Saturday, March 18, 2006
Breakfast: blueberry froot smoothie, cereal. Today I caught up on a lot of e-mail (but not everything), and I started my taxes, grateful that I was thoughtful enough last year to save my notes from Tax Boy who helped me last year with some very puzzling questions. Patrick got back from martial arts practice and took a shower, a bath, a nap. After he woke, I had a quick lunch (leftover pasta), and he and I did some Union Square shopping. When we got to Crate and Barrel, we noticed that there were lots of motorcycle cops blocking off some of the streets, and there was a TV van set up ready to film something. I looked around some more and realized that the anti-war march scheduled for today was just coming down the block. Fortunately we didn't get caught in any the traffic it had caused. We ducked into Crate and Barrel where the employees were all agog at the forthcoming wave of protesters which were clearly seen and heard through the giant display windows. I overheard one employee ask her manager if they could leave the doors open, and the man quite wisely said most definitely no. Patrick and I still support the anti-war movement, but after the events of the past 4 or 5 years we've decided it really isn't very productive to participate in marches like these—kind of how it no longer seems very productive even to register or vote (though we still do). The march does create an awful mess of traffic, and in San Francisco a protest like this is like preaching to the choir. Around the nation and around the world, everyone knows San Franciscans and Bay Areans are among the most liberal Americans, so efforts like these are easily dismissed as not being representative of everyone in the nation. And, we're not even sure if terrorists who might attack the United States are smart enough to leave San Francisco alone—the terrorists we've seen in the past just seem angry and fervent and devoted to religion, and logic doesn't seem to be controlling their actions. We went to C and B looking for dish towels but we couldn't agree on any that we liked, and none of them were on sale except the ones with Valentine's Day hearts on them. Instead I found and bought a wooden utensil holder that I will use as a fashionable stand for my monitor at work (if it works out sizewise). It's been long enough I've had the two reams of paper holding my monitor up. Those quick and inexpensive tricks the ergo police at Adobe taught me finally wore thin on my aesthetics and patience. (Some may be surprised I even lasted this long.) After Crate and Barrel, we went to Macy's. Again, we couldn't agree on dish towels but we did get pillowcases that we had needed, and they were on sale. We're fonda the Hotel Collection, 460 thread-count, which I believe is much stronger than the Calvin Klein bed linens we've purchased in the past and which tore easily at the seams. We stepped in to Sur La Table which had a wide array of dish towels, but again we couldn't agree on a design and none of them were on sale that we could tell. Stopped at the Starbuck's across from the newly remodeled Cafe de la Presse, which appeared to be packed, so I didn't even get to see inside. Patrick says he's seen it and the cafe and dining room have been conjoined and the magazine rack moved elsewhere so there's more seating. He thinks it's a vast improvement. We went to H and M where it was a bit of a zoo. There were people everywhere, and we noticed there seemed to be a lot of attractive, young Asian men. Patrick did a little flirting, telling one young Asian man that a particular jacket the stranger was trying on looked good on him, and I didn't mind until I realized that he was trying on the last one available in my size! I asked Patrick to go back and tell him he was mistaken and that it looked ugly on him, but Patrick just laughed. Oh, well. I tried on a suit and this is when I realized H and M is a lot like Ikea. The suit's jacket fit me reasonably well, and we wanted to buy it, but it was paired with a size 32 waist pair of slacks. We found an employee and asked for size 31 or 30 for the slacks and she looked tediously through the rack for us but there was none to be found. I asked if she knew if the slacks came in 31 or 30 and after some confusing dialogue (a misunderstanding over whether the slacks could be separated from the jacket which wasn't what we wanted), it seemed that yes they did but they get new shipments frequently and they simply come in whatever sizes they get. I asked if there was a way someone could call me if those sizes came in, but she said no. We asked if we could order the size we wanted from their website, and she said no. (And at this moment we remembered having visited their site before and found that it's really an ineffective website for a clothing retailer—you can't order online, even in 2006. Oh yeah, Ikea doesn't have their entire catalog available online, either, huh?) So we hung up the jacket that fit and the slacks that didn't and quite sadly walked out of the store. I say this is