Enjoying the View.. One Day at a time

Take on basic math

2012-02-13T14:28:00.001-05:00

When I called AT&T to add an international data plan this morning I
wasn't expecting that I had signed up to give an 8 grade math lesson.
While discussing a couple of plan options including one for $25
which got you 50 megs of $50 for 125 megs it became very clear that
this dude had no clue what he was doing

I asked him how much I'm using on average now to try to determine what
I should choose for the 5 days I'd be away. He said

"on average I would say you are using 420 thousand megabytes per week"

This is wrong on so many levels. Firat of all an average is a real
calculation so there should be no 'I would say' in the statement. The
second issue is the fact he said 420 thousand megabytes which would
mean 420 gigs order space that I have on my external hard drive. The
problem is that when you ask a guy who works in the data division of a
multinational company, you expect him to know there is a pretty big
difference if you just add 'thousand' to a number So not only are
his numbers are dead wrong even if we excuse him for added thousand
behind 'megs' they don't even add up. I ask him what I used last
month and he said less than a gig. So how could I use 'on average'
420 mega if for an entire month I didn't get to 1000 megs? This
question was lost upon our customer service rep who couldn't explain
how he got to his 420 number and worse yet couldn't even grasp the
concept behind his error

Take on the broken screen

2012-02-12T17:15:00.001-05:00

Walking out of Guns N Roses I made the conscious decision to save the
$50 it would cost me to can it home and instead did what I always
do,... Jump on the subway. It was 3AM, I was exhausted but still by
cheapness beat out my desire for sleep which really is a battle like
the Globetrotters vs the Generals because one side ALWAYS wins.
All was well till I reached into my pocket to get my wallet and
accidentally pulled out my phone dropping it on the floor o the subway
platform. Luckily the phone stayed on the platform and not upon the
rat infested tracks but when I picked it up it was completely
shattered. I tried using it for a few minutes but immediately knew
that there was no way to really make this work since I need my phone
for work and everytime I looks at the screen I felt like I had beer
goggles on.
Anyway 10 hours later I drop the phone off at some dude's house who
throws on a new screen which he probably paid $3 for in bulk and
handed him $80 cash and all of a sudden that $50 can ride seemed like
a great investment

Take on GNR

2012-02-11T02:55:00.001-05:00

For 3 hours I was transported back to the music of my youth, where
nothing mattered but Rock N Roll and nobody cared about anything but
the music. Guns N Roses played Roseland which in 1988 would have
been a wet dream and in 2012 was more like a midnight trip to the
john. When you closed your eyes in the packed auditorium filled
with 3000 guys in their mid 30's, you could take yourself back to when
it all meant so little cause Axl's voice is still the same even if his
silhouette isn't. Slash and Izzy and Duff have been replaced by a
bunch of dudes who have fantastic chops and the melodic solos could
easily be confused for the old masters but without the big top-hat
sitting on-top of the long black hair there is always something
missing.
They played almost 3 hours and banged through all the classics opening
up with Welcome to the Jungle and Mr Brownstone and closing with
Nighttrain and Paradise City and honestly it sounded genuine. I
probably could have done without the four or five tracks off of
Chinese Democracy and to this day I don't care for the movie songs
(Live or Let Die and You Could be Mine) but when Axl sits at a grand
piano to play November Rain or they do an all acoustic Patience it
just feels so right even if the lighters have all been replaced by
iPhones.
The highlight past Axl's ability to still command the room are the
three guitarists who duel for lead guitar supremacy throughout the
night which actually probably proves how incredible Slash was as he
handled all those lead guitar duties alone.
But the most striking part is that the age and waistline of the
audience have mirrors Axl's trajectory. Gone are the ripped jeans
and flashing chicks in the audience and in it's place stands an
incredibly civil crowd with most people keeping a fair distance and no
mosh pits or successfully crowd/surfing. The civility was actually
pleasant because after standing on my feet on concrete for 4 hours, I
would much prefer a leg rub to just about anything else. But all in
all it was a rocking good show, it could have been an hour shorter
since nobody except Axl cares about anything Chinese other than
Jeremy Lin but honestly it was probably the best show I've seen in
decades.

The only thing I am left with is......where the hell is BucketHead

take on the little lin

2012-02-10T16:19:00.000-05:00

Sometimes you get an athlete who seems to transcend the sport. Sometimes it's based purely on skill, other times it's because of an overwhelming personality and sometimes it's a cult of personality that wins over the fans. Jeremy Lin, the new Knick point-guard out of Harvard who averaged about 15 points per game in High School has set the NBA on fire and in a sport dominated by stars named Kobe, LeBron, Christmas Paul and Rose. You usually get a guy who blows up the universe like this once per decade but in the last 5 months we've had Tebowner and now the little Taiwanese dingy.

Now I can't tell you if he's going to be able to keep it up but I do know that it doesn't matter.. Lin has picked up where Yao Ming left off. Virtually overnight he went from some scrub sleeping on his brother's couch to a guy who has an entire continent on his shoulders…while still sleeping on his brother's couch.

I have yet to actually see him play but when a guy can show up with the body mass of a runway model, a haircut that looks like it was given on a runaway train and a jump-shot which looks worse than most runaway kid's from a school for delinquents, I'm interested. It often looks more likely than he'll break his own ankle than break the ankles of an opposing point guard but for a scrawny kid, he's shown up some of the most highly regarded point guards in this league already.. I bet he's got 10,000,000 votes for the All-Star game already..most of which can be originated from some cell up on 124^th street

take on extreme cold

2012-02-09T14:43:00.001-05:00

When I looked at the weather forecast in anticipation for my trip out to Eastern Europe I almost fell off my chair. Last week they were getting minus 30 degrees in places like Bosnia, Bucharest and the Ukraine with thousands getting cut-off of power because of snow-fall which lead to dozen's of deaths. Now past the human tragedy, I always see these kinds of temperatures as just hyped lunacy. At some point when the temperature goes from minus 20 to minus 30 does it even make a difference? I've always seen extreme temperatures to kind of work in some kind of weird anti-exponential level.. Minus 20 is frigging freezing and so is minus 30 or minus 40 for that matter.. Yeah you might be able to stay alive for 3 minutes if it's minus 30 and only 2 at minus 40 but at some point you're still Han Solo.

I see it kind of like being in debt.. I could be in debt for $20million or $50 million and I guarantee that I won't lose any additional sleep for the second number. It's so much money that I won't ever wrap my head around anyway so why split hairs.

The one thing I will say is that as I look at the extended forecast which reaches into the mid teens early next week and into the low thirties towards the end..I am thanking the good Lord above.. because I don't think that showing up at a business meeting with my snowboarding pants was going to go over real well..

take on real-estate photography

2012-02-08T14:43:00.001-05:00

I have looked at a thousand apartments, houses, condos and co-ops in my life and it always strikes me how poorly thought out a lot of the photography is. As we discussed last week when you get away from the sharks in NYC, selling realty in the suburbs seems to be all about quantity of pictures… This house I looked at today online literally had 20 pictures...and 15 of them were easily useless.

But the one which really never made sense to me is the picture of a bathroom. I guess it's the Larry David in me but when I see a picture of some non-descript my reaction is.. yes I get it, there is a bathroom, it probably has a toilet, one of those sink-things and maybe a shower/bath combo. I just don't see any reason to put a picture of it on a website, especially if it's got pink tiles or some kind of lime green wall-paper. Give me a picture of a house with a sweet master bathroom with a giant Jacuzzi tub and a stone walled shower but this…

Is there some kind of realtor obligation to prove that if you bought this house you would not be subjected to an out-house or is there not even that much thought put into it and the theory is..throw as much crap as you can up upon the wall and see what sticks

Take on Bloomberg's tan

2012-02-07T13:56:00.001-05:00

Sometimes a politician's smugness cannot be wiped off their face and
when the Billionaire mayor of NYC appeared this weekend with a face
that looked like somebody's been pinching off their air supply, he
should have realized he's going to make Mitt Romney look like the
average American
I have no issue with Bloomberg heading to his secluded weekend spot on
a private island in Bermuda but when you show up with a face that
looks like the color of a buffalo wing sauce while the city has nearly
10% unemployment while you seemingly always contemplate running for
president, it may be a bit pompous

take on the needless celebration..

2012-02-06T09:50:00.001-05:00

I'm all for supporting a team, I'm all for celebrations and I'm all for excitement but what I'm not all for are idiots honking their horns outside my house at midnight when my wife and daughter are sleeping.. I'm not exactly sure what part of a victory on a football field gives people reason to disturb the peace in a normal residential neighborhood when it happens to be located in a city. I'm sure that my friends who live in towns like Montclair, Fort Lee or Kenvil were able to sleep peacefully last night while my friends who like me live within the five boroughs were treated to an orchestra of noise.. Add to that the genius of the NYPD as for 3 hours a helicopter hovered over my head as police cars races through the streets trying to calm down the idiocy. I get that you are excited but at some point you have to look in your rearview mirror and realize that you are a grown man driving a beat up Camry waking up an entire neighborhood by acting like you are stuck behind a slow moving semi.

This isn't some Paul Revere moment, everybody saw the game, it ended 3 hours ago and there will be a big parade on Saturday.. yet you find that celebrating it like a normal adult doesn't prove you are a big enough fan so instead you drive past my house leaning on your horn like some kind of 12 year old child? You are undoubtedly the same jackass who refers to his favorite team as 'we' or 'us' proving that not only that you are inconsiderate…but that you are moron too.

Taking on the electronic fix

2012-02-05T13:31:00.001-05:00

For the last three weeks, I've noticed my WiFi has started to become
spotty. First I thought it was just slow, then I suspected that
somebody was poaching my signal but finally I decided it's probably my
crappy service or old hardware. See it will work really well for a
few days and then all of a sudden it just unexpectantly slows to a
crawl. Websites won't load, my IPhone spends an eternity trying to
connect to an email server and downloading music or a movie takes
about as long as it took to record it.
Forgetting the network and reconnecting is a total waste of time and
repairing it works as often as the women in the Pilates studio on a
Tuesday at 3pm And so I find myself crawling behind the couch a few
times per week to unplug the power on the modem and the Wireless
router and waiting 5 minutes to plug it back in. I have to believe
that there has to be a better way that doesn't lead me to sneeze up
two tons of dust everytime I do it

Take on the kosciuszko bridge

2012-02-04T15:37:00.001-05:00

I am convinced the worst highway in America is the the BQE and the
worst part of the worst highway is the Kosciuszko Bridge. I have
been listening to talk radio my entire life and honestly feel that the
'backup on the Kosciuszko" is on a permanent loop like the weather
report in San Diego.
I have driven over this bridge at every conceivable hour and have
never not been met with a traffic jam. It's as if Kosciuszko is
Romanian for bottle neck

Take on the 'outrage' over the new MadMen ad

2012-02-03T11:48:00.000-05:00

Yesterday in the Daily News I read about an uproar about the new
MadMen subway ad by 9/11 victim groups saying they were insensitive.
Next thing you know people are threatening to boycott AMC and the
products advertised on the network.
Later I heard somebody who said 'to some of us, 9/11 will never
disappear, it will never be something we would make light of'
Hey jackass, nobody here is diminishing that day, this is not a
political statement not is it a depiction of anything related to 9/11
instead it's an ad for a TV show. How come you weren't offended by
the opening credits (which by the way this ad is a depiction of).
Maybe because this is a show set 4 decades before 2002 and anybody who
has seen those credits will tell you it has nothing to do with a
Tuesday in September. It's as if we are now so tied to this bullshit
sensitivity that you can no longer show anybody doing anything without
somebody being offended.

take on the suburban realtor

2012-02-02T14:53:00.001-05:00

There is a big difference when apartment-hunting in NYC as opposed to house-hunting in the burbs…

In NYC apartments listings typically have 4 to 8 pictures and are often of much higher quality than those taken in the suburbs where quantity seems to trump quality. You'll get six angles of every living room, three pictures of a random bathroom and a bunch of shots of very formal living rooms which feel as warm and inviting as a morgue.

The other difference is that all NYC properties have a floor-plan while hardly any of the suburban properties do.. I'm not sure if it's a philosophical difference is but one mentality wants to show you the best angles and a map and let your imagination do the rest while the other gives you shots of every closet but gives you no insight to where they are located within the house…

This is where the suburban realtors could really take a lesson from the NYC ones.. they spend no money on photography whereas most NYC listings look like they've been done by a professional photographer using the best light, best lens and best furniture. When we sold our apartment, our realtor almost literally had us move every piece of furniture out into the building's back stairwell during the photo-shoot and kept them there during every open-house.

