Tag: rant

  • How Starbucks lost me as a regular

    Always a sad sight!
    I love coffee. More accurately, I love vanilla soy lattes with an extra shot of espresso

    (and usually extra vanilla).

    I pass two different coffee shops on my way to/from work every day. One is a lovely independent joint called Burlap & Bean. The other is a Starbucks. (Used to pass three, but then the Saxby’s turned into a Verizon Store. And really, there are two more – the coffee bar in Wegmans, and another Starbucks in Target – but they require a short-but-awkward detour from my commute, so they don’t count.)

    For some reason, no matter where you caffinate, lattes are ridiculously overpriced, and there are surely wiser ways to spend my money, but they just make me happy – the perfect balance of espresso and foamy faux-milk and vanilla sweetness just makes mornings feel a little less morning-y – and driving right by them every day… and since it’s usually just my boss and I in the office, stopping for coffee is often the most human interaction I’ll get all day – plus, if you use a registered Starbucks card, they give you soy and flavored syrups for free, so I end up stopping most days.

    But yesterday, I saw an email from Starbucks.

    It starts out all nice and cheery – when you earn a free drink, instead of sending a postcard you have to bring in, they’re going to put it right on your Starbucks card now, and it’ll also be good for food if you’d prefer, and you get a freebie every 12 drinks instead of 15!

    Cool.

    Except keep reading, and you get to this:

    O_O

    Well… Starbucks, I’ll miss you…

    But if you think I’ll sit idly by while you effectively jack the price up on my coffee by $1.10 a cup, you’ve got another thing coming. (Hint: It isn’t me, into your store.)

    • Yes, I could skip the vanilla, or find a cheaper drink.
    • Yes, I could just drink the office coffee slightly more often.

      • (And I probably will do both of those.)

    • Yes, the other coffee shops charge just as much.

    But the thing is, that $1.10 difference was the factor that won you my near-exclusive patronage, and dare I say, even loyalty. But without that, you’re just another coffee shop. And frankly, your the big, corporate, international, chain coffee shop (with almost 20,000 stores) – versus the little local, one-of-a-kind, independent Burlap & Bean (and even the regional, one-of-90-stores, not-a-cafe-but-has-one Wegmans). All else being equal, I’d rather support the little guys. And guess what? You just made all else pretty much equal.

    So, I’ll miss you, Starbucks.

    I’ll miss the perfect – reliably perfect – deliciousness of your triple grande vanilla soy lattes.

    I’ll miss the very fun and friendly baristas at the Starbucks location I frequent, who know my name and my drink and give me movie recommendations.

    I’ll even miss being able to pay for my coffee with a barcode on my cellphone.

    But it will be nice to shift more of my support to a local business, not have to deal with that god-awful parking lot of yours, and get my coffee 15 minutes sooner (on the now-less-common days I do stop for coffee) since I pass Burlap & Bean earlier on my commute.

    Sure, I’ll stop by sometimes, especially as iced coffee season rolls around (assuming you don’t take the free soy away from that too), but not nearly as often as I have been. You’re giving up your advantage, and losing a regular. I don’t expect you’ll care, but I also don’t expect that I’m the only lactose-intolerant and/or flavored-coffee-loving customer whose business you’ll be largely losing, so thought I’d at least let you know.

    Any time you want to reconsider, I’ll come gleefully running back, but until then, you’re just another coffee shop – competing on slightly-less-than-equal footing at that.

    *sigh*

     

    PS: ATTENTION ALL COFFEE SHOPS! Charging for soy milk (unless you offer some other lactose-free “milk”), just seems kind of mean… like a tax on people with faulty digestive tracts. =(

  • Not Quite Writer’s Block…

    More like… Writer’s Banana Peel?

    “Banana Peel” by Black Glenn, on Flickr

    Yep, that figures! While this little blog was in transition, I had so many things I wanted to blog about. I finally get it moved over to its new home (here!), all spiffed up satisfactorily, the epic backlog of posts and photos posted, so I’m finally feeling free to blog regularly… and I suddenly have nothing to say.

