How to spot a service engineer
February 8, 2010 by Jesse Doerr @ 6:30 am
I've spent a lot of time on the road in the last three years. Between work and holidays, I've probably spent nearly as much time away from home as in it. It can be a nice life if you're into that sort of thing, but you quickly develop habits to try to minimize the costs.
It seems like almost every time I go into a restaurant now I can spot the fellow road warrior. For the most part they blend in. But the next time you head into a restaurant, especially if it's a big chain, have a look towards the bar. What you may see is a single man, sitting near but slightly apart from the other guests. He'll probably be eating dinner as well with his drink. If you get really lucky, you might even spot a closed paperback on the bar beside the plate.
If you want to meet someone new, this is the person to talk to in the bar. For the most part we are pleasant and polite. Since we make our living working with, and trying to please customers, we have a lot of practice chatting with new people.
A note to the bartenders out there: talk with your customers too! We're sitting at the bar because we want some social interaction to go with our dinner. There's more to being a great bartender than just pouring drinks. The best bar staff will take a moment to talk with each guest and that really goes a long way to get the guests talking to each other as well. Usually, what keeps me coming back to a restaurant isn't the food or drinks, it's the great time I had because of the staff and service. There are more than a few places that I make a special trip to visit whenever I'm in town especially because of a great bartender.
24 Hour Flu - We need to talk
February 4, 2010 by Jesse Doerr @ 10:34 pm
I appreciate all of the passion and intensity that you brought to our relationship. But it's over now and it's time for us to break up. I won't say that we didn't have our ups and downs along the way. But you have to admit that our time together has run it's course.
I'm sorry, it's not you, it's me. Good bye.
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Packing up...March 23, 2009 by Patricia Byrne @ 10:54 am
I've been traveling around the world since...well, alone since I was sixteen. I have, in total, recieved six honest-to-god, handwritten letters during my entire time abroad. No packages.
It isn't that my family doesn't love me, we just don't have that "I need things from you" kind of relationship. So, imagine my surprise when, halfway through a class on Thai Language (where I figured out that my chances of saying what I want to say are astronomically small...five tones means that each word (if you managed to have the correct sounds) has only a 20% chance of being correct. Add words for smaller percentages. I think I came up with a nice, round .01% chance of anything I say being what I wanted to say) there were two packages in the corner and one was for myself and a good friend of mine on the same abroad trip.
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