Customer service and tipping

 I met Matt in his hybrid Cafe, when a customer stormed out and Matt exclaimed: Everyone is crazy. What happened to people why is everyone crazy?. A customer had picked up something to drink and thrown the change on the counter. Matt told me it felt mean but he made this about 19 year old pick up the change and place it properly on the little dish.

We talked about customer service for a long time. I had spent many summers working in clothing stores as a student. The customer was always king. I had picked clothing stores because I liked interacting with people. The commission was great and I made more than I would have in a student research position. We didn't idle around. On quiet days we folded, shelved and made everything look neat. I was trained that even if a customer spent two hours trying something and buying nothing, that customer if treated well, will come back to buy something. Despite the fact that it was minimum pay and heavily customer oriented we obviously never got tipped.

Many years later during caregiving there were stretches with my father where food delivery was the only option, to get any cooked meal into both of us, especially during covid. The meds was making him loopy and aggressivethe more food i got into him, the more lucid he became. I would order and after a few snafus decided to wait outside. Cranky exhausted beyond physical endurance I still managed to be friendly.

I was hustled and scammed by the delivery guys. There was no compassion or understanding. The proverbial last straw. I was lied to. I had paid the delivery and service charge and considering that regular customers like me were keeping restaurants above water, I expect customer service. Delivery guys would show up three hours late with cold food. They would ignore instructions and wake my father. They would walk into wrong buildings. If I paid a certain amount they would try to weasel an extra ten out of me by telling me that the receipt was wrong.

One in particular saw that I was injured (happened while care giving) and wouldn't drive into the driveway but wait for me to limp toward him. Why? So when I switched to COD he could give me back the wrong amount where it was not well lit. Another delivered something worth 20 showed me some number in a foreign language and demanded a forty dollar tip pretending not to speak English. Another guy told me that he was earning three bucks an hour and had to pay fuel costs. Restaurants who offered a lunch time discount ended up with deliveries past five so that the driver would scoop the difference. The delivery company handled all of this so that restaurants weren't even aware this was happening.

That there was a senior going hungry; no one cared about.

When I asked a really nice guy he told me that they get minimum but a bonus for number of deliveries per hour. Any fuel or vehicle cost was carried by the company. The drivers had gotten public support by lying and telling sobstories. The entitlement was unbelievable. In dire circumstances I was forced to tip and feel sorry for them, but what about me?

There was a problem. The company wasn't paying them their tips. They got successfully sued. (I'll post the article again when I find it), but in the interim the customer got the brunt of that by being asked to triple tip. The customer has no responsibility about how a company treats their employees.

I'm still angry and my support has changed. I thought of my customer service days. I would have never treated a customer that way. In a restaurant if a waiter kept screwing up an order or provided bad service he would have gotten the 10 percent. But a waiter is cleaning tables and actually doing much more than bringing a bag from a to b. And when a senior's life depends on it? No tolerance.

Kawaii Art

 Art and fashion often reflect or react to current socioeconomic or political events. The Japanese do this particularly well. As a child I preferred anime to western cartoons. As an adult Japanese video games or animated movies dealt with difficult topics on a much deeper, progressive and futuristic way.

One of these genres is Kawaii. Japanese for cute.

Im not sure but im guessing that part of this self expression is a longing for childhood. And to be honest, I envy the kids (under 20) for their access to toys that my generation did not have. I admire their ease with which they tell society that walking around with iconic childhood blushes on a key chain is cool and socially acceptable.

The 1950s were the golden age of science fiction. In part due to the global post war economic depression. Children in particular needed superheroes to rescue the world and let them know that the world will improve.

By the time I was a teen Greenpeace had already rescued the whales. Pesticides had been banned for a while, there was a positive outlook. Goths took themselves too seriously hippies and punks were long gone in terms of trendiness.

The Japanese are technologically advanced and ahead of us. And when they do something especially in art its next level as the kids say.

There is nothing new about Harajuku girls. The creativity of making themselves look like dolls is incredible. For the last decade or so I've started seeing the prince look, inspired by anime characters translated into real life.

Then there is Kawaii 3D nail art. The image below is done with molding paste and acrylic gel. I've looked into Acrylic embedding or epoxy resin years ago, but the materials are very toxic. To create this miniature art work on something as transitory as a nail though? I've seen quite a few that are very Kawaii kitsch with prefabricated charms as they're called, but also galaxies, planets where the nail polish is cured and magnetized (whatever that means). 

Spouse creates bead jewelry and was thinking about embedding in resin, which neither one of us has tried. The fish tank ring is made that way. The second ring is glass.

Very playful and creative. The embedded pendants we've seen are usually pressed flowers that seem outdated to me. Im not interested in creating small pieces but am amazed at this wearable art.

Healthy food for less

 

Yesterday I needed to pick up tomatoes and parsley for a dish I am making. (Spouse and I take turns.) While I joke about my cooking, the dishes I know how to make are quite good.

An unexpected and pleasant surprise happened in the health food store. I have been seeing large brown bags on a shelf without rhyme or reason in various stores and assumed it's for food drives.

In the past some of the big stores have a display bag, it's 10 or 20 dollars, they are usually filled with non-perishables, and allegedly given to food banks. I say allegedly because while I like to help, selling contents at regular price to give to a food bank instead of matching it or selling it at cost, doesn't seem charitable.