    Then I’ll be driving to/from work, or in the shower, or something – anywhere i can’t type or write anything down – and remember everything I wanted to post, and come up with six new great ideas… but as soon as I stop the car or whatever, nothing. My mind is instantly blank, void of any eager scrap of creativity or inspiration! Of course!

    In the last week or so, I’ve been through this cycle so many times that I at least can remember the topics I had in mind, broadly, but still have nothing to say about them! Or I just, at that moment, think they’re incredibly stupid, uninteresting ideas no longer worthy of being bloggified.

    So after musing on that predicament for a while, I decided that it was, itself, decent [if viciously meta] blog fodder, and here we are. (Yes, it now seems kind of silly and stupid and not nearly as interesting as it did ten seconds before I started writing. But hey! Words.)

  • 134 TweetUp, Take 2!

    On the Monday the 9th, they announced the new launch date would be Monday the 16th, around 3 in the afternoon. Daddy said he had to help the sistercreature move home from school right around then, so wouldn’t be able to go. (Somebody got their priorities on wrong! 😛 )

    I still wanted to drive back down so I’d be able to get around without begging my aunt/uncle or the tweeps for rides, but the parents were none too keen on me roadtripping with other tweeps, (even though I had been talking to them for ages, spent a few days with them in person now, and everyone had to pass a Federal Government background check to get into the tweetup!) and even less amenable to me driving alone, and no friends from home were available for a random vacation that week, so I talked my aunt into letting me borrow their extra minivan once I got down there, and started scrounging for cheap flights.
    "Baby Party" Invitation

    The plan was to fly down either Sunday evening (or super early Monday morning if it was significantly cheaper), since I’d been co-planning a “baby party” for Rachel and Elliott, to be held Sunday right after church, so wanted to stick around for that. (You’re not hallucinating, the last post did say I rushed home from the first one for Rachel’s baby shower, and now I’m talking about another one… sort of. That was a small family-and-close-friends sort of shower, this one was a bigger church-wide celebration for almostMama AND futureDad.)

    This is the invitation I drew (pretty adorable, if I do say so myself!), which we snuck into church bulletins on a Sunday we knew they wouldn’t be there:

    Conflict! D=

    Then, we tweeps were informed that we might be able to have another shot at seeing the RSS retraction (well, re-retraction!)… which was scheduled for noonish the day before launch – AKA, exactly when the party was happening! The real trick was “might”. Being there for RSS retraction and getting to be that close to a shuttle on the launch pad would be an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, if it turned out we could, especially since there will literally only be one other space shuttle on a launch pad ever again… but did I want to miss a party I helped plan for my best friends for a maybe? A long-shot, even? Dilemma! (And we didn’t even know when we would find out if we could go, to at least decide if I could wait to find out before finalizing plans!)

    The more I thought about it, the more I was leaning towards taking the chance that the maybe would pan out, skipping out on the party to get to Florida in time to make the RSS retraction if we were allowed to go. I mean, logically, seeing RSS retraction up close and unobstructed would be a literal once in a lifetime opportunity, while baby showers are clearly not, and in this case, not even limited to once for this baby! And I did technically fly a thousand miles to make it to that one…

    Besides, Rachel is almost as excited about all my crazy NASAtweetup adventures as I am!

    BABY SHOWER vs. SPACESHIP

    Ultimately, no matter how awesome the friends and anti-cheese the shower, that right there should have made it a no-brainer. But, after all, I am the master of making simple decisions way more epic and convoluted than they have any right to be… and then the maybe did solidify into a yes, I saw a picture from a previous tweet-up of how close we would actually be, and I was sold. I found a super cheap flight on Spirit airlines for early Sunday morning, arranged a ride straight from the airport to Kennedy, and told my fellow party planners I wasn’t actually going to be present at said party.