In the city you hide your crap but in the burbs they almost embrace the clutter, showing the buyers how much crap they can fit in the space. In the city realtors speak about the neighborhood while in the burbs they only talk about the size of your lawn. In the city you are never pleasantly surprised when you walk in, in the suburbs you very often are… In the city you look for hidden space, in the suburbs you look for charm.. In the city you look for a hidden gem, in the burbs you look for a good school.. In the city your realtor seems like a shark who would stab you in the eye if it got them an extra $4 square foot, in the suburbs they buy you a latte. in the suburbs they tell you how far you are from the train, in the city they tell you how close you are... in the city you have to be approved by a board, in the suburbs you don't have to worry about it because they won't even show you a property if you are not white.

taking on Mitt

2012-02-01T15:19:00.001-05:00

I've long ago lost any hope that there is a magical politician out there who isn't a power hungry piranha who would actually stand for what's really right. In the end after all the campaigning, vetting and politicking they all come out to exactly the same thing.. a self-righteous, self-involved, self-loving spoiled brat.. but nobody comes across as a bigger phony than Mitt Romney. I have nothing against his policy and he may very well become a great president but I've never seen a guy show less passion than this dude does. For somebody whose life-long dream is to be president, he usually has about as much excitement in his voice as one of those Budweiser frogs. Add to this that he's comes across about as authentic as those hand-bags you get down on Canal Street and nobody is surprised he hasn't sown this sucker up by now…especially considering he's been campaigning for 5 straight years now.

But forget the flip-flops or the lack of passion.. what you have to say about Mitt is that he come across as having even less compassion than he does passion because he has to be one of the most out-of-touch candidates we've had since Bush Sr. thought a gallon of milk cost 50 cents.

A few weeks ago in preparation for the release of his tax-returns, Mitt said that he didn't make much of speaking engagements which paid him something like $100,000 per appearance and just today said 'I'm not concerned about the very poor, we have a safety net for them' Now I'm sure it's taken out of context or he is completely spent after dancing to the BeeGees in Fort Lauderdale late into the evening on top of a giant picture of Newt but that kind of language never seems to work with the electorate who are already weary of him and think he's completely out of touch and now he's going to have to spend the next two weeks taking his loafers out of his tooth whitened mouth.

Take on the Amazon Local Deal

2012-01-31T17:46:00.000-05:00

Every day i get some random email offering a green-tea massage, a 2
for 1 spin class or a chance to rejuvenate my split ends for what is
advertised as an amazing deal. I don't know when it happened but
about 3 months ago I started getting bombarded with AmazonLocal deals,
Jeff Bezos's answer to Groupon apparently. Not only do I not use
Groupon and actually find the service a complete waste although as a
psychology major i can surely understand the infatuation with it
but I never actively signed up for this AmazonLocal thing yet they
felt like it was their right to bombard me with unwanted junk mail.

Bit what really gets me is that this is like the antithesis of the
Viagra spam advertisement instead of upping your testosterone each one
makes you into a bigger chick. Do you ever notice that there are
absolutely no deals for dudes? Every option is catered exactly and
only to women.....unless of course Amazon has assumed I'm a chock
based on the history of my online purchases

Take on the car rental airport fillip

2012-01-30T13:32:00.000-05:00

As a guy who was once employed by a rental car company and now a
frequent customer there is something that never made any sense. It
is pretty standard for car rentals to ask you to return it full which
I am fine with in theory but it's almost like they set you up for
failure because most airports do not have a has station anywhere neat
the car rental return center. It's as if the car rental companies
and gas companies are cohoots like the US government paying farmers
NOT to grow crops because the rental car companies make a fortune of
the gas penalty they charge renters. It is not uncommon
to see companies charge upwards of $5 a gallons as punishment
For somebody like me who is perpetually in a crazy rush the situation
is always the same, pick up rental car, drive around for a day, get
delayed somewhere, rush to return rental cat, scramble to find a gas
station nearby, sweat profusely and finally return car, rush to
terminal to usually find me flight to LaGuardia has been delayed
anyway

Take on Sleep No More

2012-01-29T13:23:00.001-05:00

When I was told to meet for a night of entertainment on west 27th
street, promised tons of tits, a dark space with small rooms, a sea of
blank faces, simulated sex scenes set in tight quarters with a
decadent decor could I be blamed for assuming we were heading to
Scores? Instead I was dragged into a 100,000 square foot abandoned
warehouse which had been transformed into an interactive theater stage
to be dragged through what felt like one of those procrastination
fueled high-school nightmare to see an old Shakespeare classic done by
the theatrical equivalent of David Lynch. A 1930's themed hotel, was the setting for a revival of Macbeth in a production which was half haunted house half Stanley Kubrick called Sleep No More.
There are apparently 13 hours of acting which takes place simultaneously throughout the fun house and you are expected to walk
through the story as you encounter and follow various characters from the play all while masked.
The biggest Issue I had was going in was that I was told it was a silent play so having no recollection of reading it in high-school
which was probably do to the fact I probably never actually read it in high-school (sorry Mr Erickson) I was in for a long and boring night. Thankfully a friend gave me the cliff-note version basically as we walked in which
allowed me to follow it roughly and I don't often say this for avant garde or modern art but it was quite good
Now granted I didn't see everything as nobody could possibly catch all 13 hours of acting during a chaotic 2 hour show so those boobies i was promised were never presented to me although neither were any of the multiple naked units which were exposed right along those boobies (one
of which my cliff notes teacher was quite impressed with)
I did see the killing of the King, Lady Macbeth in bed, some moving
trees and a couple of nuns/nurses looking creepy.

So although I only saw 20% of the play, understood 10% and didn't see
any tits, I would still give this 2 units up....one small one and one
large uncut one

Sent from my iPad

Sent from my iPhone

taking on the 'I'm not a racist...but" guy

2012-01-28T13:33:00.000-05:00

Whenever somebody starts a statement with ‘I’m not a racist but’ I immediately cringe. There is no other statement that I can think of that makes me more uncomfortable than this one and it’s one of those situations where I just hope for everybody’s sake that as soon as somebody starts a sentence like that, that they jump out of a moving car immediately and spare us both the next few uncomfortable minutes. What the hell are you supposed to do other than point out that just because you say “I am not a racist’ doesn’t in fact make you not a racist and almost always means that you are a racist.

Just the other day I got into one of these scenarios and was immediately struck with the dilemma whether or not to confront them or just to stay quiet and like a bad-rain storm hope it passes quickly. But if you know me, you will know that I have an incredibly hard time keeping my mouth shut. So there I go, after a long day of work, stuck in a conversation which you just can’t win when the dude tells me he wants to live in a place where he doesn’t have to see color. I guess there is a difference between keeping racist separate and vowing to exterminate an entire one.

take on visual voicemail

2012-01-27T09:30:00.000-05:00

I embrace technology but there are a few things which really leave a lot to be desired.. take Visual Voicemail for example

Today I got the following

"Hi, good afternoon this message is for Mrs Celebrate, my name is Asia. I'm calling from Dr. ##### office. This is a regards to your Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurance. I gave over. I see that I did the potatoes to verify your insurance. Please give me a call back at 212-xxx-xxxx thank you"

First of all instead of using our last name it interpreted it as ‘celebrate’, secondly I really doubt that the nurse calling shares the name of a porn star (although that may make this call that much more interesting) but most importantly I can’t tell you what the hell potatoes is supposed to mean in this statement.

Take on the guy who backs into a spot

2012-01-26T12:01:00.001-05:00

Is there anything more pompous than the guy who backs into a parking
spot that is fully approachable by fronting in? There are
typically two kinds of cars, an expensive sportscar or a junker. Can
somebody explain why somebody would ever need to spend the time to do
this?

There really are only two explanations

The driver either

- has no self confidence and needs to compensate by showing off he is
capable of driving in reverse

- he is planning a quick getaway because he is robbing a bank

Either way I can't imagine that you are really showing off because it
either proves you are hung like a pale Dutchman or the cops already
have you pegged because if I were running a bank, I'd immediately
press the emergency button the second I notice a guy backing in

Take on the NYTimes camera work

2012-01-25T11:24:00.000-05:00

The NY Times does nice work covering the news of the world but despite
the money and energy they spend on covering and uncovering stories and
events, it never fails to surprise me how second rate their
photographs are.
In yesterday's sports-section there was an article about Baron Davis
and his rehab which may not have been daily News esque but was surely
informative but what struck me was the accompanying picture. For a
new organization which sees itself as first rate, the routinely put
fuzzy, out of focus shots or worse in their articles. I must count 5
or 6 pictures per day which look like the were taken by an amateur who
happens to be blind and suffer from the shakes to boot. It is not
uncommon to see a picture of an official state visit which was taken 4
seconds after the official pose, so the picture shows an official
buttoning their jacket or looking off to the side. I don't know much
about the newspaper industry but I do know that if you are going to
publish a picture, have it enhance not deflect from the story

Take on luggage

2012-01-24T08:14:00.001-05:00

Over 15 years of heavy traveling, there is one thing which I have yet
to figure out and it has nothing to do with TSA patdowns, size of my
toothpaste tube or delays at LaGuardia. What I can't seem to get is
that it doesn't matter how many days you travel, you always have a
full bag. Take today when I'm off for three days, I lugged the same
piece of luggage I will likely take when I go to Europe for 7 days.
Although you need a few more pair of socks or underwear and a couple
more shirts, it's the staples that kill you.... It doesn't matter how
many days you travel, you still need your toothbrush and deodorant.
I still want a pair of jeans and a sweater for lounging in the hotel.
Regardless of the longevity of the trip, I still bring pair of
sneakers and gym clothes. You need a belt and a sport-coat
regardless, you need a charger, your computer and your pen drive.
I need to figure out a business model where somebody hands you a full
bag with everything you'll need when you get off a flight. Most of
us would be fine with a toiletry bag, a few white or blue button
downs, a few undershirts and a pair of sneakers. They throw in an
iPhone charger and a few pairs of socks and all of a sudden you are
only boarding with a messenger bag

Maybe this is the newest billion dollar idea.. You go online and set
up a profile with what you need and whenever you travel you just tell
them how many days you'll be on the road and a bag meets you at Denver
airport by the car rental counter. I just need to get it vetted by
averageasshole.com

take on the obsessive elevator button presser

2012-01-23T15:00:00.001-05:00

I have taken an elevator up to my office for 15 years and i've noted the strange behavior of the people who I share that intimate time with. I've observed the almost perfectly coordinated subconsious dance people will do as new ones enter and exit the elevator to ensure the maximim amount of personal space and the general level of respect people for their fellow passengers by keeping conversations to a minimum and the observation that the door-close button is the equivalent of a placebo because I'm convinced that button is not attached to anything. There is one thing that still baffles me..

So often a guy will walk into an elevator I'm on which is heading down and will press the 'G' button even after it is lit. Maybe this is just routine or maybe it's our fool-safe method to avoid technical glitzes but it seems very strange to waste the energy to press a button which is already lit.

If you fear that the button has malfunctioned, I don't see how pressing it again will help and if you believe the button is on constantly than how would you even know that it has registered your request but mostly when you get into a down-elevator in NYC and observe a bunch of people wearing winter coats and fuzzy hats..I think it is more than safe to assume they will be going directly to the ground-floor.

Take one the three grades of gas

2012-01-22T14:45:00.001-05:00

I've often heard that the biggest rip-off in the world is NJ gas.
People tell ne that although easily $0.50 cheaper per gallon that the
gas is watered down so you are not getting nearly a much oomph. I'm
not sure how that could work since I've always assumed that the octane
level has something to do with the purity of the gas and my assumption
has been that there must be some regulation to enforce a standard so I
can't imagine that these multinational oil conglomerates would risk it
all to save a couple of bucks leaving those kinds of shortcuts to
environmental risk calculation.

But what really gets me is the though of 89, I have never met anybody
who puts 89 in their car. Just look at how they price it, although
the purity of 89 is much closer to 87, they price it just south of 93
because they are fully aware that there are only two types of people
in this world People who fill up regular and those that don't So
the battle is already won when somebody wants a premium product, they
just have to price it so that there is no enticement in getting the 89

Take on the house stalker

2012-01-21T18:47:00.001-05:00

Anybody who has done a fair share of house hunting knows both the joy
and frustration of basically being able to legally stalk somebody.
It's one of the only chances you have to be truly nosy and feel no
repercussions and it does feel a bit creepy. You walk into
somebody's home and go through their closets, check out the water
pressure in their bathroom, see what they have in their fridge, check
out their CD collections, open up drawers and peak under beds and it's
all completely acceptable.
I see the family portrait hanging in the hallway, and an immediate
story starts to enter my mind. The guy worked on Wall Street but
lost his job during the recession, they are struggling on a much
smaller income and they apparently have already traded in the BMW for
a Hyundai. The wife is a stay at home mom who's miserable cause her
kids are now in school for 6 hours per day and she feels a but lost.
They spend weekends in Vermont, summers in Rhode Island but this year
they may try camping again The daughter hopes to be a ballerina, the
son a baseball player and the baby scream every night

But since they are desperate, maybe they'll sell for 20% under asking

take on the guy walking with his headphones on..

2012-01-20T15:00:00.001-05:00

It must be a slow newsday because I read this screaming headline that read "Walking with headphones can be dangerous, U-Md. study shows‎"

So some univerity spent good dollars to conclude that walking with head-phones on are much more likely to get hit by a bus than people who don't have head-phones on.. A similar study showed that dudes who like going bareback with chicks carrying STD's are much more likely to have a painful piss-stream a few months later than guys who practice abstinence.. Anyway, I completely realize that for example, I'm much more vulnerable to get run over while listing to The Thundering Herd podcast that I might if I didn't have my ears covered so I'll file this away as a study that proves the obvious..

