Wrong Aid

As I'm rushing around this afternoon I had to quickly update the site to share with you one of the most astoundingly bad customer service experiences I've ever had at (surprise, surprise) Rite Aid. And don't think that I do not fully understand what I'm saying when I say that this was one of my worst customer service moments in New York City. I say that knowing full well exactly how much weight that carries.

I generally avoid the Rite Aid like the plague. After they hung up on my doctor after arguing with her while trying to call in a prescription for me and listening to the woman behind the counter repeatedly talk about the evils of homosexuality while swearing like a sailor I decided that I would only go there in the direst of circumstances. Such circumstances presented themselves to me this afternoon as I rushed about preparing for my trip. I needed razor blades, and this was my best and quickest option.

After having to get someone to unlock the blades from the shelf so that I could take them I waited in line where a lovely lady (we'll call her Tiffany [because that was her name]) called me up. "Hey, sweetie," she said. It is always amusing when someone in their late teens or early twenties calls people older than them sweetie. In my mind you need to be at least double someone's age to be given license to call them sweetie but I wasn't going to argue this point.

After She rung my stuff up and I got out my card she took out her cell phone, looked at the time and said, "Why the hell is ime is moving so slow! I want to get the f@#! out of here!" Then she looked at me and said, "Debit or credit, honey?"

"Uh, debit."

It was amusing that her manager was standing about ten feet away during this exchange. I'm sure he didn't hear her but it just goes to show you what kind of respect is apparently generated in the culture of Rite Aid. I briefly considered writing a letter to Rite Aid to inform them about why I don't shop there citing this and my past experience as examples. Then I figured that I just didn't have the time and this location is a lost cause. If I thought there was anything worth saving there maybe I'd write. But why waste the energy for something not worth saving in the first place?

I Hate The Mini Cooper
With apologies to my buddy Steve.

I had to rent a car for the day yesterday for work. I have a membership to Zipcar and the good thing about getting a car on a weekday is: 1) All the cars are drastically reduced in price, and 2) all the cars are the same price, regardless of their make or model. Knowing this I perused the available cars and decided to go with a Mini Cooper because it looks cool and I know my friend Steve loves his.

After arriving at the garage, a gentleman pulled the car around for me. When I got in it seemed fine. I drove it off and after a few minutes wanted to roll up the window. A simple task, you say? Maybe you're thinking of every other car ever invented. In the Mini Cooper it was a five minute ordeal of looking around and flipping every switch imaginable. The standard on-door control for the windows did not exist.

I get Zipcars or rent cars quite frequently and I'm used to fumbling around to find a few controls but generally the unwritten code of automobile layout is followed and it doesn't take more than a few seconds. Generally it doesn't require me to spend multiple minutes and actually cause me to unleash a primal scream of rage before I locate it. If you were near me on the George Washington Bridge yesterday you will know that I am not exaggerating, especially since my windows were rolled down.





The car defies every ingrained bit of knowledge you have about how a car is layed out. It puts everything in a different place. After a while it becomes apparent that most of the changes were done just to be different. The Mini Cooper taunts you, seeming to say, "Oh, well in a car you may look there for the volume knob on the stereo, but you aren't driving a car, this is a Mini Cooper." Actually, I'm surprised they didn't use that snobby, self righteous tone in their advertising campaigns, because it seems obvious that that's what they're going for in their design.

After finally rolling up my window I had to try to figure out hot to turn up the volume on the radio. Again, not where you would think. It wasn't on the actual radio itself, over the left, like on every other radio you've ever seen in your life. Instead it was dead center, way underneath the radio.

Sure, I bet after you drive this car for a day or two this all comes rather naturally. However, having this as a rental car should be illegal. It's exceedingly dangerous to have to fumble around, in traffic, for common controls all the while trying to drive somewhere you've never been before (which should probably be illegal too).

After my day at work I had to do something which, on the surface, seemed like it was going to be easy. I had to start the car up and drive home.





