I'm not Sally of "When Harry Met Sally" fame, but rare is the meal that I order without some kind of deletion, addition or change.
I don't like vegetables or mashed potatoes with skins in them, and one of the guys who worked for me used to hear me order turkey subs enough that he developed a frighteningly good impression ("plain turkey, on white ... no, I don't want lettuce or tomato ... just meat and bread").
When I used to get soft drinks with my meal, I always ordered them without ice. Once, to the astonishment of my companions, I sent back a soda not because it had ice in it, but because the waiter brought it without ice and clearly only the amount of soda they'd put in if the drink had ice in it.
Now, I mostly drink water with my meals, so I don't care if there's ice (you can't water down water, after all), but I used to have a problem with servers disregarding my request to not have lemon in my drink until my wife suggested asking for it "without lemon" instead of "no lemon." I have no idea why -- maybe "without" registers because of the extra syllable -- but I can probably count the lemons in my water since then on one hand.
Which brings me to Wendy's.
I've written before about how it baffles me that Wendy's refuses to recognize hamburgers to the point of serving cheeseburgers even when I specifically say the word "hamburger." Much like Niagara Mohawk and mlb.tv, among others, I'm sure one of my rants is on a training video somewhere. (I've also gotten the "do you want lettuce, tomato and onion" line when I've asked for my triple hamburger plain, but far less often.)
But I do love their burgers, so when my wife and I went out for some errands today near a Wendy's, that's where we went for lunch. This time, however, I made a fateful decision.
I surrendered ... threw in the towel ... tapped out ... gave up. When it came time to order, I requested a plain ... triple ... hamburger ...
... without cheese.
I still think it's stupid that Wendy's defaults to cheeseburgers, and just as stupid that their employees either don't realize or are trained not to realize when someone wants a hamburger. But I just didn't feel like fighting it, and I did get exactly what I asked for.
And it was tasty.
Problem that is completely inconsequential in light of the many troubles in our world ... solved.
Monday, September 1, 2014
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Oh yeah ... he's still got it
 |
| Not a bad way to spend an evening. |
The young singer is now 33, and the album that first made people take notice is now nearly 13 years old.
Last night, my wife and I went to Tanglewood to see Josh Groban in concert for a second time. Our anniversary was more than a month ago, but my wife bought the lawn tickets as an anniversary gift. Fortunately, we got great weather.
As years go by, artists come and go and various songs catch your attention at any particular time, to the point where if you're flipping through the songs you've downloaded, you skip through a lot of songs in order to hear whatever's at the forefront of your mind at the time.
In recent months, Josh Groban's songs (among others) were among the ones I skipped a lot. It's not like he stopped being good. It's not like I stopped liking his music. But it had reached the point were it was just ... there ... and there was usually something else I wanted to hear.
Then he came out on stage last night, joined by the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra (think Boston July 4 celebration) ... and the reasons for his appeal came back all at once.
The voice is still amazing (dumbest review I ever read, and one I wish I could find, was the one that said he had a "generically pleasant voice). The stage patter is much improved, I assume the byproduct of being older and having spent a lot more time in front of audiences.
The songs, particularly the older ones, are the same as I remember them. As the nearly two-hour concert appeared to be winding down, it was like the audience was waiting to hear "You Raise Me Up," and he complied.
Yeah, he's still good. He's still real good.
Sunday, August 24, 2014
Come one, come all to our Silly Emmys party
It's Emmy time again night, which means it's time for everyone to get together and take part in the most-enjoyable aspect of any awards show ... snarky remarks, wondering how they could have worn THAT, celebrating or bemoaning who won what and generally having a laugh at the proceedings. (The Robin Williams tribute will, of course, be a notable exception. I'm expecting lots of people wondering how the room got so dusty all of a sudden, or who's cutting the onions.)
The festivities here will start around 7ish, or whenever I get the chat fired up, so we can cover the exercise in vapidness that is the pre-show. So make sure you put on your best red-carpet-if-the-red-carpet-is-in-your-house attire and join in the fun! All it takes is a valid social media account -- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
As always, there are only a few rules:
1. Do not actually come to my house unless you ask first. Otherwise, I will tell you to leave and probably call the cops.
