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Archive for the ‘Personal Essays’ Category

Nothing is Finer Than Being in Your Diner

Posted in Personal Essays, Small Business, tagged , , , , , on February 7, 2012| 1 Comment »

When I attended my first Seinfeld trivia night back in December, I never anticipated the chain of events I’d set into motion: I’d interview the trivia host, Dave Oliver and we’d become fast friends; I’d write my most-read blog post ever based on that interview; I’d join Dave’s company, Trivia, A.D., as a consultant; and I’d help him host a Seinfeld trivia night at Tom’s Restaurant, a.k.a. Monk’s Diner from the show.

Still, none of the above is so unbelievable that you’d doubt it if I put it in a blog post.

Slightly more unbelievable, though, is that on the night of the Tom’s event, I’d find myself in an Italian restaurant a few doors down from the diner, explaining to Jeremiah Birkett (the guy who played oversleeping marathoner Jean-Paul Jean-Paul on Seinfeld) and Lou Cutell (who played Dr. Cooperman, a.k.a. The Assman) that in about a minute, I’d be bringing them down the block and through the front door of Tom’s for their surprise guest appearance in front of a crowd of 80 trivia players.

—

What separates Tom’s Restaurant from any other coffee shop or diner I’ve ever been to is, well, not much, actually. If I didn’t know it was “the coffee shop from Seinfeld”–or recognize the neon “RESTAURANT” sign on the outside–I never would have figured it out once I was sitting inside eating my grilled cheese and rice pudding at the counter.

There’s a blurb in the menu that mentions the diner’s famous connections, but it’s understated and easy to miss:

Tom’s restaurant on upper Broadway and 112th Street has been serving Columbia University and the surrounding communities since the 1940’s. Tom’s became a legend through Recording Artist Susan Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” Song and even more so after appearing repeatedly on the world famous Seinfeld TV program.

On the wall to the right, there are a few enlarged and framed TV Guide covers featuring Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer. And in the very corner, tucked between the front window and the counter, is “The Kramer” portrait, which Tom’s sells as a poster for $12. I decided not to ask the owner–Mike, not Tom–whether anyone has ever bought one.

To the locals–for whom Tom’s closed its doors for two hours while the trivia was going on–it’s just a diner where they go sometimes for a cup of coffee and a piece of pie. A wi-fi-less place for Columbia students to take a study break. A rare NYC eatery that doesn’t serve alcohol and only takes cash.

As trivia teams started to file in, Mike checked names off his list of reservations. I asked him whether his place was usually this full on a Monday night. He smiled and shook his head.

The guest list for the evening was invitation only, based on those teams who had been to Dave’s Seinfeld trivia nights before. The list of team names read like a Kentucky Derby race card if Jerry Seinfeld owned all the horses: Spongeworthy, I Was in the Pool, Mulva, What About the Driver?, and the odds-on favorite, Why No T-Bone?

The pre-trivia buzz for an average Seinfeld trivia night typically carries the nonchalance of any weeknight happy hour. But at Tom’s, the atmosphere seemed a little more tense. As teams assembled and claimed their booths or spots at the counter, I gleaned bits of one team’s conversation as they quizzed each on the minute details of specific episodes. I even heard one woman say, “I was studying my flash cards last night,” with a straight face.

And when Dave read the first question–“In the episode, ‘The Doodle,’ Kramer and Newman wait all year long for the Mackinaw peaches. Where do they come from?”*–the diner grew eerily silent as everyone considered their answer, knowing any misstep, even on the first question, could cost them. It felt like we were proctoring the SATs.

—

Hoping to raise the event’s profile, Dave had reached out to the agents and publicists for every Seinfeld actor he could think of in the months leading up to the event. Who knew, maybe one of them would actually show up. While most were either out of town or simply too busy to come, many sent gracious and genuine responses as well as signed headshots to give away as prizes at the event.

Dave only told a handful of people that Lou “The Assman” Cutell was going to be there–just in case Lou had to cancel last minute–but he was clearly excited. Every couple of weeks I’d get an email or text to the effect of, “I just talked to The Assman on the phone for 40 minutes!”

Jeremiah “Jean-Paul Jean-Paul” Birkett’s appearance that night was a surprise even to Dave, who explained that in earlier conversations with JPJP’s “people,” it seemed as though they didn’t want him doing anything without an appearance fee. But Dave’s shoestring budget didn’t have room for anything like that, so he crossed him off the list and moved on.

Outside the context of a Seinfeld trivia night, it might be hard to place Jeremiah Birkett’s face. He’s a Caribbean guy in his early forties and in good shape, walking around Manhattan’s Upper West Side in a fitted black t-shirt, a leather jacket and jeans. But inside the four walls of Tom’s, even 16 years after the Jean-Paul episode (“The Hot Tub”) originally aired on NBC, he was recognized instantly as Jean-Paul, even before Dave could announce him.

I led Lou in next, holding up the famous ASSMAN license plate out in front of him to help people connect the dots. He got an equally warm reception, after which Dave handed him the microphone to guest host the final round of questions–all of which referenced the episode in which he appeared, “The Fusilli Jerry.”

A professional performer for decades, Lou looked over at Dave as if to say, “What should I say?”, then proceeded to tell a couple of stories about Life After Assman which all ended similarly: “I’ve been in over 70 films, I’ve done Shakespeare on Broadway [yada yada yada] but I’m still remembered as The Assman!”

Lou then read the last round of questions, pausing comically in disbelief every so often to scratch his head and say things like, “Who would know this stuff?”

After the round was over, a few of us feverishly graded the answer sheets and tallied up the scores to determine a winner. Jeremiah bought us a little time, following Lou’s lead and telling a story about being hassled at the airport a few years ago on his way back from Amsterdam with his wife. A security guard looked at him funny for a few moments until realizing who he was, then proceeded to point at him, shout “Seinfeld! Seinfeld!” and eventually let him pass.

When it was time to crown a champion, Why No T-Bone? had edged out Spongeworthy by a single point to win the night. It was retribution for Why No T-Bone?, who has won nearly every one of Dave’s Seinfeld trivia nights but finished second in his 2010 Seinfeld trivia tournament.

—

Once Tom’s cleared out, Dave sat down–for the first time all night–with those of us who’d helped him throughout the event. As we sat there eating burgers, fries, and root beer floats, something seemed eerily familiar about a few friends sitting in a booth, having a conversation about nothing.