However, the "key" for the Mini Cooper is a goofy looking saucer that you have to insert into a slot beside the radio. Next to the slot is a Start/Stop button for the engine. I inserted the key and pressed the start button. Nothing. I tried again. Nothing. I tried holding the button down. Nothing. I tried this about ten or twelve more times in every way I could think of. Nothing. After a few minutes I opened the glove compartment and started reading the owner's manual. That's right, I had to read the car's manual to figure out how to turn it on. After leafing through the car's manual (something I've never had to do in my life) I realized that apparently the car will not start if you don't have the brake depressed. I then realized that I normally have the brake depressed in a car when I'm turning the key, but the strange experience with this car threw me out of my element so much that I was fixated on this new system and not doing what normally comes instinctively in any other car I've ever driven.

On my drive home, as I fumed, I realized what was so awful about this experience: this must be what it feels like to be eighty years old. This must be what it feels like to be completely surrounded by technology you don't understand or know how to use. It's frustrating, frightening and extremely depressing. I wondered if I was the character in some sort of story that exposes me to my own prejudices against the elderly and their lack of technological know-how. And now I must vow to never be frustrated with anyone who is struggling to understand technology. I have walked a mile in their shoes and I know how it feels. I will be sure to always treat them with honor, respect and understanding from this day on!

Thanks, Mini Cooper. I guess.

Sapping My Good Will

Every so often Jen and I accumulate a bunch of stuff that we need to get rid of. I feel tremendously guilty about throwing things away so I try to donate or reuse as much as I possibly can. Yesterday I brought a giant bag full of books to The Strand to sell them. I didn't really care about getting any money, I just needed to get them out of our apartment.

It was a fairly awful experience. I lugged the bag downtown filled with as many books as I could carry. When I got there the I walked up to the book-selling counter with my bag where I was instructed to go outside and wait in line behind a yellow line spray painted on the sidewalk. When it was my turn I went inside where a silent man behind a computer went through my books and sorted them into the pile of books they would buy and the pile of books that I would have to carry back home. Sadly the piles of books were exactly equal in height. I was in the area yesterday anyway but even so it was hardly with the ten dollars in profit I made for the time and effort involved in the process. Previously I asked if they'd just take the books as a donation but they refused (odd) and said they only bought books. If I could only lose the inability I have to throw away books it would be so much easier.

I've never cared for the Strand. It's a fine book store, I guess, but I just hate being there. It's poorly organized, extremely claustrophobic, and filled with pretentious jerk offs carrying their The Strand: 18 Miles of Books tote bags. Just a look at this portion of their website gives you a clear indication of the kind of person that shops at The Strand. So, like most places, it isn't the store that I dislike at all, I guess, it's just the people there. If there's one thing living in New York has reassured me of it's my dislike of people.

Today's mission was to get rid of a giant cart full of things we no longer need. A lot of it was items that have been upgraded or replaced from the wedding gifts we've received.





The cart was filled so high that I had to hold the rolled up carpet in place to keep the bag of salad bowls and glasses from falling the entire walk to Goodwill. Goodwill, much like every company that has a location in New York City, suffers from an abundance of apathy in its workforce. Like most chains or organizations that will provide you with excellent service and accommodations anywhere else in the country, in New York City this tends to devolve into a level of treatment and servicet that generally would be reserved for rabid dogs, not human beings. I like to call this the phenomenon the Duane Reade Principle.

When I got to Goodwill they looked at me and my cart of donated goods with an average level of disdain that I have learned not to take any offense to. A rotund gentleman came up to me and said, "Do you have a box or anything to put that all in?"

"Um, no. Sorry. Do I need one," I replied.

At this the guy rolled his head back and let out an audible sigh while scratching his neck with one hand and rubbing his forehead with another.

"They don't like us putting things in the bin all loose like that."

"Oh. Do you have a box I could have?"

"Are you leaving the cart too?" The man asked.

"Um, no. I would like to keep my cart please."

"Alright," he said, shaking his head. "Just put it in there."

"Okay," I responded as I quickly began unloading my cart into the giant blue donation bin. Most of the stuff was in bags. Bags I didn't intend on donating but I figured I would leave them there so that the chubby guy didn't have a coronary.

