here, kids are offered 5 meals a day pretty religiously, so families probably do cook. Aided by those processed factory-made half-ready products. 🤷🏼‍♀️

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