Rich People Problems

Tonight for small group we went out to Seasons 52 and I had a great time! I love my small group and had never been to Seasons 52 before and was excited to go. The premise of the restaurant is that there is nothing over 500 calories. Tiffany (who is also vegan+) and I decided to split two of the entrees... Salmon Flatbread and the Autumn Market Vegetable Plate. To go with it, everyone in the group had a glass of wine. Everything was wonderful and I would recommend this restaurant to anyone. The service was slow, however it was just fine because we each had so much to talk about it made time just fly! Let me say that this part of the evening was more than I could have asked for... I had a blast.

But the rest of this is going to be written before all this healthy rage wears off...

Seasons 52 is in a retail/business area called One/Two Buckhead Plaza. I have been to the Plaza before to go to J. Christophers, a breakfast restaurant, and the first time I parked in the wrong parking garage and ended up paying more to park than I did to eat, needless to say I was frustrated.

However this time I searched and searched until I found the correct parking garage, it was a maze to get into and I passed complimentary valet parking but because I was being really cheap and didn't want to pay the tip to valet, I parked myself. Where I parked was for retail customers and was 2 hours free parking. Or so they said.

However, when I tried to get validated they said that Seasons 52 is not a retail shop. I question what it is then? I defined retail in this setting as something other than business. Since I am going somewhere to pay them money for a product (aka food) I figure this was retail. Crazy me.

So then I go to exit (and luckily it was evening) and I ended up paying $5 to park. Not that $5 is a lot of money, however I was expecting free. And more than that I feel like they purposefully made it complicated just so they can get money off of people like me (and had this been during the day it would have been $6 per hour or in this case about $15). And more than that, this isn't downtown Atlanta where there is no free parking to be had, this is Buckhead where its free to park pretty much anywhere. And more than that I could have done complimentary valet, pulled up to basically the exact same place and I could have tipped them this money, which I prefer to do, I was just being really economical (or cheap).

As I was driving home and I was stewing over this and basically just making myself more and more angry I started thinking about Oasis and Andy Stanley.

The anger training that we just went thru in Oasis class talked about healthy anger. And since I wanted to hurt someone over this means its not healthy anger.

And as Andy would say, this is a rich people problem.

I was able to eat, inside a restaurant, I was able to pay for the food with my own money, I was able to drive in my own car home, and I have a home to go home to. If any of those things were not there, this would be a real problem. Me having to pay a parking garage to be able to park my car is a rich people problem. And really, I need to just get over it.

So why am I still upset?