The next morning, Dave looked in his bag and discovered Jeremiah had autographed a head shot for him. It read, “Thanks Dave, you son of a bitch.”

*The Macinaw peaches came from Oregon. Several teams got this one right.

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Rooting For the Underdog at the U.S. Open

Posted in Customer Experience & Reviews, Personal Essays on August 30, 2011| 1 Comment »

Typically in the first week of the U.S. Open, many of the first and second round matches are more like mismatches. The high seeds–the Nadals, the Williamses, the Federers–are pitted against lesser knowns (or unknowns), and inevitably the better players dismantle their less skilled, less experienced opponents, barely breaking a sweat on their way to the next round.

The fans generally know this, but they buy tickets for these early rounds anyway because A) they’re cheaper than the later rounds and B) they came to see the best tennis players in the world playing on the sport’s biggest stage. Sure, 99 times out of 100, those top seeds will win, but the oohs and ahhs of a perfect drop shot or a bombastic serve or a long rally make it worth the price of admission.

In other words, people buy tickets to the U.S. Open to see a show.

This manifests itself pretty clearly in the way fans behave over the course of a match (sometimes eschewing proper tennis etiquette), and it plays out the same way every year.

The buzz at the U.S. Open, particularly during the evening matches, is unlike the typical live sporting event. Even from the nosebleeds, fans can feel the electricity as the players names are announced and they begin to warm up under the lights of Arthur Ashe Stadium.

As the match begins, fans want to see their favorite players do what they do best, because that’s what they paid to see. They want to see Rafa Nadal curl his extreme topspin forehand deep into his opponent’s court, just as they used to pine for Pete Sampras‘ lethal serve-and-volley game, or shake their heads as John McEnroe incorrigibly berated the chair umpire for a bad call.

But after a few games, when the buzz begins to wane, something strange happens. The fans, formerly rooting for the favorite, change their collective mind and throw their support to the underdog in the hopes that all their cheers and whistles and C’mon!s will encourage them to play their best tennis, and maybe make a match of it after all. (This switch happens so quickly that it’s almost as if the fans planned it together while riding in on the 7 train.)

This very phenomenon emerged yesterday afternoon as I watched the 3-seed Maria Sharapova, three-time Grand Slam winner, struggle against British teenager Heather Watson. The fans, watching their last match of the day before being swept out of Ashe Stadium, wanted to get their money’s worth. As Sharapova made several unforced errors, Watson fed off the energy of the crowd and jumped out to an early lead.

Sure enough, Watson won the first set 6-3 and was matching Sharapova shot for shot in the second set. At this point the fans, as they always do, realized that Watson was playing too well; if she kept this up, their wonderful day of tennis would be over and Sharapova–who had a legitimate shot of winning the U.S. Open–would be ousted from the tournament for good.

Slowly but surely, the generic and protean chants of “Let’s go, Heather!” became “Let’s go, Maria!” With a little fan support and some timely shot-making, Sharapova snatched the second set from Watson, 7-5.

By the start of the third set it was obvious Sharapova was in control and, barring a meltdown, would win the match. Predictably, the fans changed their allegiance again, seemingly feeling bad for the 19-year-old British upstart and how they had turned their backs on her during the second set. They suddenly admired her hustle, her gumption, the way she was making Sharapova earn the victory.

But it was too late; Sharapova had match point. In one final show of infidelity, the fans stood up and cheered Sharapova, asking her to put the cherry on the sundae that was an afternoon of exciting, competitive tennis. As she won the match’s final point and raised her arms in triumph, the fans smiled as they exited the stadium, likely forgetting the name of Sharapova’s feisty opponent they’d loved so much for the better parts of the past two and a half hours.

(As an avid sports fan, I can’t think of another professional sport where this happens. Gambling implications aside, I’ve never heard of someone rooting for their favorite team for the first few minutes of a game and then deciding the game’s not close enough, so they’d better root for the other team for a while.)

You may be reading this and thinking, So what’s wrong with that? The better player won and you got to see a great tennis match! Maybe so, but I’d be remiss not to tell you what happened when I was in attendance for the first round of the 2005 U.S. Open. Andy Roddick, the former champion and 4 seed that year, was all set to roll over his first round opponent, Giles Muller.

But nobody told Muller.

The fans did their classic flip-flop routine, at first cheering Roddick’s powerful serves but generously encouraging Muller. A few hours later, Muller, almost surreptitiously, had defeated Roddick in straight sets. (He’d go on to beat another American, Robbie Ginepri, in straight sets before losing in the third round.)

When I left the grounds and headed to the 7 train, I saw a gigantic billboard promoting the U.S. Open with Roddick’s face plastered on it. (Think Reebok’s 1992 Dan & Dave campaign.) Most of us fans, who had showed up hoping for a hard-fought first round match with Roddick prevailing, seemed to look at each other as if to say, What have we done?

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Confessions of a “Fired” Customer

Posted in Customer Experience & Reviews, Personal Essays on August 25, 2011| 4 Comments »

I came across an interesting Harvard Business Review article this morning called “It’s Time to Fire Some of Your Customers,” in which the author, Anthony Tjan, describes a scenario where a business pares its customer base by only focusing on the most desirable customers, its “super loyalists,” which effectively means “firing” the low-potential customers. From the article:

Some businesses exhibit the classic 80/20 rule, with their top 20 percent of customers making up 80 percent of the revenue. We have also seen a good number of firms with even more skewed revenue distributions that are closer to 90/10. Yet organizational efforts and resources are often poorly mapped to, or unaligned with, that revenue distribution pattern. In fact, it is often the opposite. That is, the bottom customer quartiles take disproportionately from a company’s sales, marketing, and customer service resources. Some of the most challenging customers are those who in the “low-middle” bucket, buying relatively little, but needing very high touch and maintenance.

When I read the HBR article, I automatically thought of a coffee shop owner I know who’s very serious about customer service. I reached out to him to find out whether he’s ever had to “fire” any of his customers, and coincidentally, he had a customer experience to share.

Recently, some of his customers had figured out a way to “game the system” regarding his pricing. Instead of purchasing an iced latte—two shots of espresso with milk, served over ice—these savvy coffee drinkers were ordering espressos over ice in large cups, and then pouring their own milk from the milk-and-sugar station. Essentially they were getting all the same ingredients but at a lower price. According to the owner, he was actually losing money on these drinks because these customers were pushing the milk costs back onto him.