Now I can't wait for the follow up study which will go over accidents caused by people walking while using their smartphone… I have to imagine the results will be striking

take on the NY Times collumnists

2012-01-19T18:16:00.000-05:00

I've said for years that the only NY Times columnist with any sense of humor is Gail Collins but that's almost like saying that the best tasting piece of dog-shit comes from a French poodle. The NY Times Op-Ed office is probably as dull as a school library and I'd always imagined it to be something like this

Maureen Dowd comes in drinking a large double-mocca Latte, chatting away on her blueberry while eating a strawberry scone while she tosses her Burberry bag onto Nicholas Kristof's desk knocking his black coffee all over his huge map of Angola.. He gets up to protest but Dowd is already half-way down the office stroking her cocker-spaniel she keeps in her purse and nearly runs Roger Cohen carrying a huge poster of Frank Rich. David Brooks cackles at the sight and immediately goes back to quoting some completely irrelevant Shakespeare line for his next article to ensure he gets to 2000 words. Thomas Friedman, fresh off his 10^th trip to India in the last 8 days stands in the corner staring at a mirror while wearing a jacket with way too many zippers trying to convince Charles Blow that the world is getting smaller and flatter while his head is in fact growing both larger and more round every-time he opens his mouth. The bubble caption above Blow's head is pretty clear "if somebody doesn't shoot this guy I will strangle him with a notebook full of statistics" Joe Nocera stands nearby and his bubble reads 'Man am I good looking, I bet I'm packing more heat under these navy pinstripe pants than Blow and his clown pants'

In the corner sits Bob Herbert in one of those chairs with the attached desk with a look on his face like the janitor is about to come in and move his desk into the hallway with him in it, he starts to speak and Brooks says 'has anybody ever told you that you could pass for Bill Cosby?"

Gail Collins working hard at her typewriter asks the disinterested crowd if she should add an anecdote of Mitt Romney's dog being tied to the family car in her next article but she loses her train of thought half-way through her thought to ask if maybe she should just go with 'we digress'. The camera zooms over to Paul Krugman as he polishes his Nobel prize with a hanky from PINK with the sweat of the underclass.

Brooks turns to Ross Douthat and asks when he's going to marry Rachel again…only Bob Berhert laughs..Brooks turns to him and said 'good one right Bill?" The William Safire memorial desks sits empty with a one of those black and white notebooks open filled with pages of grammatical corrections he's found in the pages of the Old Lady.

take on the blackout

2012-01-18T14:18:00.001-05:00

January 18^th will go down as the day the internet was shut down.. or at least Wikipedia shut itself down to protest legislation to stop pirating of copywritten material. Now obviously Wikipedia is immensely popular and blacking itself out will have a real affect as kid's might actually have to visit a library to finish their history reports. Along with Wikipedia and CraigsList which are obviously very important in the cybersphere, Google put a big black box over their logo showing exactly how much they really believed in the cause and Mark Zuckerberg posted that "The Internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world. We can't let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the Internet's development. Facebook opposes SOPA and PIPA, and we will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the Internet. In other words this is really bad and we don't think they should do it but we won't actually take any action on Facebook. Although it doesn't say much for standing up for what you believe in it does show that a Dobbs Ferry education made him smart enough to realize he shouldn't upset the apple-card so close to a possible record breaking IPO.

What we found interesting was that unlike Google and Facebook a number of other websites did follow suit and blacked out. The other websites includes something called Reddit which I have never heard of before and some blog named Boing Boing which I can only imagine is about babies. So the question of course is…if a tree falls in the internet and nobody cares, does it make a sound?

The president of Reddit was all over CNN fawning anger against pirates..well against people who are against pirates. If this isn't the greatest marketing scheme for Reddit because in every clip this dude makes sure to note that Reddit is some website where people go to vote for other websites and that they get millions of hits. I swear that I've lived 36 years without ever having needed the services that Reddit offers which seem so insanely idiotic that can almost be misconstrued as clever..

The great irony of course is that nobody will remember Reddit tomorrow when they turn their lights back on.

Take on the NJ Transit bus driver shortstop

2012-01-17T14:18:00.000-05:00

One of the many frustrations for the NJ transit system involves the
bus drivers. They seem to do their job well enough (they get me to
where I need to go in a reasonable amount of time) but what they
surely lack is some sense of customer service or better yet normal
civility. Like many of these unionized government jobs the NJ
Transit drivers live in a world where they feel entitled to more than
they should just look at the way they operate. I walk onto one of
the platforms a few days ago at 5:38pm to catch a 5:45pm bus. I walk
up the stairs and see the bus at the gate..well almost at the gate.
As is typical these bus drivers will park their buses about five feet
in front of the gate so they do not have to let anybody on. So there
we stand with 25 adults waiting while watching this dude pick his
teeth through the window Now there is nothing that says he has to
open his doors a second before he is suppose to but as a human
courtesy when you see two dozen people standing after a long days
work, wouldn't it be at least courteous to give them the opportunity
to sit?

Take on the educated candidate

2012-01-16T13:23:00.000-05:00

TOR hasn't spent nearly as much time on the Presidential Race as we
should and we've been criticized for being too busy with things like
women's shoes, Kim Kardashian and bowel movements although there is a
large portion of our readership who prefers we stay out of the
Political theater. We will take both suggestions and only do an
occasional political blog entry but only if we find the subject matter
completely outrageous like if we find Rick Perry dressed like Kate
Perry or when somebody finally unearths Obama's dead sea scrolls

Today us one of those days because it struck me how absolutely stupid
the latest attack ad is.
Newt Gingrich has released an attack ad, called "The French
Connection," showing clips of Romney speaking while the narrator
warns: "Just like John Kerry, he speaks French!"

I hate the French as much as anybody but even i'm appalled that we are
now digging so low that we're going to criticize a guy for being
educated? We already saw what the dumb guy from the Texas can do to
a country, I'm not sure this is something to strive for.
Although i don't think Newt is dumb by any stretch, it's disturbing
when somebodies ability to speak more than one language is seen as a
detriment when aiming to become the leader of the free world!

When did we become a country where being uneducated was something to
be proud of or worse yet that being worldly is seen as a character
flaw for a potential president. This just tells you that our biggest
issues will never be 'turning into Europe' but rather isolating
ourselves from the rest of the world.
I travel around this globe and this type of rhetoric from a 'serious'
candidate for president is downright embarrassing.

Sent from my iPhone

Sent from my iPhone

Take on the celebrity

2012-01-15T20:57:00.001-05:00

It must have been a quite few months for Kim Kardashian since she
divorced the goody white/black dude from the Nets and the lack of
attention seems to be bothering her because today a buddy sent me the
following link http://www.buzzfeed.com/mattcherette/heres-the-photo-that-allegedly-shows-kanye-we?s=mobile
which allegedly shows Kanye taking A 'celebrity' from the backside.
Kanye hasn't denied anything but seeing the picture it's pretty
obvious who the puffer is. Kim's ass is as recognizable as Michael
Jordan's head, Ron Jeremy's dong or Chris Farley's guy.
But of course it brings another question from the masses: would you?

Now granted I have to imagine none on my light skinned buddies would
be able to be within 6 inches of her but I find Kim to be the Tebow of
chicks. Half the works loves her, 49.99% of the guys hate her and the
rest played for USC

Take on the subway scammer

2012-01-14T12:00:00.001-05:00

The beauty of the unlimited metro-card is also it's biggest detractor.
Anybody who rides the trains realizes that you need about 20
minutes between subway swipes at one station and years ago there would
be guys standing at the turnstiles with a stack of unlimited
metro-cards who would swipe you through for a buck. They figured
that if they had 40 cards and swiped on person through every 30
seconds they could make $60 per hour before expenses ($90 metro cards)
working only about 4 or 5 hours per day and for some period of time
this seemed like a way for a couple of guys to make a few bucks
You don't see those guys much anymore but what you do see are a bunch
of people standing at stations like Grand Street or Canal who are
waiting on opposite sides of the gate. One will go through the
turnstile, pass the metro card through the gates and wait for twenty
minutes so the second guy can swipe through.
How terrible is your life if waiting on a subway platform for 20
minutes to save $2 sound like a good deal? And truthfully an
unlimited metro-card used twice a day comes out to less than $2 per
ride There has to be a better way cause if you ever catch me doing
this I give you permission to throw me in front of the next oncoming D
Train

Take on the Righetti Competition Wreckage Service and relationship wrecking company business model

2012-01-13T11:55:00.001-05:00

10 years ago before I was a happily married father of one, when I was 240 pounds, had not yet won the D-Cup and still believed that the world revolved around Erasure, Asian Women and Sushi, I toyed with a number of business ideas.

First came DirtyDVD.com.. Remember when the DVD first came out, one of the main selling features were the multiple camera angles you could watch a scene from and I figured that there was no better way to utilize this new video recording device than for dirty DVD's. First you'd watch a wide-screen shot, then a close up of the chick, another of the action and finally you'd go to the long shot to see the entire scene come to a crescendo. Little did I know that XNXX, RedTube, Tube8, YouPorn would come along and basically make dirty movies a thing of the past

Then came RighettiGear.com. TShirts with funny statements on it, the first problem was that except for four or five quirky statements, we didn't have much else... For New Years I hand-wrote 'if drinking made your winkie shrink, would you quit?" on a tshirt in a sharpy.. that was the extent of it and then came 6dollarShirts.com which were funnier.

Well finally we had the idea for the Righetti Relationship wrecker.. I'm not really sure how this would make us any money but then again DirtyDVD's and RigehttiGear were about as succesful as pissing into the wind.

anyway this was the business model

Righetti Competition Wreckage Service and relationship wrecking company
when you need protection from yourself and later protection from me.

a relationship wrecking company
Cliffside Park, NJ 07010
hours: Sunday mornings from 8:30am till 11:00am
President: Russel Jones

FOR THE RIGHETTI EXPERIENCE

FAQ:

What do I get? fat slob to come with you when your meeting some slutty chick with a long term boyfriend
Why do I need him? to keep the L.T.B. occupied

What does it do for you?: the fat slob will immediately start drinking with the long term boyfriend bringing him to an immediate drunken slob
What happens now? a drunk righetti will start becoming competitive and challenge the LTB to a whose got the bigger unit contest, leaving a sight no-one will want to remember
Can this backfire? have you ever seen a naked Righetti?
I still don't get it: the long term boyfriend will be too busy in a pissing competition with our slob to pay any attention to his girlfriend, you on the other hand will be sober .
What does it cost?: only the price of the drinks
What is the Bump Guarantee? a drunk righetti
What happens if all goes well? You get yours
What happens if I go to the men's room? Righetti gets yours
What do I do then? start drinking
Does this technique ever fail? Depends how you identify failure, failure for you maybe, failure for our slob doubtful.
How do I dress? better then the L.T.B. but not good enough that you mind getting puked on
Do You have examples of this fool proof plan working? do you have proof it doesn't?
What happens if the girl is fat and slobby? Righetti gets his
What happens if the girl is fat, slobby and ultra slutty? You and Righetti might both get his
What happens if she winds up getting drunk instead of the LTB? once again Righetti gets his, yours and the LTB's
Do you offer services for a girl looking to hook up with a guy with a LTG (long term girlfriend)? not even a challenge, b/c a drunk girl (ltg or not) is a done chick

take on the subway platform ad

2012-01-12T15:22:00.001-05:00

As a veteran of the NYC subway system, there is something that has been bothering me for years. Do the people who handle the sales of the ads on the platforms have different pricing depending on the direction of the train on that side of the platform?

The reason I ask is, take a random platform on the R train going into Brooklyn and you'll know that you will always find people waiting on the platform for the uptown train but rarely anybody waiting to catch a downtown one. Basically it's a city which revolves around Manhattan, so any platform that serves trains that go into Manhattan will have people on it while the platform on the other-side of the tracks is mainly used by people getting off the train and directly departing the station. So whereas the same amount of people will go through both turnstiles, you'll get much more captive audience on one side as people will stare at these ads as they patiently wait for their train to come barreling down the tunnel Since advertisement is all about capturing a captive audience there must be a different price for both or at least there should be.

Then I think about another aspect of it.. there probably is a lot more graffiti on the uptown advertisements as there will obviously be many more bored teenagers standing on one platform who will deface just about anything..

take on the megabyte

2012-01-11T11:00:00.000-05:00

I’m all for the ease, convenience and sensibility, so it’s no surprise that the Metric system is a far superior concept to the old British system we use. I’m a 36 year old man and couldn’t tell you with how many ounces there were in a pound or what the boiling temperature of water in Fahrenheit is. If you ask me how many feet are in a mile, I’d guess about 5342 and if you ask me how many fluid ounces there were in a gallon I’d look at you like you just asked me to identify each strain in the DNA strand.

So what I don’t get is the way that we measure electronic data. Kilobytes to Megabytes to Gigabytes has a very metric (and logical) feel to it..BUT when you actually see the conversion you are told that there are 1024 KB in a megabyte and in turn 1024 megabytes in a gigabyte, so in other words there are 1,048,576 kilobytes in a gigabyte and 1,073,741,824 kilobytes in a terabyte which sound about as random as 5280 feet in a mile (I looked it up.. and i'm disputing this because my foot is a bit smaller than 12 inches).

