If you can afford a $200 Pinot, you can sure as hell afford to tip on it.
Do you consider yourself a polite, sophisticated diner? Of course you do. You say “please” and “thank you.” You know how to use chopsticks. You can define the word “Burrata.” But if you’re one of the millions of people who have never waited tables, there are a few subtle breaches of dining behavior you might (unwittingly) be guilty of ? ones that are causing your server financial and emotional harm.
You’re more interested in your Smartphone than you are in your dinner.
Or your fellow diners. Or your waiter. Here’s a tip: When you sit at the table with other humans, they might be offended that you find what’s on your iPhone more fascinating than you find them. And your waiter will hate you because you’re going to ask him to repeat the litany of specials he just described to everyone else for the second (or third) time because you weren’t paying attention. Put the phone down. Better yet, turn it off and put it away. And please take that damned Bluetooth thing out of your ear. Your server might not be as technologically savvy as you think. He might mistake it for a hearing aid and yell directly into it.
Tasting wine should be a relatively simple ? and ideally a painless ? procedure. The waiter shows you the bottle you’ve ordered, citing the pertinent information (maker, vineyard, vintage, etc.); you accept the bottle; waiter opens said bottle and pours a little of the wine into your glass after placing the cork in front of you. The sole purpose of cork inspection is to determine whether or not the bottle has been stored properly. When you sniff the cork, it is a clear sign to your waiter that you have no idea what you’re doing. A true cork will invariably smell as God intended it to smell: Like cork. Take a whiff of the wine instead. And, whatever happens, never dramatically wave a screw cap under your nose, even as a joke. That particular move has led to blood loss on more than one occasion.
You stay all night.
Don’t be a “camper.” Lingering over a romantic dinner is one thing, but hogging a table in a busy restaurant for the entire evening is a surefire way to bring on the ire of your server, the hostess, management, and the nice people who have been patiently (or not so patiently) waiting for their turn to dine. If someone came into your place of business for an appointment in the morning and then decided to hang out until closing time, making it impossible for you to see other clients and earn money, you’d probably hate them, too.
This is not tipping ? it’s more like clearing your pockets.
You’re a crappy tipper.
There are few things that can match the sense of betrayal a good server feels when he or she has been stiffed on a gratuity ? especially after her guests have just finished telling her what a marvelous dinner they had and how great she was. The last time we checked, landlords and student loan officers do not accept good wishes as legal tender. Don’t think you need to tip on that $200 bottle of wine? Think again: Not only is your server taxed on that sale, but she has to pay her support staff (hostess, busser, food runner, etc.) on it, whether you tip or not. If you can afford to eat well, you can afford to tip well. Otherwise, just do takeout. That way, you can check e-mail to your heart’s content, sniff anything you like, stuff a dollar in the tip jar, and hang out all night in the place where you truly belong anyway ? at home.
The Misconception: You procrastinate because you are lazy and can’t manage your time well.
The Truth: Procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking.
Netflix reveals something about your own behavior you should have noticed by now, something which keeps getting between you and the things you want to accomplish.
If you have Netflix, especially if you stream it to your TV, you tend to gradually accumulate a cache of hundreds of films you think you’ll watch one day. This is a bigger deal than you think.
Take a look at your queue. Why are there so damn many documentaries and dramatic epics collecting virtual dust in there? By now you could draw the cover art to “Dead Man Walking” from memory. Why do you keep passing over it?
Psychologists actually know the answer to this question, to why you keep adding movies you will never watch to your growing collection of future rentals, and its the same reason you believe you will eventually do what’s best for yourself in all the other parts of your life, but rarely do.
A study conducted in 1999 by Read, Loewenstein and Kalyanaraman had people pick three movies out of a selection of 24. Some were lowbrow like “Sleepless in Seattle” or “Mrs. Doubtfire.” Some were highbrow like “Schindler’s List” or “The Piano.” In other words, it was a choice between movies which promised to be fun and forgettable or would be memorable but require more effort to absorb.
After picking, the subjects had to watch one movie right away. They then had to watch another in two days and a third two days after that.
Most people picked Schindler’s List as one of their three. They knew it was a great movie because all their friends said it was. All the reviews were glowing, and it earned dozens of the highest awards. Most didn’t, however, choose to watch it on the first day.
Instead, people tended to pick lowbrow movies on the first day. Only 44 percent went for the heavier stuff first. The majority tended to pick comedies like “The Mask” or action flicks like “Speed” when they knew they had to watch it forthwith.
Planning ahead, people picked highbrow movies 63 percent of the time for their second movie and 71 percent of the time for their third.