After dropping stuff off at Goodwill I inevitably feel like crap. Mostly because the staff there treats me like I've walked into their home off the street expressly to pee on their carpet before I steal some of their cake and leave. I always expect to feel good. Two good things happen: 1) I donate useful things to people who genuinely need it and 2) I get rid of clutter from my apartment that makes my apartment a nicer place to be.

Don't get me wrong, I don't expect fanfare and praise from the staff. I'm not expecting maidens to come out from the back room and feed me grapes while fanning me with olive branches. I'm not expecting the president to come out and have his photo taken with me while shaking the hand of the world's greatest philanthropist. I don't expect lepers to crowd me just for the hopes of a single curing touch. I just expect not to feel like I've caused anyone the world's greatest headache by giving them my stuff. It was probably $250 to $400 worth of stuff (must to Jen's regret I did not get a receipt) that I'm giving to them that is perfectly useful, most of it brand new and never used.

Thankfully there was no computer recycling involved in the past 24 hours. That is always an exercise that makes me feel even more horrible. The worst part being that most "recycled" computers just end up going into Chinese landfills instead of American landfills.

Oh well. I guess I'll continue to do what I'm doing. Much like the simple act of buying toilet paper at your local New York City Rite Aid makes you feel like a giant piece of manure, donating things to the needy also fills your heart with sadness. The only thing that you need remember to make it worthwhile is that it is hopefully worth it.

With the toilet paper it almost always is.

Tour de France Commercial Recap, Week 2
It's not about the bike(s).

Ah, another week of cycling draws to a close. As the riders of the Tour de France struggled up the first Alpine stage in Italy this morning I was left to reflect on another week of excessively repetitive television commercials. Here's the latest batch:

1.) Cash 4 Gold



This ad strikes me as the second most depressing of all the ads. It basically reaches out to those people up at 8AM watching European cycling on a Tuesday morning and says, "Hey, you! Yeah, you, the one that's unemployed and sad and is watching this even though you don't particularly have any interest in cycling! Listen up! Remember that guy that you married a few years ago before the divorce? The one that put you off relationships for the rest of your life? Why don't you sell us the ring he gave you? We'll pay you one tenth of what it's worth so we can smelt it down and sell it for its actual value! We'll send you cash int he mail! What do you say?"

2.) H2O Mop



This isn't actually a 30 second commercial but rather it's a 30 minute commercial. Generally I catch the tail end of it before the tour starts. Sometimes the tail end of it consists of 29 minutes because the Versus program lineup likes to lie about when the Tour actually starts. It is very good at tricking you into either watching this ad or some bull riding. Either way you lose.

3.) DirectBuy



This one is my nomination for the most sad ad during this year's Tour. It features chubby husbands and wives with breast implants as they explain how they got all their amazing furniture for rock bottom prices. Just watch these guys talk for two seconds and you'll have them pigeonholed as "THAT GUY!" You know the guy. I don't know if it's possible to put the guys' personalities into words, you really have to listen to them to understand. "That guy" is under the impression that the awesome deal he got on that dining room table is going to impress his friends. He's also under the impression that it makes his wall-to-wall carpeted home in Wisconsin look exactly like a room in a cozy village in the hills of Tuscany. That guy is wrong on both counts.

4.) Bacardi Mojito



This is a pretty typical commercial. It features a ton of hot girls shaking their hips and an exceedingly chumpy bartender mixing up some mojitos. While the bartender mixes the mojitos the girls all shake their butts and the guys stay happy because of the butt shaking. When the bartender suddenly stops making mojitos everyone stops and looks lost. They are confused and seem to not know what to do with the rest of their lives. At that point the bartender smirks and continues making mojitos and the party starts back up. The bartender has realized that he has powers greater than the average bartender. He is no bartender. He. Is. A. GOD!

He may be a god but I'd love to wipe that smirk off of his all-knowing, chumpy face.