Take on Obama v Hernandez

2012-01-10T11:28:00.001-05:00

On Monday the Obama administration argued that Guatemalans who were knowingly exposed to STD's without their consent cannot sue the US government. The claims were being made when the covert operation in the 40's was exposed by some researcher at Wellesley College a few years ago. Basically 2000 Guatemalan prisoners and mental-patients were exposed to the syphilis, gonorrhea and some other things that make it hurt when you piss. They said that the subjects were exposed without their knowledge although they were compensated for something with a pack of butts and in case of the prisoners, were exposed by infected prostitutes.

Forget the moral dilemma involved in something as unethical and Third Reich-esque as this is, I can't believe the CIA can legally pay for hookers.

But how about the precedent this sets? Granted they are using some ridiculous thing called the Federal Tort Claims Act which apparently allows you to date-rape a prisoner but you can just see where this leads. If you can't sue Uncle Sam for giving you the Clap, does this mean some chick can't sue some dude from Long Island who knowingly gave you syphilis? I can see it now; some chick whose cootch looks like it was taken over by bed-bugs goes into court and gets slapped down when the defense lawyer uses Obama v Rodriguez. Before you know it they'll be using that ruling to let dudes out of jail who slipped some chick the date-rape drug, you gotta nip this thing in the bud now before all chaos breaks loose.

And how about those poor prostitutes..how did they get compensated for having to sleep with a bunch of Guatemalan prisoners? Those guys probably all look like Hernandez from Oz, if I were those chicks I'd be suing the US Government myself cause having to sleep with that guys might be worse than syphilis

Take on those small pictures

2012-01-09T17:02:00.001-05:00

There are days where I feel like I'm getting baited and switched left
and right. Just last week, I open the NY Times app and click on the
''most emailed" tab and am met with the expected 10 top stories which
as usual was a mix of Maureen Dowd, latest news for an IOS based
tablet and health and fitness. Anyway as I was scrolling down the
picture accompanying the sixth article immediately grabbed my
attention and without reading as much as the headline I had clicked on
it.
Problem is that my eyesight is getting worse and instead of a picture
of some dude's huge biceps, I had interpreted it as a huge set of
cans. It as if my pervert eyes were once again playing tricks on me
except I believe the Times purposely chose a picture which could be
confused for some of the best cleavage this side of 52nd street and
Broadway
As you can imagine I was mighty disappointed when this thing was about
a different kind of looking good in a tshirt

Take on the trunk

2012-01-08T14:15:00.001-05:00

What is wrong with people, i walk past a car like this a few times per
month. Basically some dude has an entire scrubless carwash in his
trunk. I know from my own life that I never have enough space in my
trunk and here I see some dude with two crates filled to brim with
soap, rags, jugs of that blue crap, vinyl cover and tire cleaner in
his Civic

Taking on (more) tipping etiquette

2012-01-07T13:34:00.001-05:00

I rent an apartment which includes a bunch appliances as part of the
rent. Stuff like a washer/dryer, a microwave and a dishwasher.
Most things in the apartment are more than fine but it was pretty
obvious when we moved in that the dishwasher was on it's last legs.
The door squeaks, the cycle is about 3 hours long and after it moat of
my dishes look dirtier than before they went in there.
Anyway after complaining, my landlord graciously offered to replace it
and arranged for delivery and installation of the new one and removal
of the old one. I got a call this morning and was told to expect
delivery within a four-hour window and was happy to see two dudes show
up an hour into the window to do their work.
I immediately start to question whether this is a tippable service
being they are already walking away with a bunch of parts, some
scrap-metal and a bunch of copper wire

So I ask a couple of buddies whether I am obligated to tip and would
take the consensus as my guide

First response
"yes, unless he owns the company"

Second response
"Never. I have a hard time looking at those guys."

Third response
"Tony Romo is a homo"
(In fairness this might have been a response to something else"

So I wait for the final response to break the tie which was a
lukewarm. "I guess so" which I guess means that it is a tippable act.

Anyway, I go with the first guy's rule of tipping as i make it a point
to not tip a guy who owns the company or at the very least appears to
be in a managerial role.
Now obviously the two delivery guys are not the owners of the company
(Lowes) who sold the dishwasher, nor do they appear to be the owners
of the subcontractor who installs and removes them. So I'm out $10

But then it occurs to me since it's not my house (or my dishwasher)how
the hell did i get stuck both waiting in that four hour window and now
also the guy on the line or the ten-spot?

Buddy #1 tells me that I should look at it with a glass-half-full
optimism, I'm getting an appliance for $10, I am just waiting for
buddy #2 to suggest I drop an upper-decker in the dishwasher when I
move out

Take on the ConEd envelope

2012-01-06T17:52:00.000-05:00

Has anybody else noticed the new ConEd envelopes? Maybe I'm the only
one but there is quite a bit of irony in them trumpeting their new
'green' initiative by printing it on the envelopes they send out their
bills in. Whereas Bank of America and other bill envelopes use the
envelope to implore the payee to sign up for paperless billing, ConEd
sees it all together differently. Obviously ConEd has a lot more
experience in customer relations than I ever do as they must cover
their asses for all those service outages but even the promotion of
green energy for a cleaner planet by a company like ConEd seems
disingenuous.
I signed up to have my portion of energy come from ultra clean wind
energy. For this, ConEd charges me a premium (which I willingly
accept) but they then use my usage to fight off charges they rely on
dirty energy sources and most probably taking advantage of tax breaks
designed for the spread of non carbon fuels
I am the one making the choice and paying the price but it is ConEd
who takes the bows
So much for saving me money

Take on the end of the month inventory

2012-01-05T18:06:00.000-05:00

As we closed the books on 2011 and look towards 2012, something
occurred to me regarding inventory management which might or might not
have any impact to the bottom line but would surely have a lot of
inconsistent record keeping.

As anybody who works in any type of business dealing in the sale or
purchasing of widgets knows, there is a very obvious lag time from
when one company ships goods (and it this leaves their inventory) and
another company receives goods (and is thus added to theirs) so there
are a usually a number of days or weeks when neither company counts it
as inventory.
I am not sure what the real repercussions are in terms of balance
sheets, tax liabilities or profits but any salesman will tell you that
their typical busiest billing day is at the end of a billing cycle (be
it month, quarter or year). I would guess that shipping companies
like UPS or FedEx handle more shipments during this time as I'm sure
there are a lot of sales numbers which spike right around the last of
the month
What these 30th day of the month shipments do though is put a lot of
goods into virtual limbo where they are not on either the seller or
the buyers books.
Now obviously there is real value to having inventory and write offs
due to depreciation but having less of it can also allow a company to
show bigger profits on their balance sheets

I'm not asking the IRS to get involved as we have enough complications
as a manufacturing country but would guess that the total amount of
'inventory' held on shelves is grossly understated.

take on the check

2012-01-04T14:38:00.001-05:00

When I sat down at the bar last night waiting for the rest of my
dinner party to arrive, I was appalled was the price of the beers.
The cheapest option on the menu was some Turkish Ale which tasted like
it was filtered through the Turks sweaty sock. The price of a bottle
was $7 which even in Manhattan feels expensive but what really got me
is when it was time to pay the bill. First of all after tax the bill
came out to $7.62 which for something that tastes like it was made
from Kafta seems outrageous. But what really got me is that when
handed the bartender a $20 she only handed me $12 back. I get
rounding up or down when it's about a nickel but to round up $0.38 ??
To add insult to injury, she didn't even as much as mention it just
left it sitting there.
Then she has the gall to give me a dirty look when I don't tip beyond
what she had stolen already

Take on the forward facing sneakers

2012-01-03T08:23:00.001-05:00

There is something very disturbing about the attached picture and it
isn't just that I took a cellphone pic in the mens room. Yesterday
at some kid's birthday party at a chain playhouse, I walk in and see
the distinct view of sneakers peaking out of the bottom of the stall.
The problem is that the sneakers are facing towards the wall so there
is a very good shot that some dude is pissing all over the seat.
This isn't some Irish pub, this is a children's playhouse and unless
this dude's got a little Sandusky in him, there is a decent shot he
has a kid jumping around in the bounce-house.

Take on any given trip yo Target

2012-01-02T19:34:00.000-05:00

Ivan convinced that like a wireless fence, Target has an electronic
barrier around each store which won't allow you to leave unless you
have committed to spend $75. Today I walk in and first stand in line
to return a GPS and get back $89.95, then I walk through the store
once, get to the register and spend $0.25 more cents than I returned.
It's like they have a algorithm set up to make sure you never walk
through the store and my see at least $150 worth of junk you do not
need. You may have willpower over $75 of those purchases but
eventually the incredible deal for paper-towels or one of those funny
shirts catches your eye and it's love. A short romance later and all
of a sudden you find yourself whipping out the old debit card and once
again throwing nearly a hundred dollars to the target gods

Kill me

take on the midnight texts

2012-01-01T14:30:00.001-05:00

Maybe I've just gotten too old, maybe I've gotten too lame and maybe I'm too critical but I cannot explain often enough how insincere the mass New Years text message is.. This is like somebody posing 'happy new year' on Facebook and feeling like they connected to somebody. But unlike previous years, this year I turned my ringer off so I wouldn't be woken up at 12:01, 12:04, 12:05, 12:08 and 12;09 from this lame excuse of bandwidth . See the one thing I've learned is that when you plan to bring in the New Year dead asleep, it makes sense to turn off your phone ringer because it is the one day in the year when you get text messages from random folks that are mostly indecipherable from one another. Now I have nothing against the personal message but like we have pointed out all too often at TOR, the mass text message is anything but considerate, for example this morning I must have woken up to 20 messages and honestly they could all have been the same one wishing 'you and your family a great 2012'
Next time you want to wish me anything.. wish that my phone-plan gets canceled.

take on the New Years resolution

2011-12-31T13:59:00.001-05:00

I gotta say that the overhearing a bunch of folks discussing their New Years resolutions over coffee at the diner today was quite depressing.. Mainly because you just know the resolutions i.e. lose weight, stop smoking etc was exactly what these four discussed last year over a double cheesburger before walking outside for a couple of buts. Now I get that it is difficult to change people so days like New Years allows people to make the drastic changes in their lives which they know they need to but because it's such a played out event, it just becomes an empty threat which is actually more harmful than helpful because it gives people this false sense of doing something.

Somehow people have been convinced that the hardest step in a journey is the first..but when it comes to these self-improvement steps the first step when really it's the next 20 that are the hardest.. this is the reason you see a thousand people join NYSC on January 2nd (and see people like me quit in anticipation of that on December 29th).. because joining is easy.. it just costs money...actually sustaining a workout regiment is hard and people are inherently lazy and content ..

So this year my New Year's resolution is to tell anybody they have a New Year's resolution that they are a bunch of idiots who just wasted $89 per month for a membership they'll be too embarrassed to cancel..

take on the gym membership cancellation

2011-12-30T08:52:00.001-05:00

A few years ago when a friend had a terrible accident, I volunteered to help consolidate and close a bunch of things in her name including credit cards, payroll stuff, retailer cards, drivers license renewals etc.    It was all pretty straight forward for the most part except when it came to canceling her gym membership which was nearly impossible.    I needed doctor's letters, proof of hospitalization, report of the accident and more... it almost got to the point where I was expecting them to ask me to bring in a body.
Fast Forward 10 years and off to another gym membership cancellation..my own.   After 7 or 8 years with NYSC, I made the conscious decision earlier this week to cancel my membership after having made the unconscious decision not to use it about 6 months earlier.    It's not that I won't work out, it's just that I hate the treadmill with a passion, I don't ever see myself pumping iron and I find all those machines completely irritating and thus prefer to work out by running on the hard pavement of NYC.
I call up NYSC and am told that I can only cancel in person which is a complete scam designed to only prolong your membership especially in this case when I did not have a contract which I was going to break.    I'm sure if you throw enough hurdles up, it will dissuade people from canceling just to avoid the nuisance.

Well if having to physically get there wasn't a big enough pain in the ass, they then put the full court press on you.     I walk in and ask to speak to somebody about canceling and the guy at the desk tries to shoo me away by 'warning' me that it's busy and that maybe I should come back later.. now realize it's Wednesday Night at 6:30 the week between Christmas and New Years.. there isn't a soul in the place.
Finally one of their reps meets me and the conversation goes something like this

Righetti:   I need to cancel my membership
NYSC guy:   sure no problem.. can i ask why
Righetti:    I haven't used the gym in 6 months..preferring to run outside
NYSC guy:   gotcha.   let me just get to a screen
Righetti:   thanks
NYSC guy..   so am I correct to state in this cancellation sheet that you have decided against being healthy
Righetti... well not exactly
NYSC guy.. no problem.. they just need to me to fill something out.. so I guess you are fine to by a lazy slob for the rest of your life
Righetti... well.
NYSC guy.. gotcha.. I see here you have a family and young child... please sign here stating that you do not have any intention of seeing her grow up
Righetti.. that's not really what I'm saying
NYSC guy.. ok no problem.. we'll just say that you are happy gaining 2 to 3 pounds a year which will mean that you will be 250 pounds by the time you are 65
Righetti.. i'm not quite sure that's what I came in here to say
NYSC guy.. ok just sign here..here...here..and here.. hope your fat fingers can hold the pencil

MLIA

Take on the Video Rental Awards

2011-12-29T17:46:00.001-05:00

There are times when I really don't get people. Just this week the first annual Lifetime Achievement award for Video Rentals was given out and the award winner was…. Kevin James. Now I have nothing against the Fat Man but having him win any kind of movie award is akin to having Mark Sanchez win the NFL MVP.