2. Bring your own food and beverage.
3. If you're going to come to my metaphorical house, do not pee in my metaphorical pool.
The festivities here will start around 7ish, or whenever I get the chat fired up, so we can cover the exercise in vapidness that is the pre-show. So make sure you put on your best red-carpet-if-the-red-carpet-is-in-your-house attire and join in the fun! All it takes is a valid social media account -- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
As always, there are only a few rules:
1. Do not actually come to my house unless you ask first. Otherwise, I will tell you to leave and probably call the cops.
2. Bring your own food and beverage.
3. If you're going to come to my metaphorical house, do not pee in my metaphorical pool.
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Hey Facebook, why stop at satire?
In an effort to aid those whose BS detectors aren't up to snuff, Facebook is apparently going to test a "satire" tag for people's news feeds. That way, people who can't tell the difference between what's real and what's fake can save themselves the potential embarrassment.
Although at least one friend of mine considers it a sign of the impending apocalypse, maybe Facebook should do even more.
For example, we've all seen posts/sent posts/seen or sent the email that can't possibly be true, right? That's because it's usually not. (Confirmation bias can play some serious tricks on the mind.) Therefore, perhaps Facebook could hook up with Snopes.
If someone can't wait to inform his or her friends that Barack Obama is the only president not to go to the D-Day Monument on the D-Day anniversary, or that Sarah Palin wanted to invade the Czech Republic after the Boston Marathon bombings (speaking of satire), a little message could pop up saying, "Before you do this, there's something you should know. What you're posting isn't true, and while your like-minded friends will probably say 'See, I knew all along!' when they see it, to everyone else you'll look kind of silly."
And while Facebook is at it, is there any way to build an algorithm that tries to keep people from posting racist, sexist or otherwise bigoted stuff? While I would never say that people shouldn't be allowed to post what they like, maybe a note stating, "This may not be a good idea. You may think that no one outside your circle will ever notice, or that you'll just take it down, but screengrabs are not your friend" would be enough to cause second thoughts. (This wouldn't be a bad idea for Twitter, either.)
I'm no expert at writing computer code, so I don't know if either of these are even possible, but if they are, surely someone at Facebook would know how.
So get on it, Zuckerberg.
(Now, the question is, "Am I being satirical?" Maybe a little, or more than a little ...)
Although at least one friend of mine considers it a sign of the impending apocalypse, maybe Facebook should do even more.
For example, we've all seen posts/sent posts/seen or sent the email that can't possibly be true, right? That's because it's usually not. (Confirmation bias can play some serious tricks on the mind.) Therefore, perhaps Facebook could hook up with Snopes.
If someone can't wait to inform his or her friends that Barack Obama is the only president not to go to the D-Day Monument on the D-Day anniversary, or that Sarah Palin wanted to invade the Czech Republic after the Boston Marathon bombings (speaking of satire), a little message could pop up saying, "Before you do this, there's something you should know. What you're posting isn't true, and while your like-minded friends will probably say 'See, I knew all along!' when they see it, to everyone else you'll look kind of silly."
And while Facebook is at it, is there any way to build an algorithm that tries to keep people from posting racist, sexist or otherwise bigoted stuff? While I would never say that people shouldn't be allowed to post what they like, maybe a note stating, "This may not be a good idea. You may think that no one outside your circle will ever notice, or that you'll just take it down, but screengrabs are not your friend" would be enough to cause second thoughts. (This wouldn't be a bad idea for Twitter, either.)
I'm no expert at writing computer code, so I don't know if either of these are even possible, but if they are, surely someone at Facebook would know how.
So get on it, Zuckerberg.
(Now, the question is, "Am I being satirical?" Maybe a little, or more than a little ...)
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Thoughts from the left side
So today is International Left-Handers Day. I didn't get any cards.
In fact, I didn't even know there was such a thing until a friend of mine (whose husband is left-handed), posted a funny pie chart in which the vast majority of people, when they notice someone writing left-handed, say, "Are you left-handed?"
Being left-handed means using those little scissors with the green handles and wiping ink smudges off your hands. It means always eating with your elbows close to your sides to protect yourself from chicken-winging right-handers and hearing people shout "LEFTY!" when you walk into the batter's box.
"Sinister" and "gauche" have their roots in left-ness, and I'm sure most of us have heard and said "If the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and the right side of the brain controls the left side, then left-handers are the only people in their right minds" more often than we can count.