Eventually he figured it out and readjusted his pricing. He says that based on the change, some of those customers raised a stink at his store and have either stopped coming in or begrudgingly paid the new price. He thinks some people will always be hatching the next great coffee scam to game the system again, but that he’s not spending too much time worrying about them.

Back to the HBR article. The part about the most challenging customers who don’t spend a lot but are the biggest pains in the ass? That’s me. I wouldn’t consider myself a “super loyalist” at too many places, but I’m the first to ask to speak to a manager, or send back a beer that doesn’t taste quite right, or write a scathing Yelp review, or share my thoughts about a poor customer service experience on my blog.

In a post last month I wrote about a bar crawl in which I only drank at bars that offered a free drink for just one Foursquare check-in, and the lukewarm customer service I received as a result of my low-potential customer status. It’s obvious to me now that like the iced latte bandits, I too have been fired as a customer many times.

I have one more similar customer experience to share regarding a very popular dining program: NYC Restaurant Week. As many couples do, my girlfriend and I occasionally like to splurge for a decent meal, and Restaurant Week affords us the chance to have a fancy dinner for a little less than what it would cost normally. For $35 a head, restaurants include an appetizer, entrée and dessert—alcohol is not included. Inevitably, the food will be tasty and the night will be fun, but when the bill comes, the $70 figure I had in my head at the start of the meal (that’s $35 times 2) has suddenly ballooned to around $135 after alcohol, tax, and tip.

Unlike the much maligned Groupon deals that have many small businesses complaining about a lack of profitability (often due to a lack of repeat, full price-paying customers), the concept of Restaurant Week got us to spend as much—and possibly more—than we would have otherwise.

Had we ordered our exact same meals (again, appetizer, entrée, and dessert) off the regular dinner menu, my food would have come to $54.50, so in theory I saved $19.50 by ordering from the RW menu. But my girlfriend’s meal would have come to just $39, merely a $4 savings. On a regular night, we may have ordered just one glass of wine at $11 apiece, but the implied savings from the RW “deal” had us feeling like we could order two each and still make out on the deal. In the end, we had a tasty (though hardly mind-blowing) meal and a fun night, but the RW promotion didn’t really do us any favors.

I think it’s safe to say I’ve been fired as a customer of that restaurant, and possibly fired from all of Restaurant Week. And I’m sure I’ll be fired by many more establishments in my lifetime, but the good news is there’s no shortage of businesses of all shapes and sizes in NYC, and eventually I’m bound to be hired somewhere.

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A Complicated Relationship With My Kindle, Part II

Posted in Customer Experience & Reviews, Personal Essays, tagged , , , , on August 16, 2011| 4 Comments »

Where we last left off, it was Christmas 2010 and I had just been given a Kindle by my mom.

My first Kindle book was East of Eden, on my mom’s recommendation (and on her credit card). I have to admit, reading on a Kindle is very cool. The text is so crisp that it looks like an actual printed book. And once you get used to pressing the “Next Page” button instead of turning a physical page, one-handed reading is far easier in places like a crowded subway.

Based on my last eight months using my own Kindle, here are a few points worth exploring before you decide to bite the bullet and enter The Wonderful World of E-Readers:

Buying Books

Mostly every book title is available on the Kindle through Amazon.com, and Kindle titles are often a couple bucks cheaper on Amazon than their print counterparts—plus an e-book comes with free, instant delivery.

The second best feature of Kindle is book sampling. (The #1 feature is the Dictionary; see below.) This is the digital version of leafing through a book at a bookstore; I can have a sample of a book sent to my Kindle to try free of charge. If I like what I’ve read, I have the option to buy the full book and my Amazon account will be charged.

Free Books

On Amazon’s website, there’s a list of e-libraries where free e-books are available. I’ve attempted to navigate these libraries on several occasions and found it not worth the trouble. Amazon has a few free titles as well, which are mostly classics whose copyrights have expired. I got about halfway through Bram Stoker’s Dracula before cutting my losses—the best perk of a free book is there’s no guilt about not finishing!

I’m also currently reading an e-book I “bought” for free on Amazon called Stealing Jake (published June 2011), which averages 4 ½ stars on Amazon. I’m getting the sense that users factored the bang for their buck into their ratings.

My biggest disappointment about the device is that the New York Public Library doesn’t currently support Kindle. Nook owners can download select e-book titles from NYPL, but Kindle owners are out of luck, at least for now. I tweeted @NYPL to ask them whether there’s a timeline for supporting Kindle through their digital content solutions provider, Overdrive. Their response was “unfortunately not yet…but stay tuned…” According to Amazon’s website, “You’ll be able to borrow Kindle library books from any of the more than 11,000 libraries that work with OverDrive, the leading provider of digital content solutions for libraries.” We’ll see.

Dictionary

In my opinion, this is easily the best feature of the Kindle. In the past if I was reading a book that was full of SAT-level vocabulary, I might carry a dictionary with me or mark pages that contained a word I wanted to look up later. Often, I’d just forget to look them up and when I did, I almost never retained the definition.

Kindle allows me to quickly and easily access its dictionary and look up a word without distracting me from enjoying the book I’m reading. This feature is so good that when I come across an unfamiliar word in a print book, newspaper, magazine, or an online article, I find myself wishing I was reading it on the Kindle.

Lending Policy

Amazon’s Kindle lending policy says that the owner of an e-book, if that title is deemed “lendable” by its publishing house, may lend it one time to one other Kindle user for a period of 14 days.

I was able to borrow the entire Hunger Games Trilogy at no cost from a co-worker. This worked perfectly because the books were quick reads and the 14-day policy never came into play. However, the policy is largely impractical for longer books like The Pillars of the Earth, which might take months to read.

As Kindles become more mainstream and publishing houses (hopefully) become more malleable about the “lendability” of their titles—though I don’t see why they would—the lending feature may become a legitimate selling point for the device. But for now, it’s a non-factor.

Vacation Reading

Another theoretical selling point for the Kindle is that if you went on vacation for a week and planned on reading at the beach, you wouldn’t need to lug around a bunch of heavy books.

I’ve traveled fairly often since I got my Kindle and I have run into a few cases where I finished a book and wanted to download another title and start reading right way. (If I didn’t have a Kindle, I simply would have packed more than one book and complained about the extra two pounds.) Having a thin, light reading device might have made my life a little easier during my two-week trip to China, but is that convenience alone worth the $180 price tag for a Kindle?