My first thought was obviously who the hell is his competition, obviously these award shows are all whores for publicity and my guess is that James was the only one who returned their call so. I guess he beat out were probably Ray Romano, Andy Dick and David Spade. If Redbox (the host) had to be honest you'd have to think that a guy like Will Ferrell or Adam Sandberg who were probably too busy doign anything else.. although they could go the publicity stunt route and give it posthumously to Chris Farley.

The second thought is.. do we really need a Video Rental Awards show? Nobody watches any of these crappy award-shows anymore, shit the Grammy's just eliminated about 40% of the awards nobody cared about to try to keep eye-balls on the screen and the Oscars went away from all their 'best postproduction award for a Foreign film" categories a while ago.. I am all too happy when we consolidate these kinds of things not expand them..

Then you have to think why they are even putting this award show on.. video-rentals are a dying breed. There isn't a videostore left in America, Netflix is imploding and even the smut shops on 42^nd street have all shut down. I only watch movies in four places: On an airplane, On-Demand at home, Streaming directly from Amazon using Prime or download from the Android store for my Touchdroid.. I haven't take a survey but I have to imagine that I'm in the majority when it comes to actually ordering a video or DVD..so I'm not exactly sure who they are trying to appeal to

But the real thought I have is.. will that jackass wear that idiotic hat when he accepts the award.. I guarantee that I will NOT be watching so I'll have to catch the award show when they release it on video.

take on the printer cartridge racket

2011-12-28T16:11:00.001-05:00

Forget the Gambino crime family, the biggest racket in this country is the printing business and more specifically the printer cartridge industry. Just look at the way they run their operation. You buy a new cartridge for about $75 which last you for a few months, they you buy a new one and they give you a UPS label and ask you to return your old cartridge back to the factory. They put it under the guise of recycling and a greener earth but honestly it costs them about $5 in UPS Ground charges and they can refill that printer cartridge for about $2 worth of ink and then resell it back to me for another $75. No wonder there is this huge underground market for off-market ink for these things, it's absolutely ridiculous how big a rip-off it is and now they've compounded the rip-off with them convincing us to give these cartridges back for nothing.. think about it this way..you get $0.05 for a returned glass bottle but get nothing at all back for this hump of plastic other than some environmentally feel good hue.

Take on redemption

2011-12-27T14:01:00.000-05:00

111.11 to 110.26. Only .85 points separate two teams after 16 weeks
of battle but for the first time the one on the losing end wasn't me.
10 years, hundreds of hours watching meaningless games to the bitter
end, thousands of hours of research and analysis, sleepless nights,
restless days, arguments with my family and so much more. Nobody
ever said we weren't capable it was just that when the games got late,
the scores got tight or the pressure high we always found a way to
find the most excruciating way to lose. Whether it was Tiki Barber
going off in a week 17 Monday night football game to stick the nail in
the coffin or the Redskin drive three years ago which stalled just a
few Fred Davis yards short of victory not to mention the years
depending on Jermaine Wiggins, Brad Hoover or The Whizzanator or
having our heart ripped out with another fumble by Sweaty Arms Ahman
Green

Because although there weren't that
many these few failures always obstructed the successes but not this
year. This year I can finally sleep knowing that finally it has all
come together for the Silly Putty Sacks who as a charter franchise in
the SecondHand Fantasy Football League was one of 3 teams who had not
had the pleasure of heaving the DCup up over our heads in victory.

Take on cheap shoes

2011-12-26T12:49:00.001-05:00

A few months ago I got what seemed like a great deal, a pair of
standard black work shoes for $29.99 at Overstock. Three months later
I walk up the stairs at Penn Station and just about kill myself when
my foot gives out. I do some investigative work and find that the
glue that keeps the sole attached to the shoe has completely come off.
I get that a cheap pair of shoes is not going to have the comfort or
life of a better pair but to completely disintegrate is another story.
I am not saying that every pair must pass the same rigorous QC step
but at least all should pass a basic one that tells you it will last
for more than a few months

Take on the heartbreak

2011-12-25T10:18:00.001-05:00

I am nice to old people, I donate to charity, I believe I am a good
father, I work hard, I don't overindulge yet still the fat man in the
red coat hates me. I play by the rules but sometimes it just doesn't
feel like that's enough I don't know what I need to do but whatever
I am doing isn't working.

Once again I have been Romofied, my entire fantasy season gone in the
blink of an eye (or a Jason Babin stunt) and for the second time in
two years as the Cowboys QB was carted of the field, my season was
carted off to the morgue.

I am just not very good at this game

Take on the butchered wrapping job

2011-12-24T14:46:00.001-05:00

Some people wake up on Christmas morning looking forward to a ton of
presents, I wake up to see the wrapping job people have done and rank
the best and worst. Now I can't blame anybody as that paper has the
tensile strength of water but there is something kind of ridiculous
about spending 3 hours finding a gift, spending hard earned money on
it and then wrapping it like it looks like you threw up all over the
gift

So if you insist on force feeding me a gift at least have the decency
to not wrap it like you are wearing ray-bans

take on the gmail 2 step verification

2011-12-23T14:20:00.001-05:00

I recently signed up for the new 2-step verification for GMAIL to give me some security. It basically means that when you sign into a computer from a machine which you don't usually use, that you need to enter a second password which gets sent to you as a text similar to the way many people in corporate America use the toggles. It's a great concept and would give you some feeling of security knowing it would be much more difficult to hack your account but here is a scenario which I think GMAIL has overlooked .

You and your new bride are travelling in Costa Rica spending nights in fancy hotels overlooking the cloud-forest, Volcano Arenal and the hot springs. Everything is going swimmingly when all of a sudden you realize that you can't find your bag which included your wallet, your passport and your brand new white IPhone 4s after a night of heavy booze and marathon sex. You need to get in touch with your friends in Staten Island to help you get back to the States but without a phone you can't call, text or email. You search high and low and finally find an internet café, go to gmail.com and log-on. The problem is they ask you for the 2^nd verification code which of course was sent to your brand-new white IPhone 4s and now there is no way to log onto your account and thus no-way to get in touch with your friend with too much chest-hair, too little humility and too much weight around his midsection.

take on McJesus

2011-12-22T15:07:00.001-05:00

A buddy of mine driving through fly-over country comes across a manger in front of a McDonalds the power of which immediately forces him to take out his camera, snap a picture and send it around to all his buddies describing it as 'real america' The beauty of it is that it combines the two great loves of America, Jesus and Big Macs and shows how inseparable the two are.

I have spent a 100 nights in 'real america', have been in the company of some of the biggest religious fanatics who have screamed at me that this is a 'Christian country' and have seen more crosses, mangers, Rudolph's and virgin mary's in public places than I care for so I realize the importance of the Baby Jesus to an incredible percentage of this population. Of course I could argue that this country was founded on the concept of a separation of Religion and State but when you hear God's name invoked after every presidential address, spoken by every elementary school kid before class, during every 7^th inning stretch at Yankee Stadium and after every NFL victory you realize that there is no doubt that you can never truly separate the two especially when you see that the American Muslim program gets pulled off the air.

But what made this so striking was that it was located on the property of a McDonalds a company which you would think would keep its nose out of anything potentially controversial, I can't imagine any 300lb American passing up a Happy Meal because there wasn't a Nativity scene in front of the double wide doors.

taking on what the untouchable police force

2011-12-21T16:21:00.001-05:00

know this is going to come across as somewhat tone-deaf but I'm really starting to believe it, but in very sad way the memory of 9/11 has become the worst thing that has happened to the accountability of the average cop walking the beat because when it comes to any form of criticism they have become completely untouchable. There are thousands of great cops out there but there are also a ton of them who see protecting the lives of the citizens of this city as secondary to killing green-pigs or playing words with friends.

I lived through 9/11 and obviously don't mean to imply it is at all a good thing but what the memory of it has done is that these cops walk around completely untouchable when it comes to their individual personal behavior. I've lived in NYC for 10 years but it's getting completely ridiculous how they walk around now with this air of entitlement. Every day I walk on the street, stand on a subway platform, wait in line at a restaurant and see a cop putzing around on his cellphone. Today I saw a guy on the corner of Times Square playing Cut-The-Rope, yesterday I was almost run over by a cop driving his patrol car while on his cell-phone and every day I see a group of them congregate on one side of a subway platform shooting the shit.. I don't know another profession where it seems completely acceptable to spend most of your working day completely distracted. I've said it before but you don't see a girl working at McDonalds on her phone her entire shift, I never catch the postman standing around reading a magazine and I don't see an elevator operator playing angry-birds and none of these guys have the responsibility to make sure that the citizens are safe.

But even if you accept that cops are a different animal, what gets me is that you can't say anything about it because you'll come across as unappreciative or unpatriotic even if the criticism is completely acceptable. Take that ticket-fixing scandal which broke a few months ago. The immediately response was not that of shame but was a bunch of cops wrapping themselves in their flag to defend heroic behavior on days like 9/11 to try to diffuse the fact that they were breaking the law.

take on the Iphone earbuds

2011-12-20T13:29:00.001-05:00

I am often shocked with how incredibly stupid people are and even that statement shocks me..

Take today as an example, I am walking to work and see some dude standing on the sidewalk using their white earbuds thing to talk on their IPhone. Now this in itself isn't that crazy but what is ridiculous is that this dude was still putting his phone right up to their mouth.. what exactly is the point to having to wear those earbuds if you are just going to give yourself an arm cramp by holding the phone mic right to your face.

This is similar to the people you see driving using the speaker-phone option on their phone but still holding the phone in their hands. Somebody please explain to me how anybody could consider this 'hands free'

Take on the original gift

2011-12-19T18:32:00.000-05:00

Somebody asked me what the hardest thing was about being married or in another relationship. I have hears people say that it's money, kids, philosophical differences or life style but after being married for 5+ years (and having been together for almost 9 years) I have to say the single hardest thing is to come up with an original gift. For somebody like me who will only try to present a well thought out gift, all these holidays, anniversaries, birthdays etc are impossible. Just do the math

Just do the math and your head starts to spin
You have four gift giving days per year (Birthday, anniversary, Christmas and Valentines Day) x 8 years and before you know it you are approaching three dozen 'well though out' gifts

No wonder I have gone to the massage about 10 times already

Take on the 'never drinking again'

2011-12-18T14:34:00.001-05:00

There are mornings when you feel like
you missed out and there are mornings you are glad you did. Years ago i made it a point to always get my money's worth at a party with open bar but when I woke up this morning and it did not feel like there was a contractor drilling in the inside of my head I felt like I wanted to drop to my knees and thank god. So many mornings I have spend vowing to never drink again but today was a morning where I had that feeling without being hungover and just glad I didn't feel like hell

Take in church parking

2011-12-17T14:16:00.001-05:00

Whatever happened to separating church from state? In a city where there always seem to be one parking spot for every two cars, our city still insists on kissing Christian ass with their no-parking in front of a church signs. I don't know what the reasoning is or why it's been this way for ever but there seems to be no rhyme or reason because mist churches seem to be closed most of the week. It can't be a 'religious' thing as mosques, synagogs and temples aren't afforded the same luxury but somehow thousands of perfectly good spots are eliminated all over this city to accommodate a few

Forge everything else we need a commission to find more parking spots an eliminating these no parking zones should be step 1

take on the subway flood

2011-12-16T16:26:00.001-05:00

Is there anything less efficient than the NYC subway turnstiles? I'm not talking about the fact that there seems to an inverse relationship with the amount of time before the train departs and the amount of swipes it takes to get through but instead talking about how ridiculous it is that during rush hour you can't get to the turnstile to enter the station because there is a flood of people coming up the stairs. I have lost hours of my life when I missed a train because it took 5 minutes before I could even get anywhere near the turnstile because getting to the swipe spot feels like you are swimming upstream

Here is a novel ideal how about you devoted lanes for entering and exiting cause when you get to the Holland Tunnel it isn't a free-for-all with cars using the same lanes at the same time for inbound and outbound traffic

Take on the small hair

2011-12-15T14:46:00.001-05:00

Everyone knows the TOR position on public restrooms but sometimes even we are appalled by what we find. Today in a standard NYc office building bathroom we are met with what I can only believe is an ass hair on the seat. Now I know some of the TOR readers of Slavic and Mediterranean descent will tell me that excess body hair is something they must deal with but is there really nothing you can do to not flake ones that have come out of your ahole onto my seat??

take on the mastercard gift-card

2011-12-14T15:21:00.000-05:00

A few years ago, I received a Mastercard giftcard as a present from an aunt. It was a nice gift but somehow it never made it out of the birthday-card it came in. Fast-forward 3 years when I'm going through a spring-cleaning and find the birthday card with the Mastercard giftcard still sitting inside. This felt like finding a $20 in the pocket of your jeans while doing the laundry.. so here I am sitting with essentially found money and decide to splurge by using it to go out to eat, except in this case my pocket has a huge hole in it...because the card gets declined when we decide to use it to pay for the meal. We call the company who issued the card and are told that they charge a $2.50 monthly convenience fee.. Can somebody explain what the hell convenience it is to me to steal $2.50 from me on a monthly basis. This card was paid for in cash at a premium (it costs more than $25 to get a $25 card), somebody collects interest on this $25. So they are charging me 10% per month so that they can make 2.5% when they throw it in a standard savings account, how is that for 'convenience'?

