Monday, July 20, 2009

flirting and cleavage

tips in the shoppe have been a little lower than norm in the past month or so. i blame it on summer break -- we have no after school rush. it's great to be mostly kid-free, but it also slows down the tip jar. i have recently come up with a master plan; a double attack strategy to coax out the dollars (or cents. i'll take cents. they add up.)

step one - cut a hole in a box. oh wait. no not that plan. step one - maximum cleavage. before i leave the house, i do the bend check. since i do a lot of leaning over and bending in the shop, i try to make sure that you can't see my belly button through my neckline when i do so. anything else goes. i also try and factor in other people's height, so it doesn't get too scandalous for the work place, but that's kind of difficult seeing as 86%* of the world is taller than i.

step two - flirt city. i used to think that i never flirted with anybody. then one day i realized that it was kind of more like i flirted with everybody. so, to a certain extent, i use this in Operation Tip Jar. and by "to a certain extent" i mean "mainly with hot people". not that i think hot people will tip me more, i just hate writing checks i'd rather not cash ifyouknowwhatimean. and also, i have a tendency to pick up stalkers just by being friendly. who knows what trouble i could get myself into†.

anyway, on that rather superficial note-- a short anecdote from the day's cookie hustle:

i received a call at the shoppe, and answered with my standard greeting, "Ye Olde Shoppe, this is Sara"^. the voice on the other end said "Hi, Sara", proceeded to ask me to put aside some whoopie pies under the name Keri, and said that she'd be by in about 20 minutes to pick them up. I put the cookies aside for her and then kind of forgot about it. I started in on my closing duties, occasionally interrupted by a customer or two, but nobody i could be super friendly with because i'm getting only older or underaged, gay and/or married. as i'm finishing up with a man and his two (not underaged, but probably not old enough) kids, the front entrance bell rings. i quickly glance over, notice what seems to be a very pretty lady, and then turn back to the man. as i'm saying my standard "thanks" and "have a good one", my brain is like 'umm...pretty sure that pretty lady is keri russell'. so then i turn to the lady that just entered, and it is indeed her. she says "hi, i'm keri." and my mind says "i know this, but why are you telling me?" she then proceeds to say that she called a little while ago about the whoopie pies. oh! it all comes together.

anyway, the whole point of this story is that now i can totally tell everyone that i've had a phone conversation with keri russell.






*rough estimate
†this implies that no hot people are stalkers. i like to believe this is true, even though i know from experience that it isn't
^may vary slightly from my standard greeting

Saturday, July 18, 2009

latte art

no matter how hard i try-- how many times i practice, how many videos i watch, how many times i watch someone else do it -- i cannot for the life of me make a damn leaf in a cup of coffee. my shoppe doesn't require that we are arteests with our steamed milk...it's not like i'm going to get fired for not ever being able to produce a leaf...but i think it would be a neat skill to break out at parties. coffee parties.

even though i know i can't make a leaf, every time i make a latte, i try. i do exactly what those videos and the real people told me to do, hoping the leaf will one day show up. since this never happens, i kind of just get creative at the end of the milk pour and freehand a design. it's edgier than a leaf. so there. once i accidentally made a happy face. usually, i like to guess what i've made. a rabbit on the run, a duck, a cloud. one time, my freehand design looked like a vag painting. so i joked to my coworker that it was the georgia o'keefe special.

unfortunately, all my freehand modern art latte designs are one of a kind, and can't be recreated. this was most unfortunate later in the day, when christine marinoni came into the shop (presumably to buy a nice treat for her lady). as was pointed out by the aforementioned coworker, had i been able to do it again, i could've confidently (and appropriately) (or...inappropriately) offered her the GO'K spesh.

Thursday, July 02, 2009

the robots will destroy us

guys, something crazy just happened to me. but let me take you back a few weeks to when i was just a girl with a regular ol' flip phone talking to her mother. my mom's friend had just been showing her iphone off to my mother, and all the fancy new york specific apps she had gotten for her recent trip here. i, of course, had always wanted one, but the truth was, i liked my phone, there was nothing wrong with it, and i don't really have expendable income. but when my mom brought it up, i took it a step further and researched it. it turns out i was due for an upgrade, so i went for it and joined the world of smartphone users.

i can already tell having this thing is making me a more efficient person. i have train timetables and i can access my schedule really quickly. I am used to keeping a sole wall calendar in my bedroom where i write in all my doings, so whenever someone wanted to hang out, i'd have to be all "i'll get back to you after i check my calendar. which i have to go home to do." i have never been able to keep up with the electronic updating required of iCal or my gmail calendar. but now...it all syncs! anyway, this isn't a smartphone commercial, i'm just trying to paint a picture here. i can check my email on my phone, and this prompted me to finally marry my hotmail and gmail accounts. before, i would spend an hour after work checking my reader and email, but now i can do it all...when the fuck ever!

so yes, with this extra efficiency and large amount of free time i now have, i have been inspired plow through my to do lists. plural. because i can't keep just one. i start one in one room, another on my desk, another in my mind. so then i got this great idea to add these all to one Epic To-Do list using the Notes function of my phone. (what a difference a qwerty keyboard makes. Eff you T9!!) i loaded it up for the first time, and started a new note. whence i finished, i noticed there was another note there from april of like 2008. i was all, maybe this is a factory installed note example. but weird that it's from so long ago. then, i click on the note.

this note was a note that i had indeed authored in april of 2008. it was from back when i was still doing the weekly roundups here on the blog (back when there were enough weekly posts to do this). it was just a draft of a roundup. a sentence and a link, a sentence and a link. BUT HOW DID MY PHONE GET IT?!?!

i do remember writing one note once in my email program. i use gmail, but i check it through Mail on my computer. So i was like, oh maybe it just synced. That's cool. But when i checked the notes folder on Mail, IT WASN'T THERE! i had, in fact, deleted it a while ago, as i thought i had. OMG HOW DID MY PHONE GET IT BIG BROTHER BIG BROTHER ARJIWAO;FJINAEO;AWEOWR;MJEW