But in a world that finds us odd, being left-handed is just ... what I am. And it's not weird at all.
I've made some allowances for a right-handed world. I've known how to cut with right-handed scissors for years, and I was so used to right-handed desks in school that I usually refused on the rare occasions there was a left-handed desk available and someone offered. (To the righties reading this who may ask, "What's the difference?" a right-handed desk has the little area for your books and notebooks attached to the right side of the chair, while it's obviously the reverse for a left-handed desk. The intent is to not have to read or write across your body, but I got used to it.)
If I'm casually driving with one hand on the steering wheel, it's usually my right hand, and for whatever reason, I cannot type on a smartphone with my left hand at all.
Strangely enough, I've come to believe that one of the benefits of being left-handed is that lefties are aware that most of us have two hands. No matter how left-dominant a person is, it is a physical impossibility to be purely left-handed. The world isn't set up that way. However, I know right-handed people who can't do much with their left hand because they've never had to.
Yet using my left hand (or foot) to write, eat, throw, kick, roll a bowling ball, shoot a basketball (badly) or swing a bat or golf club (also badly) is as natural to me as breathing. There was no point where I realized I was left-handed, at least not that I remember, and I didn't have to be taught to do things with my left hand. I just did them, and fortunately, I'm young enough to have missed the era where left-handed kids were encouraged if not forced to change.
Sadly, the one thing I never learned how to do with my left hand was throw a curveball. Otherwise, I might still be pitching in the big leagues in my early 40s and be millions of dollars richer. (Jesse Orosco and Tony Fossas are our patron saints.)
So to all my fellow southpaws out there, Happy International Left-Handers Day. To the right-handers in my life, I like presents, but money and gift cards are nice, too.
In fact, I didn't even know there was such a thing until a friend of mine (whose husband is left-handed), posted a funny pie chart in which the vast majority of people, when they notice someone writing left-handed, say, "Are you left-handed?"
Being left-handed means using those little scissors with the green handles and wiping ink smudges off your hands. It means always eating with your elbows close to your sides to protect yourself from chicken-winging right-handers and hearing people shout "LEFTY!" when you walk into the batter's box.
"Sinister" and "gauche" have their roots in left-ness, and I'm sure most of us have heard and said "If the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and the right side of the brain controls the left side, then left-handers are the only people in their right minds" more often than we can count.
But in a world that finds us odd, being left-handed is just ... what I am. And it's not weird at all.
I've made some allowances for a right-handed world. I've known how to cut with right-handed scissors for years, and I was so used to right-handed desks in school that I usually refused on the rare occasions there was a left-handed desk available and someone offered. (To the righties reading this who may ask, "What's the difference?" a right-handed desk has the little area for your books and notebooks attached to the right side of the chair, while it's obviously the reverse for a left-handed desk. The intent is to not have to read or write across your body, but I got used to it.)
If I'm casually driving with one hand on the steering wheel, it's usually my right hand, and for whatever reason, I cannot type on a smartphone with my left hand at all.
Strangely enough, I've come to believe that one of the benefits of being left-handed is that lefties are aware that most of us have two hands. No matter how left-dominant a person is, it is a physical impossibility to be purely left-handed. The world isn't set up that way. However, I know right-handed people who can't do much with their left hand because they've never had to.
Yet using my left hand (or foot) to write, eat, throw, kick, roll a bowling ball, shoot a basketball (badly) or swing a bat or golf club (also badly) is as natural to me as breathing. There was no point where I realized I was left-handed, at least not that I remember, and I didn't have to be taught to do things with my left hand. I just did them, and fortunately, I'm young enough to have missed the era where left-handed kids were encouraged if not forced to change.
Sadly, the one thing I never learned how to do with my left hand was throw a curveball. Otherwise, I might still be pitching in the big leagues in my early 40s and be millions of dollars richer. (Jesse Orosco and Tony Fossas are our patron saints.)
So to all my fellow southpaws out there, Happy International Left-Handers Day. To the right-handers in my life, I like presents, but money and gift cards are nice, too.
Monday, July 28, 2014
Remember when the world was going to end because the computers were messed up?
Today, my wife and I went to Boston to meet up with an old friend of hers who's in town on vacation with his 13-year-old niece.