Forget rallying against the 1%ers.. I'm rallying against the 10%ers

take on loud commercials

2011-12-13T16:35:00.001-05:00

We spend about 360 days out of the year complaining about something but today we're going to commend some very brave people who complained loud enough to actually get something done. After a couple of years, a bill finally passed Congress that would force commercials to have to lower their volume to the same level as that of the TV stations. For years we have complained (mostly Mrs TOR) that we have to reach for my remote 3 times per half-hour so that I don't blow my eardrums out when New Girl or Fringe goes into commercials. Now granted watching any of those shows should make me wish my eardrums were popped out by sharp but finally I can make that decision based purely on the merits of the show and not the volume of the sponsors.

Now we all know that advertisers and marketers will find someway to grab our attention and it wouldn't surprise me if they find some way to circumvent the rules although I wouldn't complain at all if instead of trumpeting volume they spliced in clips of the Lindsay Lohan playboy photoshoot.

take on the All American Muslim

2011-12-12T13:25:00.001-05:00

I opened up CNN.com today to find out that Lowes has cut its advertising on some TLC show called All American Muslim after pressure from a bunch of radicals down in Florida who said this show was a guise for sleeper-cells.. I'm sure All American Muslim is about as entertaining as American Dad or American Chopper or American Idol so I can't imagine the entire show getting pulled will be any great loss but what it does show how the crazies are running the asylum..

This is what America is all about apparently, casting a large spell on an entire group of people, religious group or race. Depending on where you look Muslims make up somewhere between 1/2 and 2.5% of the entire US population and I would venture to guess that the percentage of those Muslims who are nuts is probably about the same as the percentage of crazies who are card-carrying members of some Christian church. In 225 years we're still the same bigoted group we were when we were shipping groups of Africans by boat to work our farms. How this Florida group isn't offended by Jersey Shore, Joe and Kate plus 8 or the horrible singing on the X-Factor is the real travesty.

But this is who we are and nothing is more apparent than a conversation I had with somebody the other day about Mitt Romney, where they told me that they wouldn't trust him because he was a Mormon. Now mind you that this was the same person who told me 4 years ago that all of this Richard Ayers-Revered Wright-secret muslim-Obama stuff was incendiary but now they throw the exact same argument against a Republican.

Take in airplane rules

2011-12-11T14:42:00.001-05:00

I will not use TOR to defend Alec Baldwin but would like to shine some light on a practice which airlines participate in which makes absolutely no sense. Baldwin got kicked off a flight for refusing to out away his smartphone so he can continue playing Words with Friends which I get because that game is incredibly annoying.
I get airlines need rules and need ge ability to enforce them in this age but honestly I have asked this question before: Airlines say that phones must be turned off when the door is closed prior to pulling away from the gate yet you are allowed to use your phone the second the wheels touch the ground upon landing. I just ask for consistency
In both cases the door is closed, in both cases you could e interfering with radar and yet in one of the cases you are getting kicked off a flight while the other you are applauded.

Sent from my iPhone

Take on the House Blend

2011-12-10T14:13:00.000-05:00

I am embarrassed by my country. It's not because of foreign policy, it is my because we allow the banks and special interests to run Washington and it is not because David Stern runs his league like some overzealous fantasty football commish
I am embarrassed because when I walk into a coffee shop and get a cup it tastes like I am drinking watered down pool water. For a country who claims to go big or go home, we are a bunch of pussies when it comes to coffee. Turkish coffee, Arabian coffee, Italian coffee, Brazilian coffee all tastes like you are chewing on coffee beans while the typical American house blend might as well be called House bland. Not only is our coffee weak and tasteless, nowhere else do they numb the taste with sugar and milk to drown out the flavor of dirty socks

If America thinks it can still be a force, it might want to start by growing a pair

take on the natural laxative

2011-12-09T16:15:00.001-05:00

Sometimes the biggest scientific breakthroughs are the ones we find out in some convoluted way.

There are many out there who have issues of being so plugged up that they can't go for days at a time which people combat using enemas, stool softeners, prunes and even a table spoon of olive-oil but honestly there is nothing which can unclog your bowels than a night of beer and sushi.

It's as if the combination of tuna, wasabi and Sapporo is the perfect combination to offset the body's ability to bind its excrement because like clock-work, 10 hours after my last bite of maccrel I'm sitting on the can.. Now i'm not saying it's an uncomforable setting but instead a fairly easy way to relieve y ourself

I'm sure the local Japanese restaurants can't wait for Phizer to start marketing it to all those poor plugged up folks

take on the 'leaving money on the table' argument

2011-12-08T17:48:00.001-05:00

There is a sports argument that I cannot exactly wrap my head around, it has to do when people compare contracts for players. This happens often but the conversation recently has been about Chris Paul who has been making a not so quiet plea to get out of the NBA Siberia of New Orleans to move to the NBA version of the Addams family in New York. With the new collective bargaining agreement the NBA continued its attempt to keep home-grown players on their original team by giving them a financial incentive to stay. Although nobody is quite sure it sounds like the Knicks could sign Paul to a 4 year-$74 million dollar deal next summer while he could earn $100 million for 5 years if he stays put. Even on a per-year basis there is no denying that that the Knick offer of $18.5million per year would be less than the New Orleans offer of $20 million per year but it's probably not a far fetch to think that he can make up at least a part of the difference in endorsements playing in NY although that really isn't the point

The point is about the argument which goes something like this.. 'Chris Paul is leaving $25 million on the table if he goes to the Knicks' The problem is that a lot of that is based on the value of the contract but doesn't take into consideration the amount of years of said contract.

Now I get that there is a $25 million dollar difference here but there is also a difference of one year. In the NFL that might be a big difference but in the NBA where career ending injuries are very uncommon, The entire argument of 'leaving $25million on the table' is rubbish because it assumes he makes $0 in 2016 and it would be almost impossible to fathom that Paul would not at least get a decent one-year contract in 5 years. In that fifth year he'll only be 32 and should still be able to garner an offer of $10-$15 on a one year contract if not significantly more.

Look at the 2009-2010 salaries for point guards Jason Kidd $21 million, Marbury $21 million , Bibby $15 million, Arenas $15 million, Nash $15 million… most of these guys are well past 32 and most are bad. I have to imagine that unless he completely falls apart there is no reason to think he wouldn't get at least something from one of the 32 teams.

So all of a sudden the amount he's leaving on the table is maybe $10 million which still is nothing to sneeze at but it's not $25 million either.

now i've also thought of the following.. Why doesn't a player sign a one year deal with a new NBA team and then immediately sign an extension since he is then officially under contract of that team.

take on the Groupon deal

2011-12-07T16:15:00.001-05:00

I read an article today about a cupcake shop across the pond who was basically put out of business because of a Groupon deal they had advertised when 8500 people showed up demanding a dozen cupcakes at a 75% discount.

I get this new concept and we have participated in a couple of these things but I find that the vast majority to Groupons, living social buys and the one from Amazon we buy are an almost complete waste. I walk into a take-out restaurant the other day with a $30 Groupon but was informed I had to use the entire amount in one sitting or the balance on the account would get cancelled. You can't possibly buy $30 worth of food in one of these places even if you order two extra smoothies, a second bag of fries and three bottles of overpriced water.

But that's not the worst of it, I find that ever deal I have ever bought was one of those 'yeah I've been meaning to get back into shape' moments as I signed up for 10 classes of boot-camp for $50. Problem is that I'm now getting daily reminders that my Groupon is about to expire and I have about as much interest in Boot Camp as I would in eating 102,000 cupcakes..

Take on hotel WiiFi

2011-12-06T15:17:00.001-05:00

Staying at a five star resort you think you should get it all. With your valet parking, turning of your beds, bellhops and room charge cards you figure they have all the 'conveniences' covered but when you get into your room an notice no WiFi signal you realize how much they are missing out on.
Granted there is broadband service available but in a day and time when most people carry IPhones and IPads a wired cable doesn't do you much good. I will never understand why hotels in today's age are not fully WiFi enabled. It can't be the cost of the wireless routers which even for a big hotel would only run you a few thousand dollars, it can't be based on lack of infrastructure as the beauty of it is that it doesn't take more than a box with a couple of antennas so the only thing it can be is disconnect

I have spent 5 days and nights with no ability to stream movies or videos, to download books or newspapers or to as much as surf online on my TouchPad. Now my complaints to the front desk obviously were not going to immediately resolve a complaint but I would say that it makes for a pretty disappointing part of out stay to not be able to fire up my HP touchpad and get much done unless I'm sitting in the lobby.

Take on the handicap bathroom

2011-12-05T15:09:00.001-05:00

After a chicken quesadilla, two Bud Lites and some wingers I had one of those moments where it is man vs time as i rushed to find the closest -and most discreet- piece of porcelain real-estate. I decide not to punish my family by using our hotel room bathroom and instead rushed to the one in the fitness center. I walk in and head straight to the completely empty locker-room. I survey the options and see two stalls, the normal stall and the handicap one. Since I figured that this would be one of those instances where the less confined air space the better, I opt for the larger of the two options.
5 minutes later I emerge victoriously out of the bathroom and as I walk out I meet eyes with some dude who is combing his hair and he looks at me like I just pissed in his coffee. Now my first inclination was that he was already eating my stench but as it wasn't a prototypical stall as it was completely enclosed, I quickly figures the stench couldn't have travelled that quickly
I then realized he was giving me the stink-eye because i had used the handicap stall.
To be clear a handicap bathroom is only somewhat similar to a handicap stall in the sense there is a little more room but unlike the parking spot there is no rule (written or unwritten) that limits fully able people from using it. A public place is require to have one, not make it an exclusive use one

Take on the resort fee

2011-12-04T13:25:00.001-05:00

Obviously I am not highbrow and nothing is more apparent that i don't belong as when you put me in a resort. I basically have no idea what I'm doing in a situation like this and find myself stumbling all over myself when it comes to etiquette
Take this place with their $20 resort fee which should make part of it easier but instead makes it much more difficult

I get it as a concept as I am never sure how much to tip, when to do it and how much us appropriate. It ruins an entire vacation for me as I spend every waking moment questioning myself and in theory this resort fee should make that easier but for those of us with no knowledge about it, it winds up costing you more
But what should make is easier actually makes it more difficult because nobody can explain who and when to tip.
Take yesterday when the bellhop brings my bags up and then spends 10 minutes explaining everything about the resort As he gets ready to leave my room I reach into my pocket and only see a $5. Now it seems like this is too much but I feel completely weird about asking for change and the guy is obviously stalling for something
I bite the bullet and hand him the finsky. He smiles and thanks me and then tells me that the resort fee covers incidental tips. The problem is that he already has the five-spot and I can't exactly ask for it back. So now I feel like I'm screwed twice. First for overtipping and them for not knowing what the resort fee is supposed to cover. I have to say that this is the kind of thing the front desk should make abundantly clear when you check in

Now my buddy the Bump who has worked in the service industry for most of his life and thus throws around singles at a hotel like Righetti at a strip club, probably doesn't find himself in that spot First of all like a trip to FD'a he probably walks in with a 6 inch stack of singles so even if he didn't know about a resort fee he'd only lose a couple.

Take on a terrible look

2011-12-03T17:29:00.001-05:00

I have been known to dress like I don't own a light bulb but I will say that overall I get away with not having to put too much energy into the way I look by keeping it incredibly simple. For work I wear black or gray pants with a white or blue button down matched with black shoes and either gray or black socks. On the weekends I wear tshirts and jeans for most of the year and in general I don't deviate from what works. Well today I did the indefensible by going in kakhi shorts paired with socks and sneakers. If I didn't already look like the prototypical American dad, I broke that today. Terrible just terrible

Sent from my iPhone

Take on valet parking

2011-12-02T14:53:00.001-05:00

I pull into my hotel yesterday and notice there is no option to park, I pull to the front and get whisked away and before i know it they've tacked on an additional unadvertised $150+ for my five day vacation. In my opionion there is nothing more irritating than forced valet parking. I get that certain people feel special when given white-globe service but I find it to be a gigantic waste of time. It always takes forever to get your car and for the (in)convenience for having to wait they bang you for $26 per day. Not only that but you gotta throw the dude a couple of bucks each time he gets the car for you so all of a sudden you think twice about going to CVS because what should be a painless 5 minute trip now turns into a total show

Take on the thru-streets

2011-12-01T12:52:00.000-05:00

There is nothing more stressful than having to catch a plane, jumping in a cab ad all of a sudden be confronted with the equivalent of the parking lot at Metlife stadium. I realize NYC traffic is a pain in the ass but it seems that it shouldn't be entirely unpredictable but that hasn't stopped my cabby from systematically choosing the most crowded streets throughout manhattan
It has assured me of one important fact. That there is no way that those thru-streets are even slightly more effective of getting traffic across town
I am convinced those are designed to allow taxis from jacking riders for all they're worth

Take on the left side gas tank

2011-11-30T11:06:00.000-05:00

We seem to be able to adjust to most thing even if the old English system the Americans use is antiquated. We buy milk in gallons, soda in liters, we count football fields in yards but the premier event in the Olympics is measured in meters

But one thing that gets me is that my informal study has shown is that 75% of all cars have their gas tank on the left driver side. This is convenient when the drier has to pump gas but it makes for a cluster at the pump. I pull into a station yesterday and find that there is a huge line for gas on one side of the pump while the other side was as clear as day. Now I am impatient so obviously i swing around, make a three point turn and pull in facing the opposite way as everybody else I get my gas and then have to reverse out, do a backwards pony turn, wait for the other ahold doing the same thing before I am back on the highway. Now obviously you can't force GM, Chrystler and Ford to do anything but the next time one of them comes hand in hat looking for some tax payer handout we tell them that we would on the condition that they make their fleet right side gas pump accessible.