When they ran the experiment again but told subjects they had to watch all three selections back-to-back, “Schindler’s List” was 13 times less likely to be chosen at all.
Yes, this is my queue
The researchers had a hunch people would go for the junk food first, but plan healthy meals in the future.
Many studies over the years have shown you tend to have time-inconsistent preferences. When asked if you would rather have fruit or cake one week from now, you will usually say fruit. A week later when the slice of German chocolate and the apple are offered, you are statistically more likely to go for the cake.
This is why your Netflix queue is full of great films you keep passing over for “Family Guy.” With Netflix, the choice of what to watch right now and what to watch later is like candy bars versus carrot sticks. When you are planning ahead, your better angels point to the nourishing choices, but in the moment you go for what tastes good.
As behavioral economist Katherine Milkman has pointed out, this is why grocery stores put candy right next to the checkout.
This is sometimes called present bias – being unable to grasp what you want will change over time, and what you want now isn’t the same thing you will want later. Present bias explains why you buy lettuce and bananas only to throw them out later when you forget to eat them. This is why when you are a kid you wonder why adults don’t own more toys.
Present bias is why you’ve made the same resolution for the tenth year in a row, but this time you mean it. You are going to lose weight and forge a six-pack of abs so ripped you could deflect arrows.
You weigh yourself. You buy a workout DVD. You order a set of weights.
One day you have the choice between running around the block or watching a movie, and you choose the movie. Another day you are out with friends and can choose a cheeseburger or a salad. You choose the cheeseburger.
The slips become more frequent, but you keep saying you’ll get around to it. You’ll start again on Monday, which becomes a week from Monday. Your will succumbs to a death by a thousand cuts. By the time winter comes it looks like you already know what your resolution will be the next year.
Procrastination manifests itself within every aspect of your life.
Photo by Ron J Anejo
You wait until the last minute to buy Christmas presents. You put off seeing the dentist, or getting that thing checked out by the doctor, or filing your taxes. You forget to register to vote. You need to get an oil change. There is a pile of dishes getting higher in the kitchen. Shouldn’t you wash clothes now so you don’t have to waste a Sunday cleaning every thing you own?
Perhaps the stakes are higher than choosing to play Angry Birds instead of doing sit-ups. You might have a deadline for a grant proposal, or a dissertation, or a book.
You’ll get around to it. You’ll start tomorrow. You’ll take the time to learn a foreign language, to learn how to play an instrument. There’s a growing list of books you will read one day.
Before you do though, maybe you should check your email. You should head over to Facebook too, just to get it out of the way. A cup of coffee would probably get you going, it won’t take long to go grab one. Maybe just a few episodes of that show you like.
You keep promising yourself this will be the year you do all these things. You know your life would improve if you would just buckle down and put forth the effort.
You can try to fight it back. You can buy a daily planner and a to-do list application for your phone. You can write yourself notes and fill out schedules. You can become a productivity junkie surrounded by instruments to make life more efficient, but these tools alone will not help, because the problem isn’t you are a bad manager of your time – you are a bad tactician in the war inside your brain.
Procrastination is such a pervasive element of the human experience there are over 600 books for sale promising to snap you out of your bad habits, and this year alone 120 new books on the topic were published. Obviously this is a problem everyone admits to, so why is it so hard to defeat?
To explain, consider the power of marshmallows.
Walter Mischel conducted experiments at Stanford University throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s in which he and his researchers offered a bargain to children.
The kids sat at a table in front of a bell and some treats. They could pick a pretzel, a cookie or a giant marshmallow. They told the little boys and girls they could either eat the treat right away or wait a few minutes. If they waited, they would double their payoff and get two treats. If they couldn’t wait, they had to ring the bell after which the researcher would end the experiment.
Some made no attempt at self-control and just ate right away. Others stared intensely at the object of their desire until they gave in to temptation. Many writhed in agony, twisting their hands and feet while looking away. Some made silly noises.
In the end, a third couldn’t resist.
What started as an experiment about delayed gratification has now, decades later, yielded a far more interesting set of revelations about metacognition – thinking about thinking.
Mischel has followed the lives of all his subjects through high-school, college and into adulthood where they accumulated children, mortgages and jobs.
The revelation from this research is kids who were able to overcome their desire for short-term reward in favor of a better outcome later weren’t smarter than the other kids, nor were they less gluttonous. They just had a better grasp of how to trick themselves into doing what was best for them.
They watched the wall instead of looking at the food. They tapped their feet instead of smelling the confection. The wait was torture for all, but some knew it was going to be impossible to just sit there and stare at the delicious, gigantic marshmallow without giving in.