    Meanwhile, it occurred to me that I was going to get a new camera. Not so much a decision as a realization – I’d wanted a nice digital SLR for a couple years, but my inner cheapskate would always slap me upside the head, point at the price tag, point at my bank account, and laugh. “Someday…” I’d think, wistfully. And then, an epiphany of sorts:

    If you are EVER going to spend THAT much money on a camera,
    it BETTER happen in time to take some pictures of that frakking space shuttle.

    Instinct had always said wait until I was a “grown up” with an income I could actually survive off of outside my parents house… but honestly, the value of a camera is not in the camera, it’s in the pictures. What makes it worth the money is how you use it, and I did want to get a nice camera eventually, so in a sense, I would be being a bad steward of the hypothetical future camera if I missed my chance to photograph one of the last space shuttle launches and a ton of other cool stuff, just because I waited too long to buy the camera.

    I thought about going with one of those in-between sort of cameras, with a decent optical zoom and more manual functions than a point-and-shoot, but without interchangeable lenses, but then my mom agreed to chip in a couple hundred bucks as my slightly-early birthday present, so entry-level legit dSLRs were a bit more doable. So I perused the interwebs a bit, asked twitterfolk for their opinions, and ran around to every store I thought might have a decent camera trying to figure out which to get. It would have been nice to get another Canon, so I could use the lenses on my film camera too, but I was ultimately wooed by the Nikon D3100 (plus 55-200mm lens for some nice zoom), which seemed like a better camera than the Canons in the same range – and then was on sale at Best Buy for a hundred dollars less than that!

    And then there was panic.

    Spirit Airlines is cheap, in every sense of the word. The ticket price is very reasonable, comparatively, but/because they charge you extra for everything other than getting your arse from Point A to Point B. For a hopefully 2 day trip, with access to a washer dryer if needed, I didn’t need a lot of stuff, and Spirit wanted at least $28 for even a carry-on, so I figured I’d try to avoid that, and just cram everything in my purse, but I needed to clarify that I could have both my rather large purse and camera bag without paying anything. Spirit’s website was not helpful, so I tried calling them, which was less helpful. (Automated menu was broken, no matter which button you pushed, when you finally got a human, it seemed to be the same guy who barely spoke English and couldn’t understand my question!)

    So I turned to the rest of the internet… which just made it worse. Not only could I not find an answer to my question, I could not find a single positive review of Spirit Airlines. Besides complaints about nickel-and-dimeing, which I was okay with because the total still ended up cheaper than any other ticket, last minute anyway, there were horror stories about planes getting delayed for days because of weather or mechanical problems and Spirit refusing to put passengers on alternate flights or refund/compensate or do anything to help, cabins being horrendously dirty, seats being even more crammed and uncomfortable than usual, and the staff being generally unpleasant.

    Also, in the midst of this, I discovered I didn’t know where my drivers license was, which I’d need both to get on the plane at all, and to get into KSC. Spent the better part of the day before I’d leave looking for it, getting yelled at for not having it with me at all times (it’s not like I need to see it regularly, so I just hadn’t noticed it wasn’t in my bag), trying to pack, and generally freaking out. Eventually my dad found it under a seat in my car, where I had looked, but apparently not well enough.

    Getting there: AKA, more panic.

    The flight was to leave at 6am, from the Atlantic City airport, so I figured we should leave around 3am to have time to get there and get through the airport… and since I rarely get to sleep before then, just didn’t plan to. That evening, I went over to church to help set up for the baby party I wouldn’t be at, and then came home to finish packing (and conceded to maybe having to pay for a carry-on backpack, if they wouldn’t count that as the personal item in addition to purse and camera bag… the rules were really confusing!)

    I knew I had told my dad when and where I had to leave from, so when I went to wake him up and he said we didn’t have to leave for an hour yet, I figured he knew what he was talking about… but when we were getting in the car close to 4:30 and I asked him if he knew how to get there or needed the GPS, and he looked at me like I was a moron, I realized he thought I meant Philly, and had forgotten the flight was from AC, and I had been right with my original time estimate, so now it was going to be a miracle if we got there before the plane left at all.