like Ikea because it was very similar to the experience we had on (I think) October 1, 2005. I didn't write about it then, but essentially, Mom Ryan found a love seat that she wanted but Ikea didn't have it in stock, they couldn't tell us when it would come back in stock but—like H and M—invited us to come back at any time to check if it was, they wouldn't let us call ahead to see if it was in stock to save us the trip over the bridge, they wouldn't call us to let us know when it had come back in stock, and they wouldn't let us pay for it and deliver it later when it came back in stock. We ended up finding something that worked for her at Levitz. But it was a similar case of us as customers saying, "We want to give you money" and then "We want to give you money in a way that makes things easier for us and/or for you" and then finally "Oh well, we'll find someone else to take our money, thanks anyway." I mean, come on, Ikea, it was like a contest to see how many ways can you say, "We don't want your money!" before we'll leave. And good grief, H and M, I spent an hour in your store which I realize now was a waste of time, and I am far less likely to return knowing that finding something in my size can only be the result of good fortune rather than a reasonably simple process of information exchange followed by monetary exchange. At least at the Gap I can go home and see what's in stock online and order online (except when the site is closed for maintenance—hey, Gap management, it's possible for a retailer with your resources to create a 24/7 always-available e-commerce website, so there's no reason for your site to be completely closed when I visit at 2:38 AM, no reason for you to say, "We don't want your money right now!"). After H and M we went to the Container Store and bought some shelves and bathroom items we needed for our new aparment. On the bright side, today we had really terrific service from employees at the Container Store and Starbuck's. At the Container Store not just one, but several employees helped us find items and did so cheerfully—it was quite refreshing. At the Starbuck's in the Fifth and Mission Garage building, the barista kept pace with the torrent of customers' drink orders far better than the stocking pace of the food case items, informed customers when there would be an extra minute of delay due to "a problem with the chocolate," got everyone's crazy drink names spot on, and apologized to me and Patrick for the lack of speed in getting us his drink when we hadn't experienced anything but the usual waiting period—it would seem her standards are much higher than ours. I should have gotten her name. On our way to the garage, I ran into pharmacy student DZ—there's a conference at Moscone this weekend and a bunch of our students are attending. Bought gas at Twin Peaks Auto. Home. I took a nap. Patrick woke me up because the power had gone out and he didn't know what to do about the beeping UPS. (He figured out on his own that he needed to reset the circuit breaker.) I went back to bed. Woke. I set up some of the things we bought: a clock and a shaving mirror for the bathroom tub area, wall pockets to hold mail in the garage. Dinner at home with Patrick: spinach pasta with mushrooms and sliced ham. We were tired from the day's activities and went to bed somewhat early. Oh, just fyi, there's no restroom at H and M—I went across the street to Lori's Diner where the stinky restroom is reasonably (but not legitimately) accessible to non-customers. The Apple Store and Crate and Barrel are two other pretty easy places to take a wizz in that area. I realized today that one phase of my backups process at home wasn't functioning properly, so I fixed it and now it's better. I wish computers—personal computers—handled fault tolerance automatically, like Photoshop or OS X Help auto-deleting the preferences file when it gets corrupted, or like Windows XP reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling Windows and restoring the data after a blue screen of death, or like OS X automatically fixing file permissions when needed, or like Microsoft Office repairing itself when it knows it has gone braindead. Microsoft and Apple have some of this idea right with Microsoft Update and Software Updates, and some applications like Adobe InDesign have similar features—it just needs to be extended to other situations, particularly those involving data loss and those involving all the soft parts of the computer at the OS level. I wouldn't be out of job, I think—there are plenty more things to worry about that require expertise. Sort of like the bizarre illegality of marijuana—cops really should be spending their time investigating—and preventing—things like homicides instead of putting potheads behind bars. Personal computers and all related hardware can and should be designed to not lose data so that I can spend my time on tasks that really do require a human. How long will it take humans to reach this level of sophistication? Apple? Microsoft? Linux? Google? Bueller?