Percentage Reading

If you’re a Kindle owner, chances are you’ve said some variation of this sentence: “Oh yeah I’m reading that right now…I’m 63% through it.” Many Kindle owners I’ve spoken to find the percentages, as opposed to page numbers, a little odd. The lack of page numbers becomes particularly inconvenient if you’re in a book club or a classroom where not everyone has a Kindle. (For that problem, Amazon has a solution.)

I’ve gotten used to the percentage thing for the most part but in some cases it really gets on my nerves. The Kindle factors in acknowledgments and “also from this author” pages into the total, so most books end around 90 to 95%. Fine. But I was reading the nonfiction book Little Bets, which is full of footnotes, and when I finished the last chapter I was at just 70%. What??? Turns out, the remaining 30% was academic sourcing, which of course I didn’t plan to read.

Technical Difficulties and Customer Service

I’ve already had my Kindle replaced twice. One was due to my own carelessness, leading to a cracked screen; the other died on me while I was on vacation (which, by the way, never would have happened with a print book). Customer service in both cases was extremely accommodating and sent me a new Kindle right away at no cost.

Recommendation

For me, I’ve found the cost of buying books once a week or more often to be a little expensive. To cut costs, I’ve actually read my last four books “off-Kindle”—which prompted me to explore my feelings towards my Kindle in this very blog post.

My recommendation is that if you already buy lots of books, the Kindle probably makes sense for you–provided you have $180 to spend on it. Sure, you won’t have an impressive book collection to show off to guests, but if you’re living in a cramped NYC apartment, you’ll be happy to have some of your shelf space back.

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A Complicated Relationship With My Kindle, Part I

Posted in Customer Experience & Reviews, Personal Essays, tagged , , , , on August 12, 2011| 1 Comment »

The following is the first of a two-part post about my customer experience as a Kindle owner. It’ll be half personal essay, half product review—a format that has become par for the course here at BCSAB. I’d guess this is not quite how they do things over at Consumer Reports.

When my brother and I were younger, my mom was adamant about passing on her love of reading onto us. We were typical book resistant boys, preferring to do anything else in the world other than sitting down with a good book.

As a compromise, my mom set aside a half hour of reading time every few days for us to finish before we could go outside and play basketball or stay in and play hours of NBA Jam on Genesis.

There was nothing sweeter than the sound of the egg timer dinging, signifying that our prison sentence was over. We’d stop reading mid-paragraph, mid-sentence, perhaps even mid-word, and throw our books across the room to rush to the next activity, eager to wash the taste of reading out of our mouths. Often we wouldn’t even bother to bookmark our pages.

Our reading lists were typical for two young boys. I read a lot of the Hardy Boys series, Matt Christopher’s YA sports books, Where The Red Fern Grows, The Crazy Horse Electric Game, or articles in Sports Illustrated; my brother, four years younger than me, read classics like Goosebumps and the novelization of the movie Rookie of the Year. (After reading ROTY, my brother, then maybe 9 years old, expressed some confusion about the Chet Steadman character, played by Gary Busey in the movie. Apparently, each time he read Chet’s name he thought it referred to the New York Mets’ former ballpark, Shea Stadium.)

By the time I got to high school, required reading was no longer enforced by just egg timers and “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed” looks from Mom. There were pop quizzes and please-please-please-don’t-call-on-me mini panic attacks to encourage us to stay up on our reading. And by college, not only was there syllabi telling me what textbooks to read, but I also had to pay through the nose for them at the college bookstore.

I couldn’t remember reading a book just because I felt like it. It was only after reading was no longer required that I realized I had, in fact, inherited my mom’s bibliophilia. (To some degree, it was like figuring out that I didn’t want to eat cookies for dinner simply because no one was telling me I couldn’t.)

I attacked my newfound love of reading with fervor. I took book recommendations from coworkers, and shared my own suggestions with friends. I signed up for a new library card for the first time in ten years. I’d peruse giant shelves of fiction titles the Sachem Public Library—often judging books exclusively by their covers—wondering if some obscure novelist would get really excited when she found out I checked out her book.

After I moved from Long Island, whose library sharing system is phenomenal, I had far less luck with the Hoboken Library. The tiny facility almost never had my desired titles in house and the transit process to get it from another library, usually a couple of weeks, was too long for me to wait. The waits only got longer, much longer, when I moved into Queens and later Manhattan, where there are simply too many readers for the city libraries to adequately service. I found myself buying books when I couldn’t borrow them—and doing a lot of Sudoku in between.

At least once a year, I knew I could count on a free book from my mom, who started a Christmas tradition of buying me my own copy of her own favorite books. A few years back, it was Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (still one of my favorite books to this day, which led me to Atlas Shrugged), and the next year J.R. Moehringer’s outstanding memoir, The Tender Bar.

I never make it easy on my mom when it comes to Christmas shopping because I never ask for anything specific, with no exception this past Christmas. But I knew I could trust her to pick another great book for me, so I was happily anticipating that as I opened my first few presents from her. I still didn’t find the book after a few minutes of unwrapping when she handed me my next present.

It was the Kindle!

(To be continued in next week’s “A Complicated Relationship With My Kindle, Part II.)

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The 48-Hour Defensive Driving Course

Posted in Customer Experience & Reviews, Personal Essays, tagged , on August 8, 2011| 3 Comments »

Anyone who’s ever taken a six-hour defensive driving course knows that this is arguably the most boring six hours a human can endure. You don’t want to be there. The instructor doesn’t want to be there. And after the six hours (hopefully less if the instructor is merciful) you have not improved at all as a driver, but your insurance rates will have gone down slightly so it’s just barely worth it.

With that in mind, my friends Sean and Gil decided to try something a little different this past weekend: an online defensive driving course. The plan was to watch TV and drink beers while they breezed through it—the irony of a careless, distracted, and possibly drunk defensive driving course is not lost on me—but as it turns out, the online version is actually fairly complicated.

According to Sean, the online course is programmed with little pauses so users can’t skip through the whole thing as quickly as possible. If you do finish a section early, the program keeps you there for a predetermined amount of time to make sure you’re actually doing the required reading. It also asks you choose a password at the beginning of the course and every so often re-enter it to prove you’re still there (and awake).

