Take in the sign

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

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

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

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

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

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.

take on the caddie

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Take on tooth pain

I'm not entirely sure if is possible but last week I blew my nose so hard I think I dislodged a filling in my mouth. Now you would think that a filling could wear down over 10 years of wear but to have it pop out while blowing your nose seems hard to believe but then again I have met two different people who dislocates their retinas from their eyeballs during childbirth.....well to be quite honest they weren't both caused by childbirth as one them actually happened while taking a shit but you must understand he was quite constipated Anyway for a full week my mouth hasn't quite felt right but the weird thing is the discomfort is worse when I'm running as if each time my foot hit the pavement it shoots a sharp pain into my mouth.

MLIA

Take on the smoking booth

While I was in Europe I cam across these smoking booths in the airport The concept is similar to the old smoking rooms or smoking sections with two major differences
Unlike smoking sections, these places are completely enclosed so there is virtually no residual smoke that enters they terminal
Unlike a typical dark back room these smoking booths are all glass so the nicotine addict is publicly shamed for his indiscretion.

Although these whiny Europeans are usually wrong I can put the TOR weight behind this concept because I do not believe in infringing on a right as long as by your right does not in turn infringe upon mine. In this case you can smoke all you want just don't do it in my air (and by the way don't expect me to support your healthcare costs)
But this gets me to thinking about NEw York's rules about smoking in public places which will always be incredibly difficult to enforce also seems a bit totalitarian if it's done on some lonely beach. I actually think it would be better served as a law on the crowded streets of the city where I feel like I'm often caught behind an 18 wheeler with the amount I secondhand smoke as opposed to not allowing it on some empty path of Prospect Park at 7AM

Take on a deal

My buddy (and occasional relief bitcher) The Bump will often say that if somebody offers you a piece of crap at a 90% discount you are still getting a piece of shit. I have no issues with deals and happily buy $0.99 shampoo, $2 socks or $99 touchpads but when i do my expectations are realistic. As long as I don't mind dandruff, holes and the HP app store, I can't complain but there are certain things you cannot skimp on because they are more life or death and include stuff like condoms, a top QB in fantasy football and sushi cause if you skimp there you'll end up with sores on your junk, your mood in a funk and will find yourself pissing from your trunk

take on the greeks

This Greek bailout disaster really has me PO'd.  not just because I don't care that much about any of this stuff but mainly because the defiance these joe schmo-opolis' have when it comes to making any austerity cuts.  These guys have been living on easy-street too long, with their 50 year old retirement age, their 32 hour work-weeks, their monopoly on body hair and their laissez faire attitude about having to ever work harder.   First the entire continent bends over backwards to give you a handout and then you shoot the idea down dead on arrival by putting it in the hands of the same lazy folk who have already proven over-and-over again that they don't like paying their taxes.   If this thing was just about a bunch of gyro eating dudes with bad BO, that would be one thing but this entire mess has my 401k looking like crap again.   I get exactly that no public referendum will ever vote to cut pension funds which are the reason you can't leave this in the hands of the average guy.

These guys can't get somebody to show up to work on a given day but when they protest they all of a sudden have a million guys on the march.     

I remember when there was tongue-in-cheek talk about the Greek's selling a bunch of those Islands to pay off their debt and i'd see a bunch of greek-guys screaming that this was akin to stealing their soul and the only thing I'd ask is.. how do you expect to pay for anything if you are never willing to give anything up.   It's like trying to trade for Calvin Johnson by offering Bernard Scott and Marques Colston

you can't imagine how little these Europeans work.   My European family -who all live in a country without any debt fear - all work 30 hours per week and that's considered full-time.  

ontop of the 30 hour workweek they get 6 weeks of vacation, tons of holidays and a million personal days... it's a shock this thing has lasted as long as it has..