    Thankfully, traffic at that hour is pretty non-existant, the airport was slightly closer than Dad thought (he was thinking of a different one another side of the city, apparently), and I was able to call the airport itself, who had no way of getting in touch with the Spirit people at the gate (???) but did assure me our ETA would leave me enough time to get through security and to the plane in time, which I did. *phew*

    Spirit’s lines were confusing as crap, and the lady directing traffic was bitchy and condescending about it, but I had ditched even more of my stuff in the car so I could get through faster, so with just the purse full of clothes and camera bag, 1 Days to LaunchI got through security pretty quickly, and ran frantically through the airport, only to discover there was still a frakking line at the gate! >.<

    The plane wasn’t nice, by any stretch, but it wasn’t disgusting or noticeably more uncomfortable than other coach seats, and did manage to leave on time and arrive in Orlando in one piece and on schedule. My ride’s flight was not, and rental car confusion added further delays, so I had a nice long while to sit in the parking garage waiting to leave, but we still made it to KSC and the press site a few minutes before we needed to be on the bus to the launch pad!

  • "Review"

    It was brilliant, damn it.

    Vaguely dystopian sci-fi with suspense and an intriguing plot. The setting was indeterminate, regarding time (I’d guess some point in the future, but no telling how far) and place (a city, probably American if it’s a nearish sort of future but could have been elsewhere, even another planet, we don’t know). The main characters had epic adventures and a believable, non-nauseating romance. The dialog was articulate and witty, snarky and heartfelt at all the right moments. It was so good, that when it ended, coming back to reality actually kind of hurt. I still wanted to know what happened next, or at least go back and watch it again.

    But no dice– it was a dream.

    It played like a movie. A really frakking awesome movie, that was bound to be a genre favorite, maybe even a “blockbuster”. I wish I remembered it well enough to actually make that movie, or perhaps write it out as a book, but like anything I’ve only watched once, I can only recall the basic gist (and I do mean basic), a line or two, and few “snapshot” images. You’d think, being that the writer, director, “cameraman”, and heck, all of the cast/characters, were, in fact, my brain, I’d be able to remember a little better what happened, or at least re-create something similar. But no.

    That lovely film was created by my subconscious, who is apparently much more intelligent, creative, and accomplished than my conscious mind, and absolutely refuses to share its brilliance with its conscious counterpart, who could in turn share it with the world…

    …’cause my subconscious is a bitch about intellectual property rights.

    Figures.

  • Cafe Storyrant… Go!

    I win at cappuccino foam! (For once!)

    Oy. What a long week! I worked 8 of the past 9 days, and this week was all long shifts. So, yay for actually getting money, but boo for sore feet and tired me.

    So here’s a funny story. Not really funny, really, but a story anyway. Yesterday I was supposed to work an 8 hour shift in the middle of the day – three hours overlapping with the girl who opened, 2 hours by myself, and then 3 hours overlapping with the girl who would close. I was supposed to take my break when the closer got in, but about half an hour before the opener was to leave, I realized I had to pee, and was really hungry, and didn’t want to wait 2 and a half more hours to take my break, so I asked her if she’d mind if I took it then, I’d just take a half hour instead of the whole one, and I’d be back when she had to leave. She didn’t mind, so that’s what we did. And THANK FREAKING GOD.

    Apparently, the girl who was scheduled to close had called out, but somewhere along the line the wires got crossed and that little tidbit of information never made it to the manager who was actually working then, or to me, or to anyone actually working that day, and neither she or the manager she had talked to found a sub. So, about halfway through what originally would have been my break, the manager figured this out and called a couple people, but nobody could/would come in to close, so he asked me if I’d stay to close. Luckily for them, I didn’t have any pressing plans that would warrant leaving them with an unstaffed cafe for the rest of the evening, so I said I would.

