Sound familiar? This conversation has been the bane of the working man since some caveman set a piece of meat on a flat slab of rock and invented Thag's Dino-burgers. We've all had these conversations go on and on, back and forth, whether in person, or via email, phone, or instant message. What a waste of time.
That's why most folks are surprised to learn that a solution to this dilemma has been around for close to 80 years.
The Beginning
Back in 1932 there was a visionary named Bob Niblz who disliked these conversations just as much as you or I, but he decided to do something about it. He was a bright young staffer working on Capitol Hill. Bob, like most folks, ate lunch each day with a group of buddies. He and his friends decided that if voting was a good enough system to pick a President, then it should be all right for picking which lunch spot to go to as well. And so the Niblz system was born. Bob and his friends started writing out their restaurant choices on slips of paper, and tallying votes to figure out which lunch counter to go to.
The system worked pretty well until the rationing programs of World War II started out. Then, although Bob and his friends could still choose which lunch counter to go to, they invariably found that each location was serving the same canned peas and corned-beef hash.
The Post-War Years
When the war ended with the Allied victory, Bob thought things were looking bright for the Niblz system. And through the 40s, Bob's system grew in popularity until office workers throughout the capitol were using it, as well as workers back in Bob's home town.
But the 50s brought new challenges to Bob and his dream. There was a lot of pressure towards conformity in those days, and Bob's idea of giving people choices and variety was often looked upon with suspicion.
It was also the height of the cold war. There were several instances where Bob fell under suspicion for organizing communistic activities after it was reported that he and his friends had been scribbling on little pieces of paper and passing them around. Needless to say, nobody wanted to be labeled with the C word, and the popularity of the Niblz system declined.
The 60s, Baby!
In the 60s, the political culture finally looked more favorably upon the dreams of Bob Niblz. But in fact, the pendulum swung a little too far. It seems that there was so much free love and communal living going on that just choosing a plain old restaurant was no longer an exciting idea. People those days much preferred to eat around a communal pot out in the middle of some field, into which everyone had thrown whatever they could find to add.
One might think that with the amount of pot-smoking going on in the 60s anything related to satisfying a person's food-cravings would do well. But it seemed that each time a band of hippies would get seriously into using the Niblz system they would either end up getting too stoned to remember what they were doing, or they would get distracted by some social cause and run off to protest, forgetting all about where they were going to lunch.
Time for a Change
The 70's were a time of great change for the Niblz enterprise. Bob Niblz' son, Bob Jr., had been working around the fringes of his father's dream since he was a boy. Most recently he had been running vote-papers for his dad while he tried to pursue a career as a Broadway actor. The acting never panned out for Bob Jr. Some thought it was due to a mild case of Tourette's syndrome, which would force him to shout out expletives at unpredictable times. Others thought it might just be a basic lack of talent. Finally giving up on his dream of acting, Bob Jr. took the reigns of the Niblz enterprise and Bob Sr. moved to Tahiti, where he spends his time picking sand from his navel, and making harassing phone calls to government agencies regarding the size of his Social Security check.
As many people know, along with new management comes a new way of doing things and Bob Jr. was into technology in a big way. The Niblz system became automated using the latest technology of the time. Instead of writing their votes on little slips of paper, users could now fill out computer punch cards and send them in to the main Niblz processing center for tallying. The only disadvantage in this system was that events had to be planned pretty far in advanced to allow time for mailing the punch cards in to the processing center and getting the results back.
The Digital Age
The 80s showed Niblz' continuing to push the technology envelope. During this time, Niblz became a software based system, sent out to users as a stack of forty-two floppy discs. Some of the downfalls of this technology included the need to insert each disk one at a time to search the restaurant database, the fact that Niblz 4.10 didn't work with Niblz 4.12, there was no Mac version, etc. Because of these limitations, Niblz was mostly used during this decade by men with scraggly beards and thick glasses. Since these sorts of men don't usually get out much anyway, the Niblz concept pretty much fell completely out of the public consciousness once again.
In the 90s, Niblz actually worked fairly well (except for Niblz Bob™—we don't like to talk about that). Niblz became CD-based, so that the multiple-floppy-disks problem no longer existed. And it ran pretty smoothly on the 42% of Windows-based machines on which semi-literate computer users were able to get their IRQ ports configured correctly. Unfortunately, Niblz wasn't a dot-com and wasn't having an IPO event, so nobody really paid any attention.
Now that Al Gore has invented the internet for us, the Niblz system is ready to flourish with the American lifestyle. The new internet-based Niblz system is simple, so the challenges faced by graduates of America's troubled public school system shouldn't be an issue. It's fast, so it fits with the instant-gratification society. And the economy is fairly stable, so that Americans are finally in a spot where they have no really pressing issues to deal with, and most people's major dilemma of the day is "where do I go spend my money to eat?"