The biggest issue Sean and Gil faced was re-entering their passwords. The program wasn’t recognizing them even though they were typing it in carefully and correctly as they had at the start. This snafu stalled their progress for the weekend, and they were forced to wait until Monday morning when they could get a live person from the company on the phone to explain the situation and troubleshoot.

When Sean called the company today, they were able to reset his password, only to have it still not work when he tried it again. He called a second time and they explained that the password not only needs to be correctly typed, but also typed at the same speed that it was originally entered when he started the course. Sean’s initial reaction in his head, as mine would have been: “How the f*** do I know what speed I typed it???” To his credit, he kept his cool and convinced the customer service guy to disable that feature so he could finish the course.

But forcing users to match the speed of their original password? Talk about overthinking it. At this writing, it will have been a two full days, or 48 hours, since Sean and Gil started the online defensive driving course, and they still haven’t completed it.

Instead of creating a more efficient defensive driving course that saves time and money (the online course was $30 versus the $45 in-person course), this company, Empire Safety Council, created one that takes much longer, is far more aggravating, and will still teach its users next to nothing about defensive driving—and possibly induce new strains of road rage.

Have you had similar issues with online defensive driving courses? Are there any in the marketplace that aren’t as poorly designed? Let me know in the comments section.

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Pearl Harbor

Posted in Personal Essays, tagged , on August 3, 2011| 8 Comments »

If you’re lucky enough to have a close group of friends who you’ve known for a while, as I am, each member of that group has probably done something the rest of you playfully tease them about from time to time.  For me, that something pertains to the movie Pearl Harbor.

One night during the summer after freshman year of college, in May 2001, we decided to go see Pearl Harbor. At that point Ben Affleck was emerging as one of Hollywood’s leading men, Kate Beckinsale was starting to reach “It Girl” status and Josh Hartnett, well, he was still pretty much just Josh Hartnett. The movie was a typical historical fiction slash action film slash love story, with none of those elements done particularly well. But for whatever reason, I really enjoyed the movie.

For the most part we all had similar taste in movies and we’d always recap afterwards in the parking lot. “Pretty good, right?” or “That SUCKED.” So when we filed out of the tiny theater and walked to the car after Pearl Harbor, I was really pumped to talk about the movie. But no one was really saying anything. I decided to break the silence with the following statement: “I think that was the best movie I’ve ever seen.”

A bold statement, I know. We had all seen a ton of movies by then, making our parents round us all up and drive 20 minutes to “the good theater,” and later driving ourselves when we all started to get our licenses. If not at the theater, we were wearing out our cheaply laminated Blockbuster cards. Surely, many movies I saw during that period were better than Pearl Harbor. But I let the excitement of being back home for the summer and hanging out with my friends influence my review of what was just an OK movie. Rookie mistake.

Years later, my friends still give me crap about Pearl Harbor. At first it bothered me—my credibility among my pre-Facebook social network was shot!—but later I started to play along. If a friend asked me about a movie I’d seen, I might say, “Let’s just say it was no Pearl Harbor.” My friend Nikki and I would even apply the term Pearl Harbor, often shortening it to PH, to non-movie reviews. For example, if I was going on a date, I’d text Nikki afterwards if it went well: “she was the PH of girls.”

I’m only starting to live down the infamous PH incident now, ten years later. But it taught me an important lesson. Just because I happened to be on a hot streak one night at a poker table in Atlantic Citydoesn’t mean that the Trump Taj Mahal is definitively the best casino I’ve ever been to. And just because I happened to get a pretty girl’s number at bar once doesn’t mean it’s the best bar I’ve ever been to. It also doesn’t mean that I should quit rooting for the Yankees just because they lost 12-1 in the opening game of the 1996 World Series, where I was in attendance, sitting in a Row Y seat that cost $100.

On this site I’ll often share stories and express opinions. For the purposes of making those stories and opinions valuable to others, I’ll do my best to find the proper “PH balance,” mixing my personal perspective with a fair and accurate view of each of my customer experiences.

(Oh, I almost forgot. There’s one exception to the PH Rule: if you want to go ahead and tell everyone that this is the best blog you’ve ever read, that’s totally fine.)

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Freakonomics, A Dead Mouse & Hazelnut Gelato

Posted in Customer Experience & Reviews, Personal Essays, tagged , , , on July 27, 2011| 5 Comments »

Earlier this week, I caught the latest Freakonomics podcast in which co-host Steven Dubner described an unpleasant dining experience he had at a Le Pain Quotidien in New York City, where he used to go at least once a week to eat and play backgammon with a friend. At the table behind him, he heard a scream followed by crying. It was a woman in her sixties. The impetus for her visceral reaction? She found a dead mouse in her salad.

Dubner characteristically turned this experience into a sociological study about how customers and businesses react in catastrophic situations like these. In this particular case, LPQ cited its organic approach, i.e. it doesn’t use any produce that has been sprayed with pesticides, the kind that keep mice away, as the primary reason why a dead rodent might find its way into one of their salads. Of course, this doesn’t explain why it went undetected all the way from farm to table. Still, the woman accepted LPQ’s apology and explanation and continued to eat there after the incident. (Personally, I would have held out for a minimum of free salads for life.) Dubner summed up the whole incident as a learning experience for us all, in which LPQ limited the damage by just being candid about its mistake and using it as an opportunity to examine its processes. But the story also got me thinking of my own unpleasant dining experience about six years ago.

In 2006 I was working in Manhattan but still living and commuting from my mom’s apartment on Long Island, a two-hour trip each way, five days a week. This didn’t give me much flexibility to hang out in the city after work on weeknights, but sometimes I made plans to go out and then stay with friends who lived nearby.

One Wednesday night, I was meeting an old college friend for drinks and dinner. We did a little barhopping and eventually landed at Mario Batali’s then-new restaurant, OTTO. I was 23 and it was the first time I can remember having a “grown-up” dinner—just two friends catching up over a meal and a few glasses of wine. It all felt so adult. We ordered different wines by the glass and different entrees, but couldn’t resist ordering two of the same dessert, the hazelnut gelato.

After dinner, my friend took the subway back to Brooklyn and I walked to 14th and 5th, where another friend from college was staying at his grandparents’ apartment while they were away for a few months. It was around 11 when I got there but we stayed up for a bit and had a few beers before I eventually dozed off on the couch.