    It was only an extra two hours of work, but on top of an already 8-hour shift, that’s a long time to be standing around making coffee. And instead of two hours working alone, it turned into 7, and I still had to do the food pull for the next day (normally done at the end of the middle shift, when the closer gets in, so one can wait on customers while the other’s in the back), plus do all of the closing stuff, which is a pain in the butt to begin with. Luckily for me, it was pretty slow most of the night, so I was able to get it done anyway, and they sent some people over from the book side at the very end to help me finish up. So everything crucial got done, the place got clean, and I still made it out of there reasonably soon after the store closed. It wasn’t that bad, and the manager bought me lunch today for being willing to stay.

    This morning I get in, working on the book side, and the other manager mentions I had forgotten to put more iced coffee in the fridge, but he had apparently been the one who had dropped the ball in the first place in not letting anyone know the girl wasn’t coming in, so it was all good. I said, “whoops, sorry, I’ll try to remember that next time,” and life moved on. I helped some customers, shelved some books, didn’t have to work the register much, it was a good day… until 5.

    Then the girl who was closing the cafe showed up. From the very beginning, I could tell she was going to be stressful to work with. The other cafe workers warned me, the cafe supervisor warned me, every time I opened, I could tell if she had been the one to close the previous night, because everything was messy and half-assed, if done at all. I tried to be polite when I saw her, but was grateful that I only had to work with her twice so far. I didn’t think I’d have to worry about it today, since I was on the other side of the store, but I was wrong. Soon after she arrived, she wanted to tell somebody something on the radio. Instead of just turning on the one we keep in the cafe, she tells me, halfway across the store, to pass on the message for her. She mumbles (rather consistently) so I couldn’t hear what she said, so I walk towards her and ask her what she said. Instead of repeating it like a normal person, she grabs the mic on my headset, while it’s still attached to me, and tells whatever to whoever herself, completely demolishing any semblance of personal space in the process. >.<

    A little while later, I’m helping out on register, and she comes over and just stands there awkwardly… already I have a bad feeling about this. She rings up a couple people too, eventually the line dies down, so I try to head back out to the floor to finish the pile I was shelving, but before I can manage that, she corners me and starts going off on me about how bad I did at closing. At first I think maybe I did forget a few things, I was by myself and already tired, it’s plausible. But then she asks me how I got Sunday from Thursday (refering to the expiration stickers we stick on the food trays, everything gets either one or two days from when you pull them out of the freezer), and then tries to claim half of it didn’t have a sticker at all. I admit to her I may have missed a tray or two, but I’m pretty sure I got almost everything, and I know I didn’t put Sunday stickers on anything. (When in doubt, I just tagged it for the next day, to be on the safe side, so almost everything had Friday stickers.) It would have been one thing if she was correcting me on things I had actually done wrong, (and even then, she doesn’t actually have any authority over me, I would just have respected it since she has been there longer than I) but NONE OF IT WAS TRUE.

    When I told this story to the cafe supervisor (who actually quit, effective yesterday, but we text), she confirmed that the girl has no room to talk… “A lizard could close the cafe better than her”… and both the managers who I’ve worked with lately told me I’m a good worker and doing a great job at my job(s), so I’m pretty confident that I didn’t screw up, and she’s just crazy.

    Nonetheless, when she was done, I was so so so very mad… Somewhere between shock and actual restraint, I managed not to say or hit anything, but that meant it came out as tears of frustration, so I went back to the break room, but there was a guy in there, so I stood at the sink and washed my hands so I had an excuse to face the wall and steam/cry a little… but this was like, 10 minutes before the end of my shift, so when I came back in to clock out and he was still there, I still wanted to rid myself of the grime of other people’s money and dusty books and computers that everyone-and-their-mom has touched before I got my stuff and left, so he gave me a funny look and asked “didn’t you just wash your hands?” and I was still barely maintaining my composure/sanity, so I just sort of muttered “yup” and some failed summary of the above explanation and left awkwardly.

    But now I’m home, showered, pajama’d, and soon will be asleeeeep. And tomorrow will involve no work, but lots of funnesses.