Taking on the holiday calendar

I've said this a thousand times but on Halloween it bears repeating. I cannot think of one reason we should not celebrate this holiday on a weekend. I know there are some weird religious reasons to keep it on the 31st but like Mormonism and that weird Kabalah thing, can't we just ignore it?? There are a ton of holidays we do not celebrate on their actual proper day (MLK birthday, president's day), there are also a ton of holidays already set to fall on a specific weekend (Thanksgiving, Labor Day) and we aren't even consistent with ones with a religious basis (Christ's birth has an actual date while his resurrection is forty days after a Wednesday in April). Did they write one day down on the ancient calendar but not the other??
This IS supposed to be the ultimate kid's holiday yet 4 out of 7 years it will fall on a normal weekday (I am OK with Friday) which makes it inconvenient for parents, a distraction for schools and not all that great for kids. Celebrate it on the last Saturday in October which would allow for a full day of parties, trick or treating and fun. This would allow school to celebrate it on Friday prolonging the fun a bit and allow a kid to be in bed at a normal hour not going door to door for a sugar fix until 11pm on a school night.

If nothing else you're much more likely to get a bunch of hot chicks to slut out on a Saturday night when they can leave from home and party all night then some cold Monday when they have to be at work.

Take on the redzone blackout

Nothing seems as blatantly unfair as finally having a free Sunday to watch some NFL action and sitting down in front of your 42 incher and getting stuck with Giants v Dolphins. Not only are the Jets on a bye but because of tear archaic NFL rules against showing another game up against a home team but also because living in an area which is zoned for Time Warner there is no option for the RedZone.
The greatest invention in television next to the original transistor is not available to me because Time Warner cannot get off their high horse and give in like every other cable company (except Dolan's little baby) has done across the country. Do they negotiate?? No!!! Do they budge? No!!! Do they feel my pain?? No!! So I am stuck watching Matt Moore and Jason Taylor while I could be watching Cam Newton or Arian Foster

FML

Take on climate change

I know there is a segment of the population who believes climate change is a total hoax. Then again this are the same people who generally believe the earth is 5000 years old and Noah and his ark were a depiction of actual events. Well I can't tell you I have any proof other than what i see everyday and I know for sure that the weather we get up here in NYC is different than the weather we used to get when I was a kid. Long gone are the three months of fall we'd have with weeks on end in the 50's and 60's or a nice long spring with weather in the 70's and 80's. We go from a miserable summer with tons of rain to a cold wet fall followed by an endless winter and then we skip right over spring and go back to humid summer.
During the winter the news reported it had been the snowiest winter on record in this area. Well it was followed up by an incredibly wet spring and winter and now three days before Halloween we have 3 inches of snow again. This will go down as the year with the most precipitation and I don't think it'll be close

take on the donation thank you

A few weeks ago I got an email about some random charity for some kid who was going to ride his bike across the country for cancer or something.     Although I didn't know the kid real well, I thought it was a worthwhile cause and threw him a couple of bucks and then a few days later I got a thank you letter from the kid for my generous donation.    Problem I have is that it wasn't a personal thank you, it was a general form email which wasn't at all specific to me.     Honestly if you are going to ask for donations the least you can do is email each person back and tell thank 'em personally, it's not like this guy was running for POTUS and he was getting thousands of dollars per minute.     He had a goal of about  $500 which means that at $25 a piece, the most he'd have to write is 20 emails which considering it all is probably about an hour worth of work but likely not even on a single day because donations were probably rolling in through a few weeks.

I don't care what people say whenever anybody makes a donation or gives to a charity they are doing it in part for themselves.  There is just no such thing as a truly selfless gift.    It makes them look good in front of friends, coworkers or acquaintances, it gives them a tax write-off or it just makes them feel better about themselves.     Like the Curb episode with Ted Danson and the museum the anonymous donation always has a way to get leaked and become non-anonymous.     Now this doesn't mean we should get rid of donations, charities etc but just means that everybody should be honest about what they give and what is expected as return and the least I expect is a personal thank you

Take on the corrector

While standing on the platform I run into this piece of graffiti, it would probably go down unnoticed except for the fact somebody came over and crossed out 'slut' and underneath it wrote 'pig'. Now I am not sure what the second 'artist' was hoping to accomplish here but it seems to me that if they were trying to make the victim feel any better by substituting one for another he probably wasn't exactly doing her a real favor

But it gets you to thinking maybe it was just somebody walking past this thing who thought 'well Jane is really awful person but I wouldn't classify her as one who sleeps around although she is kind of heavy and talks with her mouth full. I wouldn't want anybody to get the wrong impression of her so as my civic duty let me correct it'

Sent from my iPhone

Taking on etiquette

Why does this only happened to me I have been feeling a bit under the weather and haven't been sleeping we so the bags under my eyes are a deeper shade of navy and my skin is a lighter pale than usual in other words I look like total crap. When a family friend passed away and i showed up at the funeral home, I looked like I should have been in the coffin.