Take on the NJ transit ticket machine

2011-11-29T17:33:00.000-05:00

I feel for anybody who has ever had the misfortune of having to commute to the Garden State out of either Penn Station or Port Authority. I don't feel for them because of what can only be described as one of the least pleasant commutes in America with the overcrowding in these two mass transit hubs. I din't even feel for them considering when they complete this hellish commute they end up in some non descript jersey towns with about as much personality of a wet fart
Why I feel bad is that these commuters have to deal with the slowest ticket machines known to man. What should be a transaction which takes about the same amount of time as an ATM withdrawal easily takes 60 seconds. Now that may not sound like a lot but when you want to catch a 5:35 train to Manalapan it seems like an eternity
It's like they have a homing pigeon in the back of those suckers which has to literally fly back to the base station in Rahway to complete your transaction

Take on snail pace

2011-11-28T17:38:00.000-05:00

Most of the time I find myself in a rush. I'm rushing to and from work. I rush through lunch, schedule short vacations, multitask constantly and hardly take a break so I realize that there is more than just a bit of irony in the fact I hate being rushed at a restaurant. I get that these places need turnover in order to survive but there is nothing more frustrating than having lunch and feeling like you are on the clock. I hate food not coming out together, I hate being given a check before I've finished my coffee and although I don't like sitting in front of an empty plate k hate having a waiter start to collect the place-settings, napkins and salt and pepper shakers before I am through. If I am going to drop $25 for brunch, at least allow me the dignity of not feeling like I'm being herded like a cow
So here is a big thumb-up for any restaurant which gets the snail-pace approval

Take on the gift of booze

2011-11-27T15:45:00.001-05:00

When my sister in law opened her presents for her super sweet 16 (x1.875) birthday party this weekend it shocked me to see how many people brought her booze. Not because she's not a fan of alcohol but because who the hell ia ever going to drink all of this. I unofficially counted 7 different bottles which if it had been a house party might seem logical but for as a present was more than a bit weird I get the idea behind a good bottle of wine or a beer of the month club but to give somebody a cheap bottle of chardonnay, a fifth of Wild Turkey, a two liter of vodka just seems odd. This kind of gift just screams regift.

Take on the tipping point

2011-11-26T14:31:00.001-05:00

Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point speaks about the masses following the innovators when it comes to popular culture. The coolest bands are discovered in small murky clubs, the best authors start out as guys who write for a small audience and Hush Puppies are cool only when they are not.
I believe in The Tipping Point concept and feel like most things Jump the Shark pretty much as they get 'discovered' by everybody. The one exception seems to be Facebook. I was speaking with a 20 something the other day and she admitted to checking Facebook at least 20 times per day, she posts, she lurks an she comments and asking her to get off of it for 24 hours is akin to asking her to chop off her left arm
The funny thing is that unlike a traditional Tipping Point, she was part of the original Facebook army having gotten her account with her .edu email address but the irony is that she like all the other early adopters never left Facebook when it got lame while basically everybody in my generation who joined late also saw how incredibly lame it was.

Although FB claims to capture about 25% of te world population it really only gets three demographic groups. Do a quick search of who is an active Facebook person and I am sure it is overwhelmingly women in their 60's, new (or wanna be new) mothers and the original FB kids crowd who are now in their mid to late twenties. Out of all my male friends I only know two guys who actively post and comment. Basically everybody in
My generation left in a Moses like mass exodus but the people who stayed are very much the original members.

Take on Friday bloody Friday

2011-11-25T13:38:00.001-05:00

My three favorite days of the year are Thanksgiving, The 4th of July and Black Friday because these are true American Holidays and in all three times you can catch fire works. Either because your aunt doesn't like your uncle's new young wife, because some nutjon is setting off M80's in his backyard or because American shoppers are psychos I have never been one of these crazies that stands online at a BestBuy at 2AM hoping to get a BluRay player for 50% off but I love watching the news that night to see people get trampled or shot as they fight over a Tickle Me Elmo doll. This is America at it's worst/best anyway you get it, people so infuriated with the man (in front of them) they take out a gun.
This year is mo different as there are already reports of a few injuries including some chick who started to pepperspray anybody who tried to come near the tablets in the electronic division at a Wall Mart
You gotta love it

Take on the Thanksgiving game

2011-11-24T15:05:00.001-05:00

The three things you can count on during the fourth Thursday in November is indigestion, tryptophan and people complaining about the Lions. Every year everybody complains that teams other than the Cowboys and Lions should be afforded the national exposure which they say isn't fair to other teams but really it comes down to people being annoyed that they are forced to watch a team that has sucked since I was in high School. This year is the first time in about two decades that people didn't complain the Lions were on TV and it's not because they finally started to believe in tradition. It is only because the Lions finally don't suck

Taking on the cab to the sticks

2011-11-23T15:24:00.000-05:00

Yesterday as I jumped into a cab in the pouring rain and told the driver to take me to the last stop in Brooklyn he -like many before him- groaned. Anybody who has lived in the boroughs has had this happened to them with cabbies acting annoyed for having to comply with the law because they will say that they will not get a return fare. Now first of all this is crap because there are plenty of people in Bensonhurst, Riverdale and Flushing who would use a yellow can but because they are like the bald eagle seem to be completely extinct

But forget servicing all the boroughs, I think long trips are actually a great deal for these guys, especially at 10pm on a Tuesday. Our entire ride did not take more than 25 minutes and after a generous tip the guy put nearly $35 in his pocket. So even if it takes him another 20 minutes to get back into lower manhattan, he has already made $35 for the hour plus he has 15 more minutes to shuttle a couple people between wall-street and TriBeCa. This dude probably made $45 during the hour he had me in a car, I'd guess that $45 is more than he sees in an hour cruising Manhattan.

taking on the power of a win

2011-11-22T15:25:00.001-05:00

I have a friend whose life seems to be turned upside down lately. His wife went up and moved out of NYC to some Midwest town, his hairline went up and moved about 3 inches up his scalp, his gumline is creeping into his mustache and for the last few months he has been in total depression. I called him a few weeks ago and felt like I was talking to somebody taking a call in a library, his voice so soft it was barely audible and honestly I am getting a bit worried. He's a good guy with a ton of life but he also goes through these episodes where things don't seem right. I check with mutual friends and honestly nobody has heard from him in 3 months eventhough he's got more time on his hands than anybody. The last time I saw him was at a wedding when he looked like he was ready to plunge either his unit or his fist into the first thing that moved. He used to be a pretty regular member of a small online forum and chat-room but even that has stopped…until

Out of the blue with a combination of Jay Cutler firepower, a resurgent Larry Fitzgerald, the transformer named Eric Decker Nelson and some dude named Helu the world has opened up again for my friend. I can't say that it was a total points onslaught but it was enough because all of a sudden as if some divine intervention birds were chirping, romances were rekindled, pens were being sold and broadband was being used.. it didn't take much (and it usually doesn't when you you are competing in back to back weeks against the likes of Reggie Bush, Marquez Colston, Braylon Edwards, Brandon Jacobs and some dude named Baldwin.) but like the first time a 11 year old boy beats off..an entire world was (re)discovered.

See from those who have never devoted their lives to something as important as a team there will always be snickers but what they don't realize is that by shutting themselves out of the new American pastime, they are shutting themselves out of America. Of course there are days when it doesn't feel fair like when Adrian Peterson goes down with a high-ankle sprain early in the first half, when Peyton Manning's injury makes Reggie Wayne and Dallas Clark's values moot or when you look down and see you have a team filled with Buffalo Bills but that is all part of the game. So for those who don't quite know, there is a love out there that a man will have that is greater than that of their mother or wife, it's an addiction worse than the best Smack and it's a high better than three hours at FD's with somebody else's black-card and when things are rolling it's like nothing in the world but when you are on a three game losing streak the pain is unbearable but all it takes is one win

Take on the Indian guy

2011-11-21T18:05:00.000-05:00

I was talking with an acquaintance the other day about this great HP touchpad I got for $99 as part of that HP closeout sale and mentioned that i was thinking about upgrading it to the Android Honeycomb operating system. I wasn't doing it because I dislike WebOS as it's actually kind of cool but was doing it because the HP app-store is a total graveyard and with them shutting down the production of these things nobody believes that any developers have any long term plans to create software for it
Long story short is that when I was discussing it, one guy mentions that the IT guy at work could do it for me. I say "oh the indian guy Jinesh" the third guy we were talking to looked at us like we had two heads each I know he was seething and was just dying to say something like 'not all IT guys are Indian you bigot'
Except for the fact that this guy is in fact an Indian. I have known him for 10 years, seen pictures of his kids and wish him a happy Diwali so although my acquaintance thinks I paint with too broad a brush I actually just being descriptive
If I said the Russian ballerina nobody looks twice, the Japanese sushi chef is completely acceptable Now tell me why you can't refer to the Indian IT guy or the Jewish Lawyer.

Take on the Kindle app

2011-11-20T13:02:00.001-05:00

Last week before flying out to China, I downloaded the kindle app hoping to be able to catch up on some reading I've been putting off for too long. I've schleped around too many books that I've not actually had time to read in the fear that I would be stuck somewhere with nothin to do but stare at a wall but with virtual books I could alleviate the fear without having to break my back. Sounds like a great concept except when you click on your kindle-app it doesn't actually let you download books. The way this app is set up is that you can pull any book you hbe previously bought from the Cloud but doesn't actually let you purchase a new book. For that you have to log onto amazon, buy and E-book and then log back into your kindle-app to download it from the cloud which obviously could not be less convenient

So here I am sitting in an airport waiting to take off and what should be a 2 click process becomes a complete ordeal

Thanks Kindle

Take on the running late vendor

2011-11-19T14:50:00.001-05:00

When we made arrangements with some event we booked on Groupon with the vendor, I knew we were in for a mess. Not because the Groupon was a rip-off but because the lady said that she'd be there at 10am as arranges as long as she didn't hit traffic. She called at 9:55 surprise surprise saying she was stuck in traffic somewhere in the Bronx Now I fully understand traffic but when you are already predicting it a week before wouldn't it make some sense to leave a bit earlier. I am not the kind of person who says that when you are being paid to be somewhere that you should be giving yourself a bit of a buffer and calling somebody 5 minutes before you are to be there saying you are in the Bronx really means you didn't leave early enough. Now if we had asked her to come at 5AM maybe you would say that being early is uncalled for and completely inconvenient but this is 10AM in Brooklyn. Worse comes to worse you get a cup of coffee and hang out for 20 minutes but when your entire thing revolves around JIT you know it won't ever really work

take on the airplane stub snub

2011-11-18T01:30:00.000-05:00

Considering how often I fly, it's surprising how infrequently I have a problem with my SkyMiles. 100,000 miles in per year and Delta accounts for almost all of them… the problem is that they never seem to capture all of them which is a bit tricky. Last month I flew from Bucharest to Brussels on Brussels Air which is a SkyMile partner, before I boarded I gave them my frequent flyer number and never thought about it again.

Fast forward a month as I check out the miles I have accrued recently and I noticed that these miles are conspicuously missing.. I called up Delta to get them added and they told me that I would need to submit the ticket number, date of travel and a copy of my boarding pass. Now getting a ticket number and date of travel is easy enough but how the hell am I to keep a boarding pass. I fly on 50 flights per year, and most of the time I toss that little ticket the second I get on the plane.

Why in today's age do we still have to present a physical boarding pass. Can't these airlines look into their fancy computers to see that I was on the flight.

And what the hell does a boarding pass mean, who cares if I even flew on the flight because I paid for it.. and really it doesn't prove you actually flew it just proved that you checked in and got a boarding pass and left the airport which is really no different than showing my initial bill for the ticket which also doesn't prove I flew but does prove I paid you $500

Take on Occupy Subway

2011-11-17T16:45:00.001-05:00

There are rumors that the Occupy Wall Street idiots have decided to try to block the subways tonight at 5PM right when the entire city is getting ready to go home. I really hope they are planning on protesting the $5 footlong because if they really try to shut the subway down any chance of getting public support is gone...

My prediction is this.. they will get noticed, they will get press and they will NOT get any public sympathy.

The nice irony of this is that the big-1%ers on wall-street aren’t taking the R train home tonight, they are probably taking a black-car service home while they are getting serviced by some exotic chick with fake out to their McMansions on the North Shore overlooking the LI Sound or to their McMansions on the south shore of Connecticut overlooking the LI Sound. No the people who are going to be affected here are the 99%ers who are the normal hard-working blue-collar guys who just want to get home after busting their ass at some shitty job to MAKE A LIVING!!!!

