There are no dumb questions. (Right?)

It's been almost a year already since our friends Don and Diane saw their daughter graduate high school. They decided to celebrate at one of their favorite restaurants in Little Italy -- a place called Valerio's, where we'd visited with them once or twice before. We don't often dine in Little Italy, in part because who needs to eat a lot of carbs before bed (not me!), and who wants to drive all over the place looking for parking (not Carlo!). But we had liked Valerio's, and, on this evening celebrating our friends' daughter, we found a place to park.

We strolled to this corner restaurant here, which we knew of as Valerio's. Only it wasn't. Valerio's, it seemed, was gone.
Actually, it had not gone, it had simply moved up the street. The waiter at Etna (pictured here), the new restaurant in the old Valerio's, helpfully pointed this out. But he wasn't that cheerful about it. I thought perhaps we weren't the first to ask about this.

Such is work. A lot of jobs have that aspect to them: an issue of explaining and explaining things, over and over again, to people who you come to resent for their ignorance, even if it's perfectly understandable.
And then sometimes when it's not.

"OK, two house salads -- and what kind of dressing for each of you?"
Pause.
"Oh. What do you have?" Because, after all, the experience of ordering a salad is all new to us, right? Land's sakes, who knew they'd be asking us for a choice on dressing!

(Sigh.)"Italian, blue cheese, poppyseed, balsamic vinegar and oil, and ranch."

"Oh. Uh, I'll take the Italian." Because, after all, you're in an Italian restaurant, and you needed the waiter to tell you they had Italian dressing, right?

The first time I second-guessed the adage about there being no dumb questions, I was also at work. The year was 1983, and I was working on a small daily paper where the business writer had the day off. Something broke in an ongoing story about a grocery-union strike and I had to call the union's lawyer for the info.

Despite the fact that our paper had been covering the story, I hadn't been following the strike very closely. So when I reached the lawyer -- a guy who, like a lot of lawyers, was worth his weight in ego -- I started asking a lot of background questions. At which point, he started yelling at me -- I mean, really yelling -- for being unprepared.

He was such a jerk. I've never forgotten him. Never had to deal with him after that, but he still pops up in the news from time to time, at which point I send out a little hex spell.

But the thing is, the jerk was right. I was unprepared. And while one way to get prepared is to ask a lawyer involved in the case to give you the background, another is to do your research.

All of which is to say, the next time you're in an Italian restaurant, expect the waiter to ask what salad dressing you'd like. Then, be prepared with an answer.