I’m a fan of Twitter. You guys know this already. I mean, I’ve been using it since it was an Odeo product about 5 years ago. You could say that with Twitter, I was a very early adopter.
Most of the time I find it helpful, entertaining and quite informative. The nice folks that I follow usually share quality items that interest me or say funny shit that makes me giggle.
That said, there are times when I absolutely fucking hate Twitter. Hate that burns with the heat of 1,000 suns friends. Hate that would turn the average person green with rage.
Yesterday (and I’m sure today) was one of those times.
You see, for those of you that are living under a rock on one of Saturn’s moons, the new Apple Telephone Device was being delivered yesterday. And all 408 of the people that follow me got one. And all 408 of the people that got one did nothing but fill my Twitter feed with post after post after post about the line, the phone, how great Apple is and how the device has changed their lives.
All day. Nothing but ATP posts.
Here’s the thing. While I’m sure the device is awesome and made from rainbows and pure unicorn fur, when all I have to read on Twitter is nerdgasm after god damned nerdgasm about it gets a little old. I even unfollowed a few people yesterday because of it.
I get your excited. Awesome! I get that you are in puffy pink heart love with the damned thing. Hooray! I get that you want to gay marry Steve Jobs and bare his puffy pink heart love child. I do, really. You are really excited. Good for you.
I, however, don’t care.
So, you can expect more Android news and retweets in my twitter feed. As long as you guys are going to do it to me, I’m just going to do it back.
And enough with the FourSquare. I don’t care where you are or how many others are there with you. If I did care, I would follow you within the FourSquare app (yes, I’m there, search for me). I for realz don’t want that crap in my stream any more.
As always, thank you for your time.
This is one I don’t think we’ve talked about before. It would seem that now is a good time for your pal Don to let all y’all in on a few of my better secrets.
In our example above, Josh served this guy about $500 worth of cocktails, and he only left about $8.50 in tips. I’m going to leave the maths up to you.
But, really? Shots? 4 bit tip? Having a great night, trying to impress the ladies and this is how you treat the man making it happen? I guarantee you will never drink with me my friend.
Drinking in a bar is a unique experience. Your contact time with the person taking care of you is much shorter usually, and that persons time is split between all of the patrons at his bar, as well as any servers that he is making drinks for. He might or might not care about you or that sub-par hottie you are trying to get back to your place that was furnished from the cable company’s equipment yard. Want to change that? Want to make sure your drinks are made quickly and correctly? Read on friends, I can help.
Change the him to a her, and this is exactly what I did at the last AMVIV. Did I ever wait for a drink? No. Did the bartender ever forget what I was drinking? She did not. Did she deliver drinks to me and the boys, on stage when requested? She did.
I’ve always been a generous tipper, especially when I drink. I worked in restaurants for too long not too. It’s the main reason why I don’t drink out very often. If I can’t afford to drink in a bar and leave a good tip, then I can’t afford to drink in a bar.
Perhaps you should adopt the same rules.
Another year has passed and today I am, once again, celebrating the anniversary of my birth 42 years ago. As tradition dictates of late, I will be spending the day working as much as I possibly can. Unlike other years, I can’t say this past one was terribly fantastic.
Which isn’t to say that cool stuff didn’t happen this past year, because it did. I mean, I did go to England last summer. Co-hosted and co-produced the first ever White Roof Radio live show. Met the lads at MINI of Ontario and MINI of Loveland. And I met some cool people otherwise (the list is too long to post here).
Without being too Donny Downer, I’m just going to end by saying that I am very happy this year is now behind me and I hope that the following year is a damn sight better!
Happy Birthday. To me.
As usual, I accept Amazon, iTunes and Starbucks gift cards. Just sayin’
I’m writing you today because I actually have the time. You see, I thought I had a 9:00AM appointment with one of my best customers. Turns out, I was mistaken and didn’t find out until I actually spoke to the customer 10 minutes prior to my arrival.
She speaks broken English but I have never had difficulty understanding a word she says. She is also a member, which means all of her information lives in a database someplace in Florida, referenced, I’m sure, by her telephone number or email address. Knowing that, why would anyone, in an unpleasant tone from what I understand, ask her to repeat her address so many times that she became frustrated, assumed the appointment did not get made and then call someone else? This is not rocket science.
This particular exchange is made equally frustrating by the fact that it actually cost me money. Sure, only $50, but right now $50 is $50 and I will take all that I can get. This is also made even more frustrating by the fact that she called me first, but I am not allowed to book appointments myself, so I had to direct her to the call center to do that.
Yet another frustration on top of more frustrations I have on a daily basis with this outfit. Why do you think I’m constantly trying to get work off of Twitter and Facebook? I make more money and control the experience, start to finish. If I can control everything, I know if there is a problem when the problem happens and can fix it. Except for one small detail.
There usually aren’t any problems.
If there is one thing that I know better than almost anything else it is how to take care of customers and how to retain those customers and keep them saying “I’ll be back”. It’s what I have been doing since I started working in 1984 and what I will continue to do for the foreseeable future.
Are you ready for that level of service? Let’s get started!.
I’m making the rounds through a few of the sites tonight, going back and looking through archives and clearing out comments like I like to do. For no reason in particular, I wondered what my first post at MotoringFile was. Turns out, it was Woofcast 56 or some such. Then, I started wondering, how many posts I put up at MotoringFile. So I counted. And was amazed. So, I checked the other sites that I post at.
Holy crap.
Going back to right about 2002, I have posted:
That’s a grand total of 6,831 posts that contain words I typed. That doesn’t count the hundreds of hours of audio you can hear my sultry voice on or more than 10 hours of video I have produced. It also doesn’t count the 3,800+ photos that I have uploaded to Flickr either. Or the 7k+ toots on the ol’ Twitter.
Holy carp!
While I’m sure there is some kind of algorithm I could use to get a word break-down, it’s late and I’m tired. I was just amazed on the amount of crap I’ve put on the web. And wanted to share.
This makes 6,832. Next stop, 7,000. I should be able to hit that before the end of the year, right?
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