fish brewing non solo
Oh my god, customers are annoying me today. I will freely admit that I should have left out the "it's been there for a week and a half part," and the fact that the customer was kind of an asshole from the start is actually not relevant for my purposes as someone offering customer service. It's always difficult not to respond to hostility -- which he clearly gave me with his "making promises and then ghosting me" bullshit -- but the onus is on me to stop it rather than perpetuate it.
That doesn't make him any less annoying. He could just as easily say the same thing of me, though. Too bad I did that in my capacity representing the company I work for. This is the kind of thing that could get me in deep shit.
I had another exchange with a customer on Facebook Messenger who, after I let her know the Britt's pickles she's looking for are having production issues and the selection will expand once that gets resolved, she still replied again with, When will you get them. I so want to reply with, What part of 'once the issue gets resolved' did you not understand? But I won't. I guess it's possible someone has a timeline estimate, but it seems pretty clear that we don't. Customers never think about the very possibility of mitigating factors, and always want immediate gratification, as if we're all over here with magic wands in our hands.
I could pretty easily have predicted this, but you can read my spoiler-free review of Solo to see how and why I gave it a solid B. This was the fourth Star Wars movie in a row that I went to see with Gabriel on the Thursday before its publicized Friday opening date. The previous three were all in December: December 18 (2015) for The Force Awakens; December 16 (2016) for Rogue One; and December 15 (2017) for The Last Jedi. The powers that be decided Solo was better for a spring release, I guess -- but it also means it came a mere five months after the last Star Wars movie. Once a year is arguably too much market saturation as it is; five months apart is way too soon.
The movie will still make tons of money, of course. It just doesn't have the fan fervor Star Wars movies have had in the past. I'm not sure studios really care, or that they even need to, really.
I met up with Gabriel and Tess for dinner at the Point Ruston development before the movie, which is also typical. I knew traffic would be bad, and left work at 3:45, and was driving out of the garage in Shobhit's car -- I gave him my Orca Card to bus to work and back yesterday -- at about 4:20. The map app's original estimate of my arrival at 6:03 was dead on, to my amazement. How does it manage to be that accurate, I wonder? Is it based on commute time averages from that time of day in the past? Who is being timed, though? How is this being figured out? I need to know!
Anyway, we wound up eating dinner at Fish Brewing Pub and Eatery before the movie, which was where Gabriel and I ate after seeing Black Panther at that same theatre back in February. Once again, the food was good and the service terrible. They also had live music last night, just this one lady who was terrible. Gabriel and Tess both went on much more than I did about her being terrible; it took me a minute to realize at one point she was singing a version of "I Will Survive" that was weirdly maudlin in tone. Gabriel took a phone call and while he was gone the woman sang Miley Cyrus's "Wrecking Ball." And later, I finally had to concede how truly terrible she was when she sang a Fleetwood Mac song I am intimately familiar with, "Landslide." It was easily the worst version of it I had ever heard. Who the fuck hired this lady?
The owner of the place came by at one point and even chatted with Gabriel about how bad the lady was, which was odd. None of us bothered to talk to him about how bad the service is every time we come, which included last night: my Moscow Mule taking an unduly long time to get to me; Gabriel's second beer he ordered nearly never coming at all before the checks finally came.
And actually, the dish I had wasn't even that great, now that I think about it. I ordered nachos and the chips were slightly burnt.
Tess spent a lot of time "flossing" -- like, kind of obsessively so. When I first noticed it I actually recognized it from Jennifer's boys doing it at their house when I stayed overnight in Shelton during my Birth Week. But with Tess, she did it pretty much any time she was standing up. Maybe it's her way of burning off excess energy? I don't know.
Gabriel really wanted to spend time talking after the movie -- which Shobhit correctly predicted -- so indulged him and we went to Stack 71 afterward, so he could order himself a whiskey. I just had water; I didn't want to spend more money or consumer more alcohol before driving home late-ish at night. I suppose we were there maybe forty-five minutes. Gabriel loved the movie, as always -- although he did concede beforehand that his enthusiasm has waned with each successive movie. "This was my complaint from the beginning," I said, in reference to the market saturation I discuss in my review, and he basically conceded that point. Yay!
We said our goodbyes and I drove home, which, from Point Ruston, takes just over fifty minutes even without traffic. See, Point Ruston is across town from I-5 in Tacoma, meaning it takes about 15 minutes just to get to the freeway. From there to the Madison Street exit in Seattle via I-5 takes only about half an hour on its own -- but then in Seattle our condo is another 10 minutes or so from the freeway. Hence, the drive that seems to take nearly as long as it takes to get all the way down to Olympia.
So, it was about 11:40 by the time I got back home. Star Wars and Gabriel are worth it, though! Otherwise I wouldn't keep doing this.
[posted 12:38 pm]