Listen if you want to go and protest, more power to you but don’t fucking interfere with my commute home.. I’ve been in China for 10 days and haven’t seen my family but now your selfish crap is going to cost me an evening with my daughter.. I don’t come to your shitty tent and piss on it, leave my little world alone.

take on the 'you'll never guess where I'm at' guy

2011-11-16T00:30:00.000-05:00

As a seasoned traveler, I have long given up any hope of any of my friends or family members giving a crap where I am at any given time. It's not that they don't care but when you add 100,000 miles to your total every year, there just isn't much to say about the place you go especially when you are going to the same few places over and over again and at some point it all becomes routine. Well as I'm sitting in the Delta lounge in Tokyo today there is a dude who is on Skype on his laptop and had to call every single person in his Rolodex and started every conversation with the same "you'll NEVER guess where I am?"

From the responses he was getting it didn't seem like anybody gave a crap especially when you consider the guy wasn't exactly calling from downtown Tokyo at at Sumo wresting event or at some awesome temple but was calling as he was waiting for a connection in the terminal.

Each conversation went something like this

Fat Jerry"hey Jenny, you'll never guess where I am"
Disinterested Jenny "I don't know Jerry, in Columbus?"
Fat Jerry "I'm in Tokyo.. at the airport"
Disinterested Jenny "wow"
Fat Jerry "crazy right.. I'm waiting for a connection to Seoul"
Disinterested Jenny "oh"
Fat Jerry "log onto the webthing. so we can see each other on the computer"
Disinterested Jenny "Jerry it is like 11pm here, I got to go to bed"
Fat Jerry "alright..catch you on the other side of the international date line"

wash, rinse, repeat 10 times over again.

like they say to a young wide-receiver when he catches a touchdown, act like you've been there before.

take on Penn State

2011-11-15T04:18:00.001-05:00

I know this is like two weeks late but I have to get something off my chest..   This entire Penn State thing is absolutely ridiculous and the fact that this was allowed to go on for as long as it did just tells you once and for all that these systemic cover-ups by church and state are what are the real levels of depravity in this society.   Whether it's the Catholic Church or the Church of JoePa, there does not seem to be any accountability when the top levels are looking down a barrel of having to publicly admit that this kind of behavior happened on your watch.

What really gets me is that this boy is 10 years old..   NOT 17 but 10.. and had it NOT been a boy but instead a young girl might there have been more action taken against Dirty Sandusky?

well today Sandusky says he was just 'horsing' around with the boys in the shower as if this admonishes him from all evil because I know there were a number of times that I've horsed around with a bunch of prepubescent boys in a shower.. This type of behavior is sickening but what is almost more disgusting are the THON loving PennState fans who spent the last week overthrowing cars not because they wanted to show disappointment in their university's inaction but rather the fact that they finally took action.    They claim that firing JoePa was criminal while the fact that JoePa didn't walk over to the Sand man and knock him out is when he learned of this is what is really criminal.

Take on French water

2011-11-14T08:00:00.001-05:00

Maybe it's the pink label, maybe it's the French snobbiness or maybe it's the price tag but there is nothing I dislike more than Evian. I never quite understood paying money for bottles water. I get that sink water may have some residual pipe flavor which you want to eliminate but to pay $3 for a bottle of H2O seems beyond idiotic. Well unless you are in a country where the water isn't exactly clean.
But out of all the water our there the one I least like is Evian. This stuff tastes stale and lifeless and drinking it makes me feel like I'm breathing air in Denver as there just seems to be something missing and the best way to describe it is that it has a flavor like it was filtered through my running socks

Take on food

2011-11-13T07:27:00.000-05:00

You get homesick when you travel for work. There are sleepless nights, endless days and countless hours lost because of delays. Maybe it's the adrenaline that keeps you going, maybe it's the knowledge it's only a limited amount of time or maybe it's the fear of being stuck in a bathroom afraid to move further than 40 feet at any given time
5 days in China for the second time in six months is always a challenge and although the country is interesting, the people are nice and the business is solid you realize very quickly that there is more to it than just that. See most everything is done around meals which means you do nothing but eat. You wonder how the hell these people stay so skinny if they constantly eat. It's not like the food (or anything else) in China is healthy. Everything is fried or at minimum doused in oil. There are never salads or true greens although because it hasn't been cooked you would have a hard time eating it anyway. But this is always the problem. Even when you go to some 5 star hotel you don't want to take take and it is torture as there are thousands of items that look very enticing to eat but as you want to avoid anything that is not cooked or cooked thoroughly you have to pass on salads, fruits, oysters, sashimi etc and you fill your stomach with tons of fried noodles and white rice at $50 per meal

Oh how i wish to be at home with a Big Mac in front of me

Take in the master switch

2011-11-12T09:05:00.000-05:00

In foreign hotels you will often have these system where one light-switch located right by the door controls the power in the entire room. It allows you to turn all the power off in your room as you walk out with a single switch and I am sure there are great advantages in terms of energy savings. The problem is that building designers and architects obviously are completely capable of working in the dark.
For example the hotel I am staying at uses this system which i'm all for except for the slight design flaw which is that the hallway light doesn't have a light of its own so the only way to turn it off is to kill all the electricity in the room. Now that doesn't bother you much while sleeping except it also means you cannot turn on your bedside light. Now even if that is something you can live with what I can't is that it also means you cannot charge your cellphone or computer at night which I found out the hard way when I grabbed my phone off the plug this morning to find it was 29% charged

MLIA

Take in the sign

2011-11-11T10:57:00.000-05:00

You gotta love China. First they smoke you out of any public home, then they feed you parts of a chicken you don't realize were edible (and still don't) and if the waterfall out of your ahole doesn't kill you maybe the carbon monoxide will. The problem isn't the fact that you want to scream but rather that nobody would care. But for all the problems the one thing you must give to them is that they are thorough. Today I walk into a bathroom and am met with this sign which might be helpful for the average waiter in NY to study also although you know if you need help with this.... Does that also mean they have a pinned up sign in the back of the Chinese FDs?

Take on phantom usage

2011-11-10T04:25:00.001-05:00

sometimes I just can't make sense of things...

As a person who both travels internationally a lot and uses his cell-phone often, I'm keenly aware of the international data plans offered by the cell-phone companies and am very vigilant when using my allotted data.     This time before a 10 day trip, I signed up for a 125mb plan through AT&T for $49.99 which I figured should be more than enough being I used about 50MB the last time I made a similar trip but would always want to be safe and not feel limited as there are many dead hours in a day when checking in at home seems like the only thing you can do to keep yourself sane.     I reset the usage statistics on my IPhone 4 before landing in Asia and go about my normal business during a 2.5 hour layover in Shanghai.   When I get onto the next flight I check my usage and am stunned when it shows that I received about 7 MB but sent 136MB in the 2 hours I got to the airport eventhough I hardly used the phone since I was lugging my suitcase through the terminal, going through customs and finding the rest-room for most of the 2+ hours.
Now I use on average about 600MB per month when state-side when I use my data-package without abandon since I have more than 2gigs per month at my disposal so the thought of having used roughly 1/4 of a 30 day period in less than 3 hours seemed ludicrous.
I called AT&T and they confirmed the usage but could not state how it happened.   I assured them that I did not actively send out 136MB but that there might be something wrong with a setting.    Maybe there was something in an application which was constantly pushing out some data which some-how added up to 136MB but since this would also be occurring while I was home, this didn't exactly make sense.    In order to send out this much data I would have to send out about 70 high-resolution pictures and as you can only send out about 1 per minute it would have meant I spent nearly my entire time sending out pictures.
Anyway after 20 minutes, I am able to move to a 250MB plan although I'm still really shuked about this entire episode mostly because there was a free WiFi connection at the airport....

Take on the JFK Delta customer service rep

2011-11-09T07:24:00.000-05:00

When the crew on the flight to Asia I was on gave various reports about the reasons for the multiple delay all of which they said would be resolved in 15 or 20 minutes but none of which seems like the real reason I was a bit annoyed. When my flight was eventually cancelled after I had already spent 4 hours on the plane, I was doubly annoyed. When they sent a herd of 400 people to the transfer desk I was tripley annoyed. But when the only option Delta could give me to get to Asia involved waiting another three hours to catch a flight to LAX which would land at 11pm with a 2AM connection to sit in the middle seat to Asia on a flight that would get in at 6AM to enable to catch my last leg which wouldn't depart until 10:30AM I was more than just a bit annoyed.
Now I get that with a plane of 400 people it is not easy to reschedule people but this is where having some friendly customer service reps might be a bit helpful. The lady at the Delta desk sitting on her throne stared down at me looking more like she was fighting through constipation than fighting to help her customers. This is where Delta makes a huge mistake by putting a woman with a terrible NY attitude in front of your customers during a time of desperation. This woman spent the entire episode making me feel like my inconvenience was a complete inconvenience to her and helping you was going to take every bit of energy she was willing to use. She refused to bring her voice above an audible level making me feel like I was the one straining to make any sense out what she was saying through her constipated breaths. Buy even that I can live with what i can't is being forced to deal with a completely incompetent rep while figuring out a creative way to get me to where I needed to get. She finally came up with something which sounded great until i had to point out to her that this involves a 20 hour layover became obviously the concept of the International Date line was beyond a airline reps comprehension. Every option I gave her with what seemed a sensible connections she shot down in between her ass pushes. She though it was completely unreasonable that i didn't want the LAX connection and when I asked her to route me through Detroit (a Delta hub with many direct flights to Asia) she complained that I was asking her to do too many thing meant 'I can only do this now.' Eventually I asked her to get me on the same flight I was on the next day as she rolled her eyes with an air of 'why did you make me try to book this another way if you were going to take that option'. Obviously she had never had an entire business trip upended although I could see her being PO'd if McDonalds ran out of fries. After a lot of fumbling, groaning, a little typing, a little laughing with a colleague from the maintenance department who sat next to her the entire time she finally got me on a flight.

Obviously the nearly 100,000 miles I fly with Delta, the platinum status I have or the business class ticket I bought doesn't allow for a competent customer service rep at the airport during your most desperate time.

Take on the delay

2011-11-08T07:37:00.000-05:00

so i was due to fly out of JFK today to Beijing through Tokyo.. Get to the airport at 10AM for a 12:40PM flight.. nothing too exciting other than the lack of edible options in the lounge.. I board the plane at 12:10PM, with three papers, 10 dowloaded podcasts, an E-Book and a ton of work to catch up on. I order my lunch and dinner options, check out the inflight movies, download my emails and make a couple of calls before the message comes across the system saying to turn off personal electronics as they are closing the cabin doors.. by 1pm when we haven't left the gate, I'm a bit annoyed but as I have a 3 hour layover, I figure it might be a blessing. By 1:20pm the captain comes on to say there was an issue with a cargo door and that they had already called for maintenance.. By 2:00pm he comes on to say the work is nearly completed and that we should be taking off shortly but that there is some expected tailwind which should cut an hour out of our flight so we'd be landing nearly on time. by 2:30pm he says the work is complete and they are just putting the cargo in. by 3:00pm they said there was one more piece that needed to be put in. By 3:30 they say that they are filling out some paperwork and that we should be pushing off shortly. By 3:45 they say that they have opened the door and that anybody who wants to leave is free to. By 3:50 the entire plane of 400 people is in total panic. by 3:55pm there is talk of a mutiny. by 4pm the pilot comes on to say that because of FFA regulations none of the pilots can fly this plane because it would have them 'on' for longer than allowed and that they are looking for another flight.

now mind you this is not a flight to Boston but a flight to Tokyo and being a seasoned traveler (or somebody with common sense) I realize that finding this pilot is not exactly going to be easy. As I am not 100% sure I will miss my connection I decide to deplane and as I walk off an announcement comes on to say that all passengers should get off. I run to the transfer desk and spend the next 2 hours fighting with them to try to get me to Asia.... the problem is that it's now well past 5 and there are no more flights that leave on Monday that will get me into Asia on Tuesday. Now I am very glad that there are regulations so that pilots must be well rested, but I do get annoyed when this all seemed very predictable 5 hours earlier...

Take on the lounge

2011-11-07T12:25:00.001-05:00

Years ago part of the beauty of international travel was the well stocked business lounge but like extra pillows and anything other than pretzels on a flight, the lounge is going the way of the birds. I walk into ye Delta Lounge today and the only food they offer are stale carrots, tasteless celery and some prepacked hummus. The lounge is packed, the chairs are straight up and you can't find an outlet anywhere. If it wasn't for the WiFi you might as well be in the rest of the terminal. I get airlines are cutting costs but when you can't even get an import beer or a turkey wrap then all the glamor is gone.

Take on the marathon

2011-11-06T13:59:00.001-05:00

There is nothing that makes you appreciate NYC more than marathon Sunday, 40,000 runners, a million spectator and thousands of cleanup crew. As a two time participant, I love how much the event means to the city and how much the city means to the marathon but the thought of making this a two day event is too much. Not because I don't think it'll pay for itself, not because I want to deny anybody the opportunity and not because shutting the city down for an entire weekend seems a bit ridiculous. The reason I don't want to see this thing swell to 100,000+ people is because applying for the lottery to get entry is part of it and I like the selective nature of it. I know that anybody can probably walk up and run the Kansas City marathon but that is why it's the Kansas City marathon.