Some few years ago my Beautiful Wife and I and one or two of our kids went to what was then a new restaurant in Indianapolis, called Joe's Crab Shack. Our time and other commitments made it necessary (we thought) to eat there rather than other restaurants.

The sound system was cranked WAY up, so loud that the crowd were trying (unsuccessfully) to talk to each other over it. The waitress couldn't understand our shouted food order, so that we eventually got a wrong (and expensive) item.

But there's more: The group at the neighboring table (3 or 4 feet away) had a birthday boy/girl in their party, it seems, so about ten of the wait staff gathered around to (allegedly) sing "Happy Birthday". They knew the combined sound level of the P.A. system and competing customer chatter wouldn't allow the folks at the table to hear them, so the leader of that ten-strong chorus had to use a BULL HORN for that joyous occasion!

I sat with my hands frantically pressed over my ears whenever I didn't really need them to eat or drink. Helped a little, though not much.

When presented with the erroneous bill (because the waitress hadn't been able to make out our order), I shouted directly into the ear of the wait-staff supervisor a request that the "music" be turned WAY down. Shouting, he managed to get across that "We would like to, but Corporate Headquarters, down in Texas, won't let us turn it down!"

They did delete the entire cost of the erroneous item because of the order mistake. But who ended up with that cost? It was the unfortunate waitress who had to pay for the mistake, we learned.

We bad-mouthed that restaurant far and wide, and never patronized it in the following eight or ten years. When we reluctantly went back there, as the guests of some friends, we found that somebody had gotten through to the high muckey-mucks in Texas, and the noise level was way down.

Dave Oesterreich