5.) 9/11 Commemorative $20 Bill Ad



You know what, maybe this is the saddest ad. It's sad because it's extremely exploitative. It's sad because it brings up instant memories of sadness. And, perhaps the saddest part, is that there are people in the world who will purchase this thinking that it's not the tackiest thing that was ever created in the history of the world. The commercial tries really hard to sell this abomination.

Firstly, it claims that it is giant and it dwarfs the regular $20 bill. It then shows it in comparison to a regular $20 bill and it appears to be about 5% bigger. It seems like they should have just told us about how big it was because the visual proof only serves to contradict their claim.

Secondly, it shows how on one side it has the "standard" number 20 in all the corners to identify it as a $20 bill. Then on the flip side it shows that it has a 9 on one side and an 11 on the other, "The first time ever that two seperate numbers have been used to add up to the full $20 face value." That is probably technically true but I am not sure it's as great a thing as they make it out to be.

Thirdly, the commercial continually talk about how it is "Liberian legal tender currency." They use this phrase with a level of pride usually reserved for people who can truthfully say things such as, "I participated in the NASA moon landings," or "My father was Charlemagne." They forget that the phrase "Liberian legal tender currency" is more akin to "genuine 100% authentic plastic."

Tour de France Recap, Week 1
It's not about the bike(s).

After a solid week of racing concluded this morning I am reflecting on the first week of the Tour this year. As some of you may know I am a huge fan of the Tour de France. It's such an amazing time each year to wake up at 7:00AM to watch a sporting event. It's unusual at first to be watching a sporting event with your morning coffee and breakfast rather than in the evening with beer and Buffalo wings. Not that I ever really engage in the latter, but I have seen it done on TV. Oh, My Boys!

The Tour is televised in America on Versus, a television channel I wish that I never had to watch. Unfortunately for me it happens to be the exclusive network for the only two sports that I watch: Cycling and NHL Hockey. Yeah, I'm the one who watches those sports. So for three weeks every summer and a few nights a week during the fall, winter, and spring, I tune into Versus. For the remaining 92% of the year not occupied by either of those sports it is generally playing bass fishing, bull riding, deer hunting or some other sport that involves torturing or murdering animals. Also it plays WEC Wreckage which features humans torturing and murdering themselves which is a little more appropriate, I suppose.

A few years back Versus made the decision to add Al Trautwig into its mix of Tour de France commentators. Originally (well, originally for me) the lineup was much simpler: Phil Ligget, the wise old sage of bicycle riding who often refers to "the suitcase of courage"; Paul Sherwen, who is Phil's younger experienced former rider with great color commentary; and Bob Roll who is a madman that has frantic hand gestures and sometimes rides a bicycle in the nude and offers a much more twisted color commentary to counter the relative sanity of Paul Sherwen. At first, I was no fan of Al Trautwig. In fact I decided to start calling him Al Basshat, which at the time I thought was an extremely clever and cutting commentary on the lack of respect I had for the man and his function on the team combined with a brilliant twist on the phonetic breakdown of his last name. Eventually Trautwig grew on me during the Tour de France and as a commentator for the New York Rangers. So it was that I stripped him of my mark of shame and refrained from calling him Al Basshat, a testament to the respect he had earned with me.

This year I was surprised to see a newcomer to the Versus group: Craig Hummer. Hummer, for one reason or another, was brought in to replace Trautwig. Apart from having a very silly name, Hummer does not lend a heck of a lot to the group. His chief responsibility apart from moderating a group that really doesn't need any moderation, seems to be calling Bob Roll "Bobke" about a hundred times per telecast. Sometimes he calls him "Bobke" twice in the same sentence. There is never a time when he is speaking to Bob Roll where he does not throw in a "Bobke" at some point just in case the viewers were confused about who he was addressing or what the asinine nickname was that he insisted on calling him.

Versus spends a tremendous amount of time appealing to the dumbest portion of the American sports audience (that's quite a statement). I'm not terribly afraid of any of them seeing this and getting offended because I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of the people watching Versus's non Cycling coverage cannot read. Everything on the channel is about how awesome and macho men are and how painful all the sports they show are. Cycling does not have a great reputation as being badass. That's not to say that falling off a bicycle at 38 miles per hour, or climbing up the Alps, or riding over 2,000 miles through France is not difficult and grueling. It's just that they don't wear boots or cowboy hats when they're doing it. Instead they wear tight spandex and that makes macho men feel very uncomfortable.