The younger the child, the worse they were at metacognition. Any parent can tell you little kids aren’t the best at self-control. Among the older age groups some were better at devising schemes for avoiding their own weak wills, and years later seem to have been able to use that power to squeeze more out of life.
“Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.”
– Jonah Lehrer from his piece in the New Yorker, “Don’t”
Thinking about thinking, this is the key. In the struggle between should versus want, some people have figured out something crucial – want never goes away.
Procrastination is all about choosing want over should because you don’t have a plan for those times when you can expect to be tempted.
You are really bad at predicting your future mental states. In addition, you are terrible at choosing between now or later. Later is murky place where anything could go wrong.
If I were to offer you $50 now or $100 in a year, which would you take? Clearly, you’ll take the $50 now. After all, who knows what could happen in a year, right?
Ok, so what if I instead offered you $50 in five years or $100 in six years? Nothing has changed other than adding a delay, but now it feels just as natural to wait for the $100. After all, you already have to wait a long time.
A being of pure logic would think, “more is more,” and pick the higher amount every time, but you aren’t a being of pure logic. Faced with two possible rewards, you are more likely to take the one which you can enjoy now over one you will enjoy later – even if the later reward is far greater.
In the moment, rearranging the folders on your computer seems a lot more rewarding than some task due in a month which might cost you your job or your diploma, so you wait until the night before.
If you considered which would be more valuable in a month – continuing to get your paycheck or having an immaculate desktop – you would pick the greater reward.
The tendency to get more rational when you are forced to wait is called hyperbolic discounting because your dismissal of the better payoff later diminishes over time and makes a nice slope on a graph.
Evolutionarily it makes sense to always go for the sure bet now; your ancestors didn’t have to think about retirement or heart disease. Your brain evolved in a world where you probably wouldn’t live to meet your grandchildren. The stupid monkey part of your brain wants to gobble up candy bars and go deeply into debt. Old you, if there even is one, can deal with those things.
Hyperbolic discounting makes later an easy place to throw all the things don’t want to deal with, but you also over-commit to future plans for the same reason. You run out of time to get things done because you think in the future, that mysterious fantastical realm of possibilities, you’ll have more free time than you do now.
“The future is always ideal: The fridge is stocked, the weather clear, the train runs on schedule and meetings end on time. Today, well, stuff happens.”
– Hara Estroff Marano in Psychology Today
One of the best ways to see how bad you are at coping with procrastination is to notice how you deal with deadlines.
Let’s imagine you are in a class where you must complete three research papers in three weeks, and the instructor is willing to allow you to set your own due dates.
You can choose to turn in your papers once a week, or two on the first week and one on the second. You can turn them all in on the last day, or you can spread them out. You could even choose to turn in all three at the end of the first week and be done. It’s up to you, but once you pick you have to stick with your choice. If you miss your deadlines, you get a big fat zero.
How would you pick?
The most rational choice would be the last day for every paper. It gives you plenty of time to work hard on all three and turn in the best possible work. This seems like a wise choice, but you are not so smart.
The same choice was offered to a selection of students in a 2002 study conducted by Klaus Wertenbroch and Dan Arielly.
They set up three classes, and each had three weeks to finish three papers. Class A had to turn in all three papers on the last day of class, Class B had to pick three different deadlines and stick to them, and Class C had to turn in one paper a week.
Which class had the better grades?
Class C, the one with three specific deadlines, did the best. Class B, which had to pick deadlines ahead of time but had complete freedom, did the second best, and the group whose only deadline was the last day, Class A, did the worst.
Students who could pick any three deadlines tended to spread them out at about one week apart on their own. They knew they would procrastinate, so they set up zones in which they would be forced to perform. Still, overly optimistic outliers who either waited until the last minute or chose unrealistic goals pulled down the overall class grade.
Students with no guidelines at all tended to put off their work until the last week for all three papers.
The ones who had no choice and were forced to spread out their procrastination did the best because the outliers were eliminated. Those people who weren’t honest with themselves about their own tendencies to put off their work or who were too confident didn’t have a chance to fool themselves.
Interestingly, these results suggest that although almost everyone has problems with procrastination, those who recognize and admit their weakness are in a better position to utilize available tools for precommitment and by doing so, help themselves overcome it.
– Dan Arielly, from his book “Predictably Irrational”
If you fail to believe you will procrastinate or become idealistic about how awesome you are at working hard and managing your time you never develop a strategy for outmaneuvering your own weakness.