He's a funny guy, and she seemed like a really great kid. At one point, we were talking about various things she wouldn't know about by virtue of being only 13 -- after all, she was a newborn around the time of 9/11 -- when I brought up Y2K.
Remember Y2K, the worry that because computers used "00" for the year, they would pretty much all stop working at the stroke of midnight Jan. 1, 2000, and therefore cause the entire world to descend into chaos?
I spent New Year's Eve 1999 watching the amazing coverage on CNN, and that night I went to First Night in Albany with my brother and a bunch of his friends, still the only one I've ever been to. We watched a couple performers, walked around a bit in the cold and then watched a countdown on a giant screen set up on the outside of what was Pepsi Arena and is now the Times Union Center.
At midnight, I looked around to see if anything horrible had happened. It didn't appear there were any issues, but then I heard a loud bang. Just when I started to wonder what it was, I turned around to see the fireworks going on behind me.
That was the noise. We all ran down the street to see the fireworks, called our ride to come get us and went back to one of my brother's friends' houses. I then went home and watched some more CNN.
So as I was explaining the Y2K hysteria to the 13-year-old sitting across the table from me, she looked at me a little like I was crazy.
And I have to admit, as I was telling her about it, it seemed pretty silly.
He's a funny guy, and she seemed like a really great kid. At one point, we were talking about various things she wouldn't know about by virtue of being only 13 -- after all, she was a newborn around the time of 9/11 -- when I brought up Y2K.
Remember Y2K, the worry that because computers used "00" for the year, they would pretty much all stop working at the stroke of midnight Jan. 1, 2000, and therefore cause the entire world to descend into chaos?
I spent New Year's Eve 1999 watching the amazing coverage on CNN, and that night I went to First Night in Albany with my brother and a bunch of his friends, still the only one I've ever been to. We watched a couple performers, walked around a bit in the cold and then watched a countdown on a giant screen set up on the outside of what was Pepsi Arena and is now the Times Union Center.
At midnight, I looked around to see if anything horrible had happened. It didn't appear there were any issues, but then I heard a loud bang. Just when I started to wonder what it was, I turned around to see the fireworks going on behind me.
That was the noise. We all ran down the street to see the fireworks, called our ride to come get us and went back to one of my brother's friends' houses. I then went home and watched some more CNN.
So as I was explaining the Y2K hysteria to the 13-year-old sitting across the table from me, she looked at me a little like I was crazy.
And I have to admit, as I was telling her about it, it seemed pretty silly.
Thursday, July 17, 2014
I do seriously wonder about people sometimes
My wife and I went to the local McDonald's drive-through last night after I picked her up from the train. We normally get pizza Tuesday nights (the staff is not just familiar with my regular order of a large pizza with half cheese and half sausage, they know it's us regardless of who calls) and go out Thursday nights, but there was nothing to make for dinner in our house, so to the Golden Arches it was.
The drive-through was a little backed up, so it was a few minutes before we could order, but while I was talking to the disembodied voice on the other side of the speaker, a few people must have gotten their orders in pretty quick succession, because some of the cars in front of me pulled ahead, leaving a gap between me and the corner people pulled around to get to the pay window.
And as soon as I started to pull away, a minivan dive-bombed that very gap. First of all, yes, you can dive-bomb with a minivan (who knew?), and secondly, if I had pulled away a couple seconds earlier, his little power move (again, it's a minivan, so the term "power move" is perhaps more an approximation) would have resulted in a collision, which would have made what followed that much more interesting.
I think we can pretty much all agree that cutting in line is generally not cool, although if you're going to just stare at the cab pulling into the taxi stand during an epic New York City rainstorm, I will do it again. However, there's cutting in line, and then there's cutting in line at a restaurant drive-through after the place you give your order.
This, combined with what I could clearly see was the distinct bright yellow wrapping of a McDonald's cheeseburger, meant a complaint was in the offing.
I will not be such a hypocrite as to denounce complaining, since I have been known to toss off epic rants both in the restaurant and on Facebook about Wendy's staff insisting on giving me a cheeseburger when I ask for a hamburger because hamburgers aren't on the menu, even though anyone with even moderate intelligence above the age of 7 knows that a "hamburger" is a specific thing, and that thing does not have cheese on it.
However, there is at least a tiny bit of protocol to complaining, and nowhere in that protocol is there anything about going back through the drive-through if the problem happened at the drive-through. You park your vehicle, walk inside, flag down an employee and calmly (or not-so-calmly ... see "me at Wendy's") describe the error and seek correction.