A little while later, I woke suddenly with an overpowering urge to vomit. Generally I’m not much of a vomiter, even after a night of drinking, but in this case I couldn’t even make it to the bathroom. About ten feet from the toilet, red wine started spewing from my mouth like an Italian fountain, hitting the closed white bathroom door on a fly. As I alternated between gagging and gasping for air, my friend came out of his room to the mess I had made. I felt terrible not only for what I did to his grandparents’ home, but also for being such a lightweight drinker!

I continued to throw up and then dry heave for a few hours, afraid to stray too far from the bathroom. At some point I managed to stumble back to the couch and fall asleep, waking a few hours later to a massive headache and a terrible stench, reminding me that the scene from last night was not just a bad dream. Had I been closer to Long Island I would have called in sick for work, but since I was already in the city, I sucked it up and went into the office. After chugging a few gallons of water, I wrote an email to the first friend to tell her I had a great time at dinner and couldn’t wait to meet up again soon—I left out the part about throwing up, still embarrassed about getting sick from just a few drinks. The whole day passed and she still hadn’t responded. I was starting to think I had been so drunk that I didn’t even realize I was drunk, and that maybe I said or did something during the course of the night to offend her.

The next morning, her reply was waiting for me in my inbox. It was something to the effect of, “Hey, sorry I didn’t respond. I had awful food poisoning the other night. I called in sick yesterday.” Food poisoning, of course! I’d never been food poisoned before, so I didn’t really know what it would feel like. But it made perfect sense—it was that damned hazelnut gelato! I told her I had a similar experience and that I planned to call OTTO to complain and see if we could get a refund on our dinner check.

I spoke with a manager at OTTO who handled the situation coolly, offering to compensate me and my guest with gift certificates to the restaurant, which they would put in the mail right away. The next day I received a heavy package from OTTO, which included: two $50 gift certificates, two bottles of Champagne, two bottles of olive oil, and two copies of Mario Batali’s cookbook, Simple Italian Food. I couldn’t help but be impressed with their expedient handling of the incident.

A year passed and I still hadn’t used the gift certificates (or the olive oil or the cookbook), so I decided to treat a friend from high school to dinner. Enough time had passed that the idea of going back to OTTO no longer turned my stomach, and my guest didn’t seem to mind the reason behind the free meal. The food was terrific, as it had been the last time, and I even ordered the hazelnut gelato again. (It was that good.) I monitored my progress for the next few hours and came to the conclusion that OTTO hadn’t food poisoned me this time.

To this day, when someone mentions OTTO, Mario Batali, or any other notable chef’s NYC-based restaurant, I tell my story. I talk about the great meal, the projectile vomiting, and the “Sorry we poisoned you!” care package. It was a nice gesture for OTTO to cover the cost of my meal considering I didn’t really get to keep it for very long. But for the cost of $100 in gift cards and some olive oil, Champagne and cookbooks that were probably collecting dust in their supply closet, it made sense just to placate me, to make me feel like my complaint was heard and addressed. I have no idea if OTTO examined its processes like LPQ did, or if word got back to Mario Batali that some guy threw up because of his hazelnut gelato.

I typically like to wrap up these posts with a clever turn of phrase or tie the beginning paragraph back to the end. But in this case, I’m not sure I can. Is the moral of the story, “If you eat organic, beware of dead mice in your salads”? Or, “If you get food poisoning from a restaurant, make sure they give you a free copy of the chef’s cookbook”? No, I got it: Sometimes crappy stuff happens to us in restaurants and in life. If your worst problem is a dead mouse in your salad or a violent bout of vomiting, you’re probably doing pretty OK for yourself.

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Travelogue: Colorado, July 2011

Posted in Personal Essays, Travel on July 14, 2011| Leave a Comment »

For a long time, I’ve loved the idea of living in Colorado. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t a skier, I didn’t know anyone living there who could plug me into the social pipeline, or that I hadn’t ever actually been to Colorado.

One of my close college friends moved out Fort Collins a few years ago to pursue an advanced degree at Colorado State University, met a nice girl, and was getting married on July 3. He asked me in December if my girlfriend and I would like to come out for the wedding. Yes, we would.

We arrived in Denver the morning of the wedding, which gave us just enough time for a quick lunch on 16th Street Mall, a nap in our room at the Embassy Suites, and then we were off to the wedding, just across from our hotel at the Ellie Culkins Opera House. After a night of catching up and mingling, dinner and dancing, and a cake that Cake Boss would be proud of (it was deliciously heavy on the FAHN-dahnt), the first leg of our Colorado trip was in the books.

On Day 2, the Fourth of July, we checked out the Cherry Creek Arts Festival, a 15-minute drive from our Downtown Denver (a.k.a. LoDo). The event was terrific. Artists came from all over the U.S. for the event to display and sell their work. Prices ranged from $40 for a ceramic tea cup into the thousands for some of the larger framed paintings and photos. One piece grabbed my attention right away: a colorful wooden statue by Jef Raasch, carved and painted in the shape of a life-sized human, but whose body parts were made of animals—meaning its chin was the face of a squirrel and its left butt cheek was a turtle and its hamstring was an owl.

My favorite booth featured a collection of clocks, key hangers, and shelves by Jim Rosenau made out of similar-themed hardcover books on the same subject (e.g. cooking, or writing). One shelf was built using two cookbooks stacked horizontally with a third cookbook sliced into a triangle wedge as the shelf bracket, and an egg beater poking through the middle of it (perfect to mount in your kitchen to hold, I guess, more cookbooks).

We were priced out of most of the artwork, but we had enough to buy a $3 bottle of water from one of the Pepsi “Hydration Stations.” Normally I’d wince at paying $3 for bottled water, especially when nearby bars were selling Rolling Rocks for $2, but each station’s proceeds went to a different cause, including a local high school’s music program. We happily contributed and hydrated.

Our Fourth of July evening activity was a concert at Red Rocks Ampitheatre in Morrison, Colorado. Toad the Wet Sprocket and Matisyahu were the opening acts before Blues Traveler, the headliner, who has played at Red Rocks every July 4th since 1994. (The next time you hear a ‘90s band on the radio and think, “What ever happened to those guys?” remember that fact.)

Tailgating is popular at Red Rocks, but we hadn’t come prepared. I walked around the parking lot to try to buy a couple of beers off some fellow tailgaters–I was willing to go as high as $6 for two cold ones. A friendly group of guys gladly handed me two chilled Miller Lites, free of charge. Colorado, you’re the best!

