2.25.2005
The Experiment...and stuff
It was around 3:30 a.m. when I sort of drained myself into bed this morning. Last night I (along with some friends) conducted an experiment. This experiment will, no doubt, break ground in the areas of customer service and human behavior. Without boring everyone with pages of data and complex analysis of variance calculations, allow me to summarize the findings of this experiment:Every time I or one of my colleagues walked up to the bartender at the Capri and asked for a pitcher of beer, she poured one for us. Every time. It seemed not to matter which variable we altered or how, we always got beer. Ordered while wearing a sweatshirt, got beer. Without sweatshirt…beer. Ordered in a falsetto voice and it was “here’s your beer, that’ll be three dollars.” Even when almost simultaneously asking for a bowl of peanuts, the beer was still provided. This result was proven to be repeatable to a high degree.
Just as an observation…I’m startled by the early age at which humans learn to deceive. Not that this is his first foray into deception, by any means, but my son, age 3, tried to transfer blame this morning. About farting. Sitting at the table, eating waffles, I smelled something rank. “What’s that I smell,” I asked. “Did you fart?” He smiled and denied having farted. Thinking for a moment, he said “maybe the garbage can farted.” So maybe he’s gotta learn to blame more likely candidates (at least forget about inanimate objects), but still, the whole process is there. Amazing.
You know what I really, really hate? Alright, maybe I don’t hate it but it surely does bother me. When I go to tune into NPR (which I do often) and lo and behold, guess what's on? The Splendid Table with Lynn Rossetto Kasper. I’m sure I spelled her name wrong, and I’m a little alarmed by the fact that I’m too lazy to go to www.splendidtable.org and find out how to spell her name correctly but I’m not too lazy to bitch. That’s sad. Still, though…that show irritates me. How can someone have 17 different types of salt?! Damn! And worse yet is that I find myself horribly unable to stop listening to it. Shit! And I never even wanted to know what shmaltz is, honest!
So here I am…horrible tap beer headache, owner of a garbage can alleged to have farted, trying to double-check my painstakingly-gathered beer ordering data, listening (almost against my will) to a woman rave (with more passion that most people have about any subject) about cultured butter.
This IS a perfect Duluth day.