So what this guy was doing, which from what I could hear was over requesting two plain cheeseburgers but only getting one, was bad enough. What's worse was that it clearly threw the entire staff off their game.
I do not know the mechanics of a drive-through, since the McDonald's I worked at in college was in a mall and therefore didn't have one. However, there must be a system where the staff knows to take the money and give out the food from the first order on the list to the first car in line, the second to the second and so on.
But when someone cuts that line, clearly no one knows what to do. At the pay window, the kid didn't know how much I was supposed to pay him. Out of sympathy for him due to the jerkwad I just saw him deal with, I calmly repeated my order multiple times, and eventually they got it right.
Then, when I pulled up to the window for my food, they gave me a salad. We did not order a salad. I don't eat salads, and my wife does not get them from McDonald's. I, calmly again, repeated my order, and we eventually did get it.
So all of that was bad enough, and a master class on being an a-hole. Yet as I thought about it more, I realized it was actually worse than I thought.
You see, confronted with an incorrect order, he went through whatever thought process he went through, and decided the best course of action was to go back through the drive-through to address it, even if it meant cutting off a whole line of cars and/or taking the chance that there would either be no breaks in the line or that he would cause an accident.
May I never be driving in the opposite direction from him should he be turning left.
The drive-through was a little backed up, so it was a few minutes before we could order, but while I was talking to the disembodied voice on the other side of the speaker, a few people must have gotten their orders in pretty quick succession, because some of the cars in front of me pulled ahead, leaving a gap between me and the corner people pulled around to get to the pay window.
And as soon as I started to pull away, a minivan dive-bombed that very gap. First of all, yes, you can dive-bomb with a minivan (who knew?), and secondly, if I had pulled away a couple seconds earlier, his little power move (again, it's a minivan, so the term "power move" is perhaps more an approximation) would have resulted in a collision, which would have made what followed that much more interesting.
I think we can pretty much all agree that cutting in line is generally not cool, although if you're going to just stare at the cab pulling into the taxi stand during an epic New York City rainstorm, I will do it again. However, there's cutting in line, and then there's cutting in line at a restaurant drive-through after the place you give your order.
This, combined with what I could clearly see was the distinct bright yellow wrapping of a McDonald's cheeseburger, meant a complaint was in the offing.
I will not be such a hypocrite as to denounce complaining, since I have been known to toss off epic rants both in the restaurant and on Facebook about Wendy's staff insisting on giving me a cheeseburger when I ask for a hamburger because hamburgers aren't on the menu, even though anyone with even moderate intelligence above the age of 7 knows that a "hamburger" is a specific thing, and that thing does not have cheese on it.
However, there is at least a tiny bit of protocol to complaining, and nowhere in that protocol is there anything about going back through the drive-through if the problem happened at the drive-through. You park your vehicle, walk inside, flag down an employee and calmly (or not-so-calmly ... see "me at Wendy's") describe the error and seek correction.
So what this guy was doing, which from what I could hear was over requesting two plain cheeseburgers but only getting one, was bad enough. What's worse was that it clearly threw the entire staff off their game.
I do not know the mechanics of a drive-through, since the McDonald's I worked at in college was in a mall and therefore didn't have one. However, there must be a system where the staff knows to take the money and give out the food from the first order on the list to the first car in line, the second to the second and so on.
But when someone cuts that line, clearly no one knows what to do. At the pay window, the kid didn't know how much I was supposed to pay him. Out of sympathy for him due to the jerkwad I just saw him deal with, I calmly repeated my order multiple times, and eventually they got it right.
Then, when I pulled up to the window for my food, they gave me a salad. We did not order a salad. I don't eat salads, and my wife does not get them from McDonald's. I, calmly again, repeated my order, and we eventually did get it.
So all of that was bad enough, and a master class on being an a-hole. Yet as I thought about it more, I realized it was actually worse than I thought.
You see, confronted with an incorrect order, he went through whatever thought process he went through, and decided the best course of action was to go back through the drive-through to address it, even if it meant cutting off a whole line of cars and/or taking the chance that there would either be no breaks in the line or that he would cause an accident.
May I never be driving in the opposite direction from him should he be turning left.
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