The service is nice and they kept it light and the audience is taking it in when i get a tickle in my throat. I try desperately to swallow my cough as I can feel it turning into one of those violent spells which only forces me to start swelling up before I know it I'm wiping away tears. There I am probably the least important person in the room with tears in my eyes during a particularly light moment, sniffling from my cold and just looking like I haven't slept in a month and I hear somebody whisper
'he's taking this really hard'
Now I got people coming up to me after the service saying that they are sorry for my loss and I'm left to try to explain my way out of this which you just can't

take on the gym-membership model

yesterday I saw a blazing headline which read that Netflix lost 800,000 customers in the third quarter which was higher than analysts had predicted.   The dropoff was expected after Netflix tried to break their core-business into separate groups and then also raised rates to their customers..   This to me seemed like a recipe for disaster from the beginning.   If they had taken even a casual survey of their customers they would have realized that most people probably don't use the service very regularly and bringing a publicized price-increase during some pretty bad economic times was going to lead to an exodus.  

I've been thinking about it for the last 24 hours and although I originally compared this Netflix disaster to the inability for RIM to realize they were getting beat to the punch with their breadwinning product by Apple and Android they never adjusted and just hoped that their core customers would just not notice that everybody around them had cooler phones which had great cameras, fantastic browsers, thousands of apps and oh yeah by the way also had the ability to send and receive emails.

but the more I think of it, that was a technology failure, this was even dumber.. this was a failure to recognize that your customers base wasn't using your product to begin with but they kept paying for it anyway.  It's like getting a gym membership, you do it for the first few months pretty religiously and before you know it it's been two seasons since you last stepped foot in that  sweat hall, you've put back the 5 pounds you lost and added 10 more.   You know you are throwing $80 away per month but you still have a hope to go back to twice per week and feel like giving up the membership is like giving up on fitness overall...kind of like giving up on the chance to see all those classic movies you've always wanted to see but just never have time for.     Now if Jack LaLane jacked their rates up 30%, there would probably be hundred of thousands of people who would take notice and turn their over their membership cards because now they realize they'd be paying $40 more per month and still not getting any slimmer..

so if your business model is dependant on customers who pay for your service but don't actually use it... here's a piece of free advice from the Average Asshole.....let sleeping dogs lie

take on the links at the bottom of the NYDailyNews.com website

I read the Daily News daily and am eagerly awaiting a good IPhone app so that I can download it and read it while out of cell-service like I can read the Economist, the NY Times or the Wall Street Journal.     I know the writing is not exactly Shakespearean  but then again neither is TOR..   Although I read the Times everyday, I supplement with the Daily News because they have much better sports-section, they have much better sense of the pulse is like in the city and because I'd appreciate some sleaze with my morning coffee.  

What I don't appreciate is that they don't actively some of their links on their website regularly.  Today as I'm reading about the Jets game, there is a link on the bottom of the article from 'NYDAILYNEWS.com' which says 'Jets cut Maybin', which shocks me because he's played well but the problem is that when I click on this link it is from almost two months ago.. 

I had the same problem earlier when looking at an article about Jennifer Lopez breaking down on stage.. and there is a link about Demi Moore posing topless for Twitter…I click on that and it's that article of her taking a picture through the bathroom mirror from 2 months ago. 

Come on NYDailyNews.com you're better than that

Taking on the 'throw in $20'

Maybe I'm overly anal, maybe I am just better at math or maybe I realize how hard waiters work but it's shocking how difficult it is to do figure out a check including tax and tip in a large crowd. First of all nobody knows how many people to divide the total by so trying to get a headcount is nearly impossible as people are standing up or in the men's room so at some point somebody says '$20 each' because everybody wants an easy number but somehow it never works out which is weird because with a prefix it should not that complicated.
$14.95x0.0875x1.20->$19.50 so if theoretically everybody throws in $20 we should be well covered but as always somebody out of the 20 orders another drink, substitutes egg-whites or gets a latte instead of a normal coffee and now it comes out to $20.62 a person and nobody has any singles
So although I hate people who will analyze the bill and go dutch my new rule is if you have a prefix and you get something different you are on the hook for a 50% premium if only for convenience.