Monthly Archives: August 2024

The USPS “Undelivered Package” scam

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Public service announcement: If you get a text like this, ignore it:

The Post Office will never send out text messages like this. But if you happen to be unaware enough to click the link, you will get something like this:

The bad URL (the legitimate post office site is https://www.usps.com/, and nothing else) and the bad grammar are red flags that this is a scam website.

Again, bad English (to ensure the successful delivery).

“Lump sum: 3¢”… right. Give these scummy drones your credit card number and they’ll use it or sell it and at the very least you’ll have to get that card cancelled and get a new one. At worst, you might be on the hook for fraudulent charges.

Be careful out there, and protect your vulnerable loved ones.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

If you’ve ever worked retail

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Barking, unreasonable, terrible managers. Mind-clenching Corporate stupidity. Unpredictable schedules. Lazy or arrogant or brown-nosing co-workers. And, of course, the ubiquitous customers: arrogant, entitled, insouciant, demeaning, demanding, illogical customers… with the occasional gem of a human being hidden in the regular flow. All these are things that the average retail worker has to put up with on a daily basis.

The worst and most outrage-generating stories can be found at Not Always Right, but there’s one place a retail worker should go – if you haven’t already – to smile, cringe, laugh, and find kindred spirits: Retail, by Norm Feuti.

Retail, Strip One, by Norm Feuti, January 1, 2006.

Anyone who has ever worked in retail or still does owes it to themselves to be familiar with this lovely, long-running comic strip. It sadly came to an end after 14 years when the artist wanted to move on to a different career in illustrating children’s books, but the entire thing is available online as an archive. I greedily devoured every one, because it so perfectly captures every aspect of the retail experience, from managers, to co-workers, to the most horrible customers… all of which have to be dealt with in a day’s work if you’re interested in keeping your job.

But it’s not just about the horrors; along the way you will get to know and fall in love with a delightful cast of characters who grow, and learn, and survive the journey. Of course there are the ones you love to hate, but that only adds Tabasco sauce to the chimichanga, as it were.

Only the first year was captured in hard copy, but if Norm were ever to think about publishing the other 13 years in dead-tree edition, I would be first in line to buy them.

There was also a companion volume, “Pretending you Care,” which included many strips from year one along with wonderful expositions about what it’s like to work in the retail world.

Both are available on Amazon, but neither one is cheap, sadly – I was fortunate to score a copy of each through AbeBooks, my go-to source for difficult-to-find books, at much more affordable prices. They occupy honored places on my bookshelf.

While I never actually worked a retail floor, I did work in pizza shops for 3 years, and spent 6 months in a customer-service chair for a software company – essentially the same as retail work without the face-to-face interactions with customers. It was, to be very honest, the most soul-sucking job I ever did in my entire career, and would never again repeat the experience even if I had to. Thank Ṣiva H. Viṣṇu for retirement.

That said, I undertand. And I have always done my best to be a bit extra kind and appreciative to those people on the floor or behind the register who serve my needs, who endure the daily horror, and who long for nothing more than the end of their shift.

To all retail or customer-service workers out there, thank you.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

American Food Culture and the Joy of Leftovers

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Reposting this from… well, I’m not sure where, but it looks like Tumblr. Anyway, it’s 100% on-target. Very slightly bowdlerized.

My wife and I have started taking our own re-usable plastic containers when we eat out, to bring our leftovers home without adding to the landfill.

Pervocracy

Note to vacationing non-Americans: while it’s true that America doesn’t always have the best food culture, the food in our restaurants is really not representative of what most of us eat at home. The portions at Cheesecake Factory or IHOP are meant to be indulgent, not just “what Americans are used to.”

If you eat at a regular American household, during a regular meal where they’re not going out of their way to impress guests, you probably will not be served twelve pounds of chocolate-covered cream cheese. Please bear this in mind before writing yet another “omg I can’t believe American food” post.

nettlepatchwork

Also, most American restaurant portions are 100% intended as two meals’ worth of food. Some of my older Irish relatives still struggle with the idea that it’s not just not rude to eat half your meal and take the rest home, it’s expected. (Apparently this is somewhat of an American custom.)

xenoqueer

Until you’re hitting the “fancy restaurant” tier (the kind of place you go for a celebration or an anniversary date), a dinner out should generally also be lunch for the next day. Leftovers are very much the norm.

From the little time I’ve spent in Canada, this seems to be the case up there as well.

jumpingjacktrash

The portions in family restaurants (as opposed to haute cuisine types) are designed so that no one goes away hungry.

Volume IS very much a part of the american hospitality tradition, and Nobody Leaves Hungry is important. but you have to recognize that it’s not how we cook for ourselves, it’s how we welcome guests and strengthen community ties.

So in order to give you a celebratory experience and make you feel welcomed, family restaurants make the portions big enough that even if you’re a teenage boy celebrating a hard win on the basketball court, you’re still going to be comfortably full when you leave.

Of course, that means that for your average person with a sit-down job, who ate a decent lunch that day, it’s twice as much as they want or more. that’s ok. as mentioned above, taking home leftovers is absolutely encouraged. that, too, is part of American hospitality tradition; it’s meant to invoke fond memories of grandma loading you down with covered dishes so you can have hearty celebration food all week. pot luck church basement get-togethers where the whole town makes sure everybody has enough. that sort of thing. it’s about sharing. it’s about celebrating Plenty.

it’s not about pigging out until you get huge. treating it that way is pretty disrespectful of our culture. and you know, contrary to what the world thinks, we do have one.

theunnamedstranger

atreefullofstars

Reblogging because I honestly never thought about it but yeah, this lines up.

This is also why the idea of “pay a lot for fancy food on tiny plates” pisses so many Americans off. Unless you are rich enough not to care about throwing your money away, it’s not just a ridiculous ripoff in terms of not filling you up, it’s stingy. Restaurants are places of hospitality. If I pay that much for a plate it had better be damn good and it had better be generous. Otherwise they are just trying to fleece me out of my money AND saying they don’t value me as a customer.

If I go to IHOP or Olive Garden or whatnot, I absolutely don’t need to eat again until evening if I had leftovers, and until the next day if I did eat everything (you can’t really take pancakes home as leftovers).

But EVEN IF I DID EAT EVERYTHING and then ate a full meal on top of that, later, it’s really not anyone’s place to criticize what other people eat. It just isn’t. Let it go. It’s old.

Making fun of American food culture and food habits isn’t original or surprising or witty or funny or getting one over on us or crafting a clever retort or whatever. It’s lazy and petty and childish.

Yeah, we eat a lot of hamburgers. They’re delicious. Cope.