Like all sporting events on television, commercials are high in quantity but low in quality and variety. Therefore you get very familiar with about a half dozen commercials played in heavy rotation. Last year we suffered through 648 viewings of the blue Scotch painters' tape commercial. This year here's the crop we're looking at:

1.) Macho, Macho Men



This is an extension of the incredibly lame website designed to "Take Back The Tour": http://www.takebackthetour.com/

All the text from the site is found on the commercial. The purpose is twofold: 1.) fool people into believing that cycling is SUPER HARDCORE and 2.) stick it to all the boneheads who were doping last year and make it clear that the cyclists involved this year are not going to stand for it! Not anymore! Especially since most of them are former dopers! Did we mention how hardcore cycling is?

Every interview with every rider and every team manager this year is about how awesome they are at making sure no one is doping. Boy is it going to be embarrassing when people start getting kicked out of the race this year!

2.) Brand New Start



This commercial is pretty meaningful (if you know who any of those people actually are, if you don't it's just confusing) and actually quite moving the first time you see it. Then you see it 65 more times before the end of the day's stage and you grow to hate it intensely. When I record shows on TiVo I sometimes forget to fast forward through the commercials. Every time I hear this guitar and vocal combination it sends a signal straight to my brain and my hand unconsciously snaps at the TiVo remote to hit the skip button. Luckily this is the one minute long version and the one that actually airs is only thirty seconds.

I'll grant you that all the guys in this commercial are disgraced former riders but somehow this still seems disrespectful to them to basically highlight how they're all dopers.

I'm also struck at how much the song reminds me of This is Our Country from that pickup truck commercial. I always expect this commercial to end with the line, "This is Our Country" which wouldn't make any sense but would either make you want to buy a Chevy (or Ford?) or just make you remember how much you dislike the music of John Mellencamp. Or is it just me?

3.) Armor All Commercial with Some guy!



Every so often Versus reminds you that you are traveling in uncharted waters. I don't own a pickup truck and I'd hazard a guess that I never will. I'll also hazard a guess that I don't know who the hell that guy is in this commercial. Everyone in this commercial is in awe of this guy so I'm going to guess he is famous. He's famous to people who would be watching Versus and to these yokels in the commercial so I'm going to assume he's achieved his fame by either wrestling antelope or racing some sort of vehicle (my money's on a tractor). I guess it doesn't matter because I am a horrible self-loathing hippie-type who lives in New York City and will most likely not need Armor All any time soon. And if I do move to an area which requires me to have a car I will use my past level of eagerness to attend to general automotive maintenance to assume I won't need Amor All then either.

4.) Saab Repetition



Question: What's worse than seeing a commercial ten times in an hour? Answer: Seeing a commercial that repeats itself three times, ten times in an hour! This is by far my least favorite commercial in the group. Last year (to the day actually) I wrote this article about how much I hated Saab's Born from Jets ad campaign. If I knew then what I know now I would have kept my big mouth shut and let them continue on with that line of ads. Saab, squeezes all of the fun out of the sponge of life. Saab, squeezes all of the fun out of the sponge of life. Saab, squeezes all of the fun out of the sponge of life.

5.) Video Professor (How to Buy and Sell on eBay)



This is advertised as a brand new product. I discovered eBay from my dad's friend in 1997 and I put anything about computers that I discovered over a decade ago from a baby boomer well out of the classification "New". Video Professor has been around forever, hawking his CD-ROMs to poor unfortunate people sad enough to spend money to learn from this guy. That being said I feel really bad for the Video Professor. My heart aches every time I see his commercial and hear him at the very end as he whimpers, "Try my product." If I send him a check for $10 do you think that would help? I really don't want to try his product, but I want to support him nonetheless.

Maybe I should put a PayPal donation button on my site for Video Professor. Poor guy.