I’m not much of a concert guy, so I knew virtually nothing about Red Rocks going into the trip. Set against flat, pale red rocks and overlooking the city of Denver, the Ampitheatre is easily the best concert venue I’ve ever been to. And on July 4th, we were particularly spoiled by the view from the cheap seats: as the sky darkened, the fireworks across Denver started in waves, first a few puffs of red, white and blue, and later many blasts, big and small, throughout the city. I’m also not much of a fireworks guy, but that citywide spectacular blew me away.

The concert audience was a pretty standard, couples and groups of friends in their 20s, 30s and 40s, plus some families who showed up for the fireworks. As for concessions, my made-to-order burrito ($7) was surprisingly good. I drank an $8 local craft beer (16 oz) before downgrading to $7 Coors Lights (20 oz).

A group of friends sat to our left, dressed in Hulk Hogan-esque red, white and blue 80’s gear, including fake mutton chop sideburns, mustaches, and blonde mullets. To our right, a guy bargained with a group of stoners: “Who wants to trade me two seats in row 29 for one hit of pot…or I’ll just buy it.” I had heard the marijuana laws were pretty relaxed in Colorado…

The wedding and concert were enjoyable, but we were banking on Day 3 in Boulder to make or break our trip. We left around 10 am and drove 35 minutes north of Denver to Boulder, and beelined for University Bicycles, a bike rental shop recommended in our travel guide. For $15 apiece, we rented two really nice bikes for four hours—my girlfriend got a Specialized and I got a Cannondale. In a couple of hours, we did most of the scenic and physically challenging 16-mile loop around Boulder—I’ve never seen a city with so many parks! We made a quick stop at a nearby church so my girlfriend could do a couple of laps around their labyrinth, then locked up our bikes and went to The Kitchen for lunch, just as the rain started. We sat down just after 3, an awkward time for most restaurants, so we were only able to choose from their “Community Hour” menu. We picked on hummus and mac and cheese, nursed local beers, and mulled over our plans for the rest of the day. (We even had a tiny argument over moving to Boulder; I, of course, was ready to move immediately; my girlfriend suggested that one of us have a job lined up in Boulder first.)

After lunch, we did a little window shopping on Pearl St. Mall, Boulder’s main shopping drag, before heading home to meet up with my now married friend and his new wife for some drinks and tapas before they left for their Hawaiian honeymoon the next morning. Always welcoming an insider’s look at a city, we accompanied them to Linger, the latest trendy restaurant in Denver, which was converted from a mortuary.

The new owners manipulated the large neon sign atop the building, formerly “Olinger Mortuaries,” to read “Linger Eatuaries.” I was expecting a ghoulish theme: cocktails named Witch’s Brew and dishes like Spooky Spaghetti. But it was surprisingly polished inside. The only remnants I noticed from the former morgue were the dinner tables, flat glass placed on top of rolling metal cylinders I’d guess were once used to slide corpses back and forth; and brown glass water pitchers, which ostensibly were meant to resemble old embalming fluid bottles. The menu was separated by continent, featuring three or four dishes from each of Asia, North America, Europe, etc. The food was tasty, though it seemed as if their global menu was an afterthought: I assumed most people were coming for the décor and the atmosphere, not the cuisine.

For Day 3, we had planned a trip to Fort Collins to take a tour of the New Belgium brewery. I’ve had their  Fat Tire Amber Ale a few times while visiting relatives in Arizona and Las Vegas, but had never seen it sold in New York (rookie mistake: calling it “Flat Tire,” which I did several times when I first discovered it). But after checking the New Belgium website, we found out their tours were booked for a month solid.

Plan B was a second trip to Boulder, this time hiking up the Flatirons in Chautauqua Park. The woman working behind the desk at the Ranger Station mapped out a couple of trails for us and lent me a used water bottle from a box labeled “Clean Water Bottles”—a woman who worked there regularly brought these home to wash in her dishwasher. (Note: I would never agree to drink from a used water bottle in a visitor’s center in New York City, but in Colorado, it was copacetic.)

The hike was challenging but worth the view at the top. Along the way we came across serious hikers with those little backpack-straw contraptions (the hiker’s answer to the beer helmet), families, and lots of dogs. When I struggled slightly on the rock scrambles or particularly steep sections of the climb, I would talk myself into picking up the pace: Dogs and children are doing this trail. Man up. When that didn’t work, I blamed the altitude. I always forget that the difficulty ratio of hiking uphill versus downhill isn’t like Chutes & Ladders. Each step of a downhill hike is deliberate and soft, like sneaking in after curfew.

With New Belgium struck from our agenda, we were still feeling like a cold beer after our hike so we Yelped a list of local breweries and Twisted Pine Brewing Company came up. We recognized the name from Linger’s beer list the night before, and sought out its headquarters, which turned out to be an easy-to-miss building in an industrial park a mile and a half off Pearl Street. After perusing the seasonal beer list, we decided on a grilled cheese sampler: four sandwich halves (different cheeses on each) and four 5 oz. beer samples ($8 total).

Twisted Pine looks like a small operation from the outside, but it’s actually been brewing since 1995. And oddly enough, its owner, Gordon Knight, started brewing after he acquired some of New Belgium’s original equipment. The brewing is done on site, but they don’t give tours (we asked)—though if you look right when you come out of the restrooms, you can see the brewers working. Twisted Pine, according to their site, is now being sold in Colorado, Texas, and Louisiana. So while I’ll probably have a tough time finding it in New York City, their Blueberry Blonde was the perfect summer afternoon beer. After lunch we made a quick trip back to Pearl Street to pick up souvenirs at Jackalope and Company and then headed back to the hotel.

For our last night in Denver, my girlfriend arranged to have dinner and drinks with some family friends she knew from back East who had moved to Colorado recently. But we had a little time to kill in between, so we stopped in at the hotel’s “manager’s reception,” a free happy hour for hotel guests. It was also a chance to watch the Shriners kick back a little. One hotel staffer told us that about 15,000 of these Shriners—an international “fraternity based on fun, fellowship and the Masonic principles of brotherly love, relief and truth”—were in Denver for their 137th Imperial Council Session, which explained all the white-haired gentlemen in the tall maroon hats. Much like the altitude, the preponderance of Shriners became an incidental scapegoat for any snag in our own plans, such as a minor traffic jam. (On several occasions, I found myself angrily muttering, teeth gritted: I swear to God, if I see one more Shriner… Still, based on their gumption at the manager’s reception, it seemed like they were all about having a good time, which made me wonder what the hell they were doing in the Denver Convention Center six hours a day for four days straight.)

