The Hipster Bar, Bonsai Kittens
Thursday night in town (Gym Friday Morning) - JR. wants to show me a pop-up hipster cocktail bar beneath *****, classic, a back-alley entrance, in a sub-basement 3 stories deep, windowless hole that seats about 20 people, dark but a good ambience, they know him because he orders fancy overpriced "Mocktails", or to put it more bluntly they caught his name because he's the "Shirley Temple" guy.
A little leatherette cocktail book with a list of cocktails, their own "patented" mixologies, the smoked-cedar-plank old fashioned, infused liquors, vinegars, specialty bitters, they've 2 bartenders/servers, classic hipster types with long beards, hair tied back, "in the fashion", 1 DJ, they can't keep up, it's that classic bumble-fuck Kootenay service...
Have our drinks, check out the crowd, JR. chats up the bartenders, then on to a more classic old-school Nelson bar, where JR. orders a real drink and somehow gets inebriated and we're talking about nonsense, par usual, when he mentions the "Bonsai Kittens", an internet thing when the internet was still young and interesting, and it turns out that he believed it, thought it was horribly cruel, and I have to break it to him, it was, like so much of the internet, a complete and utter hoax, merely somebody practicing their photoshop skills, and he didn't know, and I'm thinking who doesn't fact check this stuff?
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- Category: Restaurants & Cafes
Mont Blanc, Cross, etc
Heading to work Friday and I come across the first garage sale of the weekend, just setting up. A box of pens, I pick through them:
6 Pens, 1 Mont Blanc, 4 Cross, 1 Schaeffer. "How Much?"... "A dollar?". I give him $10, it's all I have, there are limits to how badly I can take advantage of somebody.
Saturday morning, the promise of Friday's hit fresh in my glove-box, off early, there are a variety of sales to be hit. Tools, tools, some I need, but no place to store, and so I pass, some I need and I can't pass up on, 2 Dremel's for $6.00, 5 flashlights/headlamps, $10.00, an air-pistol, $10.00 - this for a colleague at work whom I have a business proposition for...
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- Category: Found
Chase PaymentTech
At the restaurant this is what we use to process debit and credit transactions.
Sometimes it works.
Lately it hasn't been.
And the owner, calling technical support, 2, 3 times a day, an hour or more a call before they tell us the problem is "fixed".
It never is. The Technical agents helping us with the issue, clearly clueless, every call begins the same way, asking for Merchant ID, terminal ID, despite having provided all this information on file from not even an hour before. The owner refuses to get irate. I'm not bound by any such scruples and having tired of turning away what few customers we have with a "cash only" policy (because we can't process debit/credit) - I'm getting really pissed off.
These people, you have to work to give them money, you should feel grateful they've lowered themselves to collecting the $3,000 - $4,000 a month they collect in merchant fees, really, they're better than this, they're doing US a favor providing this "service", ... every successive CSR providing conflicting suggestions to the one previous...
I'm listening to it, not having a working debit/credit machine fucks up your day big time, and - when it works, briefly, only to have the whole boondoggle begin again a few transactions later...steam is jetting out my ears, there's a time to demand escalations and we're overdue, we're only half busy but if we were busy we'd be right fucked...
It reminds me of Shaw Cable, the same "commitment to customer service", and I'm lobbying for a cash machine in the restaurant, instead of paying for an unreliable "Chase Paymentech" we can be paid for providing a reliable service...
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- Category: Rants
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