When grocery stores have a good idea, I wish they would keep it. As a graduate student, my budget was tight, but I wanted to eat healthy. Another student told me that a high end grocery store had an incredible fruit and produce sale before every long weekend. How good can it be I thought? Probably damaged product. Well. This was a high end store. The freshest berries imaginable, shrimp packages for 25cents each. I learned how to freeze the berries and make sugar free compotte for my oatmeal yoghurt breakfast. Every month practically free exotic fruit like physalis or passion fruit.

When covid then two wars increased food prices, I was happy to see health food stores do this. I peeked inside the bag, saw 7 vine ripened tomatoes and parsley. A container of strawberries, some nectarines, ten apples, perfect carrots. Normal quality. For three bucks. Why I asked one of the staff. Customer appreciation, I was told. When they buy surplus they reduce it before it goes bad. First time I bought one.

Great idea.

Great art should make you happy.

 

Banksy

There is a common and dangerous misconception that great art requires suffering.

It creates a skewed and imbalanced perception of art, romanticizes suffering, trauma and is dangerous and yet the myth persists.

This is not to say that it doesn't help cope with suffering, on the contrary. It is therapeutic and it can and does heal. Obviously mental stability is individual as is the art one creates. I personally am at my most productive when I'm in a good mood, which I generally am by nature.

At art school there was a group of students that were the more "artistic" types, they self expressed, were performative, created art that was provocative and disturbing. They put on airs and were very dramatic. Many did drugs as part of their artistic lifestyle, as they assumed they had to. I always thought of Basquiat when I saw them and stayed away. Basquiat was very gifted, co-created the neo-expressionism movement, one of the first to bring urban art and graffiti into modern art. He ended up hating addicts. The artist as tortured soul persists since then, but in the end becomes a victim of their own self promoting making.

I have a good friend who does not have any creativity of any kind. I focused on science, so there was little left over for art supplies. The ones I bought were geared toward the discipline I was interested in, but buying a complete set of acrylics, oils, inks, brushes and everything else in the professional grade materials list wasn't in the budget. I mentioned it to my friend, whose opinion I valued. Rather than help me come up with a solution she lectured me that Picasso created his best work during his blue period and painted on newspaper, because he was suffering. (He was very young and grieving. Hardly his best work.) This was the nonsense she had read somewhere and believed.

The New York art scene is notorious for propagating the myth, celebrating misery and tragedy, especially in conceptual modern art. I have yet to see an exhibit that celebrates everything we did achieve; the animals we brought back from the brink of extinction, the environments we did save; the positive work humans did accomplish especially now.

Art needs to uplift in bad times.

Rocky, Grace and a wonderful movie

 

Rocky by unknown posted by Weir

Spoilers: This post assumes you have watched it

Over the weekend I watched Project hail Mary with Grace and Rocky. Among many other themes it's a movie about the importance of friendship.

The type of friendship that crosses geographic location and cultural differences. I have not read the book, which probably explains more than could fit into a movie. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. It's wonderful and uplifting.

There's humor throughout. One really cares about both characters and it focuses on empathy and compassion of two different species that despite their incredible differences learn to deeply care about eachother.

I was surprised at how much emotion it evoked. Everyone teared up at the sacrifices they made and were willing to make for eachother. I also enjoyed that rocky initiated the effort to communicate. Initially by imitating until they both had rudimentary simple speech. The effort Rocky put in to communicate and invent an environment that made a human comfortable are incredible.

Yet. Both species had common reference points; they're social, have mates, children and culture. A foundation that allows them to relate and communicate. It's clear that Eridians are much more emotionally intelligent because they had to be due to their regenerative sleep habits.

I won't get into the science except that there are some great ideas that aren't plausible. Astrophages are based on Bacteriophages which do exist. I don't see how a species can travel interstellarly  without discovering radiation or relativity. But it moves the story forward.

The scene where the ships tango in the beginning was hilarious. Overall a wonderful movie that reminds us about what compassion and empathy actually mean.

Fun with image generators

There's a previous post related to this one, I posted two in one day.

Spouse and I  were amusing ourselves with image generators.

Spouse went first:

Well. The cats had kittens and the hands are interesting. I went next

Too many cats. No room on the couch.

Oh dear Lord...

Spouse got freaked out by the mutated cats and left the room?

The future of technology?

 An increasing concern of mine is coming to fruition. 30% of the world market are invested in AI and its assistants. When I quickly try to research something I sometimes get a garbled mess that contradicts itself from one paragraph to the next. They are overvalued.

I could not recall who had written Starship Troopers and searching it told me that it was Hubbard rather than Heinlein. Then another search where the search engine (I'll call it SE instead of AI), confused an advertisement with actual information and combined the two. 

There was a student in university who supported herself by writing three romance novels per year. Hardly literature and she used the contractual template provided; a heroine who was average looking, a stunning male who wooed her and they lived happily ever after. It paid for her tuition. The recent AI written horror story was pulled off the market.

I love science fiction, but when I tried to watch Gemini man with will Smith. The cgi of his younger self was so poorly done it was unwatchable. Actors are not replaceable.

Recently big companies won what I expect is the first of many legal claims.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/16/merriam-webster-openai-encyclopedia-brittanica-lawsuit/

Another concern is if this story is actually true and if the players are all artificial, then LLMs are simply copying all of human history mixing it up with science fiction dystopia and creating a civilization that will become post-apocalyptic simply because there arent enough published utopias.

https://www.spacemolt.com/news/700-agents

Technology is supposed to be progressive, not rehash ancient history.

I think that the big tech company that will win is the one that brings a useful assistant on the market.