This week my boss and my boss's boss came out from CA to visit my jobsite.

Since I am the only person here that actually works for them, they came a lot just to see me but they also like to visit with the engineers I test for. I guess we passed some big milestone and as a reward my boss's boss took us all to "dinner."

For our dinner, we went to some restaurant along the waterfront in Boston. We were served about 13-15 courses. According to the menu, one of the courses was going to be steak and potatoes so I figured ok if I can get past the caviar, cucumbers, and goose livers I may get something to eat. The first course was on a dinner plate but the food was some sort of 1 inch by half inch by half inch crunchy vegetable thing. I never did know, there wasn't enough of it to figure it out. For all that, some of my co-workers were carefully eating what I would consider not even a quarter of a bite of anything, using their fork and knife. I mean this was about the size of half a stick of chalk!!! On a full sized dinner plate!

I tell you as course after course came out, (and by the way every course came with its own full sized plate and afresh, clean set of silverware, I would hate to wash all those dishes!) I started to worry, My friends from work were talking about how full they were getting, and was trying to imagine if I had yet eaten the equal amount compared to a small McDonalds hamburger! I kept thinking just hold out there was a steak and potato coming!

Near the end, they gave us stuff like a tablespoon of pasta, steeped in beef broth, with 3 ounces of dark chocolate grated over it. I am thinking to myself who is the sadist in the kitchen, while again my friends are raving about the colors, the textures, the enjoyment of the presentation and the genius of the art of the food combinations. At this point I am really, really looking forward to that steak.

Then the steak came. It was mostly raw, almost cold, a round thing about an inch and a half across. With it was a potato the size and shape of a shooter marble. Over both was slathered some sort of green pea gravy. Are you kidding me? If you took some kind of shrink ray and zapped a real meal, that is what this would have looked like (except the bright green grass tasting gravy didn't do anything to help).

Some people say you should eat at a fancy place just once, so you can experience it. Those people are knuckleheads. I say there are some things that are simply not worth the cost.

I took a long time to tell you all this -- just to remind you the "best" this world has to offer spiritually is not filling, will not sustain you, and while it might look very appetizing to us the end result is we will be hungry and poor. It will make promises that it will not keep, and in a cruel way dash our hopes while delivering exactly what it claimed all along. It sounds good, and in our minds we will build it up until we believe something hearty and appealing is coming, only be cheated. I learned my lesson! And the cost? At $300 a person, that dinner was a bill I was very happy not to pay. Just imagine, in a spiritual way, what else the world will offer you - if you are only willing to sell your soul to get it.

The truth is, that bill already came due and I was unable to pay that one, too. Thanks be to God his son paid the cost for me. Else I might have ended up in the kitchen, washing all those dishes for an eternity! Think about it!

Randy