When I say that Colorado was exactly what I expected, it sounds like an insult, but that’s not how I mean it. Perhaps instead, I should say it was every bit as good as I thought it would be. I don’t know how likely it is that we’ll move to Colorado any time soon—though our newly married friends gave us the hard sell—but I’m already hatching a plan to visit again: if I become a Shriner, odds are they’ll be back in Denver some time in the next 50 years. Now all I need is a fancy hat.

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I Know A Guy

Posted in Personal Essays, tagged , , , , , on June 28, 2011| 2 Comments »

At a party last Friday night, I overheard a group of women talking about the costs of getting their hair done professionally. Just a cut can cost as much as $75; a cut and coloring runs into the hundreds. (I had little to add to this conversation; I typically pay about $14 for my haircuts.)

One woman mentioned that a friend of hers is a hair stylist and gives her a great discount—saving her about 25% after tip—which drew oohs and aahs from the other women. We got to talking about other professions we wish our friends and family worked in that would save us a lot of time, money, and frustration. Aside from hair stylists, here are some others we came up with. (Note: I didn’t include actors or rock stars or professional athletes. That’s a little greedy—it’s like using one of your three genie wishes to ask for a million more wishes.)

Police Officer. Fortunately, my only run-ins with the cops have come when I’ve been pulled over. I always used to carry the PBA card—that’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association—my uncle had given me (he’s now retired NYPD), and typically other policemen were willing to give the professional courtesy of letting me off with a warning…but not always. Once, in college, I was pulled over for speeding down a residential street in Beacon, New York. When the officer handed me the ticket for “52 in a 30,” he grinned and said, “Your uncle will know what to do with this.”

Bartenders and Servers. In my experience, if a food or drink server invites you to stop by their bar or restaurant while they’re working, you’re going to get hooked up. I’m content to score a couple of free rounds of drinks and maybe one or two extra appetizers with dinner. I always tip generously in these situations, and I don’t just show up if I’m not 100% positive they’re working that night. (Nothing’s worse than trying to get free drinks by dropping a bartender’s name on her night off.)

Doctors and Lawyers. Contrary to the plot of My Cousin Vinny, it’s not likely that your inexperienced lawyer cousin knows just enough about the legal system to hilariously help you beat a bogus murder wrap. Also: Don’t ask your corporate lawyer friend to help you fight a parking ticket, and don’t ask your friend’s dad who’s a neurosurgeon to look at your rash. If you’re lucky, they’ll recommend someone they know personally who can help you (and it probably won’t be free).

Accountant. My uncle has been doing my taxes for years and he’s great about it. I send him my paperwork as soon as I get it so he can file it when he has some time between actual paying customers. Just remember: you’re putting a lot of trust in this person to file your taxes correctly and on time, and you have to be comfortable with the fact that they’ll know how much money you make.

Plumber, Electrician, or Contractor. For a generation of renters like myself—my super does everything but change light bulbs—it can be a tough transition when we start to become homeowners. Knowing a Mr. Fix-It makes a huge difference, especially if they have lots of experience. In exchange for the free or discounted services, always offer him a cold drink (water’s good; beer’s better).

Media Professional. Basically this covers anyone who’s got access to really good free stuff: tickets to concerts and sporting events, dinners at the best restaurants in town, product samples, plus any good celebrity stories.

Computer Guy. My friend Gil knows his stuff; he used to work the computer counter at Best Buy in the days before Geek Squad stepped in. With his help—including several virus exorcisms—my Dell PC lasted nine years. Of course there’s no warranty when a buddy helps you out, so if you don’t trust him to open up your computer, poke and prod with a screwdriver, and still be able to put it back together, don’t ask him for free help. (For the record, Gil was handsomely rewarded with a $5 or under shopping spree at 7-Eleven.)

Mechanic. On Seinfeld, George once quipped about mechanics: “Of course their tryin’ to screw ya. No one knows what they’re talkin’ about! It’s like, Oh, seems you need a new Johnson rod. Oh! Yeah! Johnson rod! Well, get me one of those!” (Dane Cook has a similar riff.) Few situations make me feel more helpless than explaining my car trouble to a mechanic, knowing I have to trust him to fix it without ripping me off. (It’s like looking at a Magic Eye picture with someone who sees the spaceship and you don’t.) A friendly mechanic will probably still make you pay for parts, but should give you a break on labor costs.

Try not to overstep the bounds of a personal relationship just to get a discount. And when cashing in on a favor, make sure you’re not too many degrees separated from the favor-doer. Below is a cautionary aside—which is becoming a theme of this blog—about a time when I needed a car repair and a family member “knew a guy” who was supposed to help me out:

During college I dinged up the right fender on my ’86 LeBaron on a guard rail. My uncle (different uncle, not the cop) told me he knew a guy who could fix the damage at a fraction of what it would cost at a body shop. I agreed to drive into Coney Island to meet The Guy at the address my uncle provided. When I arrived, there was no body shop or garage or even a house. It was just a random street with an elementary school taking up most of the block.

The Guy showed up late and immediately quoted me $100 more than the price my uncle gave me. I found a pay phone and explained the situation to my uncle. He called The Guy’s cell, screamed at him for a few minutes, after which The Guy agreed to the original price. (I later found out that conversation ended with my uncle saying, “LOSE MY NUMBER!”) With both our cars pulled over to the side of the street, he installed the used fender I’d bought at a junk yard, leaving the old fender sitting on the sidewalk outside of the school.

When it came time to pay, I didn’t have much cash—the situation seemed sketchy from the start, so I figured I wouldn’t carry hundreds of dollars on me just in case The Guy had other ideas. His 15-year-old son escorted me to the nearest ATM. (Despite the awkwardness of the situation, we made decent small talk.) When I returned and paid The Guy, he looked me in the eye, his son watching, and said, “You know, I do accept tips.” I was still fuming from his earlier bait-and-switch and didn’t want to involve my uncle again. I made the executive decision not to tip him. I walked quickly to my LeBaron, started it, and drove off.

I wasn’t able to chronicle my negative experience with The Guy on Yelp, but if I had, it might have gone something like: “One star. Prices higher than advertised. Questionable business practices. Does accept tips.”

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