Procrastination is an impulse; it’s buying candy at the checkout. Procrastination is also hyperbolic discounting, taking the sure thing in the present over the caliginous prospect some day far away.
You must be adept at thinking about thinking to defeat yourself at procrastination. You must realize there is the you who sits there now reading this, and there is a you sometime in the future who will be influenced by a different set of ideas and desires, a you in a different setting where an alternate palette of brain functions will be available for painting reality.
The now you may see the costs and rewards at stake when it comes time to choose studying for the test instead of going to the club, eating the salad instead of the cupcake, writing the article instead of playing the video game.
Ulysses and the Sirens by Herbert James Draper
The trick is to accept the now you will not be the person facing those choices, it will be the future you – a person who can’t be trusted. Future-you will give in, and then you’ll go back to being now-you and feel weak and ashamed. Now-you must trick future-you into doing what is right for both parties.
This is why food plans like Nutrisystem work for many people. Now-you commits to spending a lot of money on a giant box of food which future-you will have to deal with. People who get this concept use programs like Freedom, which disables Internet access on a computer for up to eight hours, a tool allowing now-you to make it impossible for future-you to sabotage your work.
Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more will power, more drive, but because they know productivity is a game of cat and mouse versus a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty which can never be excised from the soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push ups.
Google Chrome has been steadily gaining in the browser market share since its launch 2 years ago. It’s not without its flaws but it definitely falls in the “kinda cool” category. Its simplicity and minimalistic, yet feature-rich, interface caused a lot of users to ditch their old and trusted browser in favor of this new tool.
Chrome has a lot of obscure features which could immensely enhance one’s browsing productivity if he were to know about them. This post intends to do reveal exactly those features.
Some of the following features might be something you already know. But as you read on, you are sure to bump into an amazing hidden chrome feature that you weren’t aware of, and that’s what makes this post worth going through. So, check it out!
1. Pin Tab
We have talked about Chrome’s cool Pin tab feature before. Just right click on a tab, hit “Pin tab” and the tab converts into a favicon and sticks itself permanently to the extreme left. Use this on those tabs that you never close (Gmail, for instance).
2. Paste and Go / Paste and Search
If you copy any URL outside Chrome and intend to visit that site on Chrome, then instead of doing Ctrl+V and Enter on the address bar, you could just right click and click “Paste and go.” Same for text that you want to search using Chrome’s address bar. Right click and “Paste and search.” Saves time in the long run.
3. Drag and Drop Downloads
You can easily drag downloaded files from Chrome to your desktop or any other folder on your computer. That means, from now on, you don’t need to go and change the download location each time you want the files to be downloaded in a separate place other than desktop (or downloads folder).
4. Resources Page
While the entire Developer tools feature which Chrome offers (you can access it by pressing Ctrl+Shift+I ) is unique and amazing, the Resources section is particularly useful for webmasters and anyone who owns a site and wants to know how fast his site loads on the browser. As you can see in the above screenshot, there are various options available to explore.
5. Task Manager
Chrome treats each tab as a separate process so that if one of them starts creating a problem, it can be killed and a browser crash could be prevented. It offers a built-in task manager to let you see the memory and CPU resources consumed by each tab. You can access it through Tools –> Task Manager or by pressing Shift+Esc.
6. Quick Calculation Results from Address Bar
You know that Chrome’s address bar doubles up as Google search bar too, but did you know that it could be used to make simple calculations? Yep, just type in 12*50 and wait a sec. The result will come up automatically.
7. Drag and Resize Text Box on a Webpage
Another very useful feature. A lot of times, the text boxes on webpages are annoying. They are too small and after you have typed a few lines, you get a scroll bar which is irritating. On Chrome, you could actually drag that box from the corner and make it bigger. You could try it right now with the comment box at the bottom of this page.
8. Site search from Address bar
If you have performed a search on a website then next time you can search it directly from Chrome’s address bar. Here’s how: lets say you have used this site’s custom Google search bar (located at the top right of this page) to lookup something before. Now, if you want to do it again, just type a few letters of site in the address bar, like guid.. and hit Tab. You’ll get a “Search guidingtech.com” option that’ll allow you to search this site directly from the address bar.
9. About:memory
For the geeks among you, Chrome provides an “About memory” page that can accessed by typing about:memory in the address bar. This gives detailed insights into how different processes in the browser are consuming memory.
10. Application Shortcuts
You could create standalone apps from webpages in Chrome by using Tools –> Create application shortcuts. This option could be used for sites that you use frequently and need them open all the time.
11. Sync Bookmarks (and AutoFills, Extensions) To Google Account
This could prove to be a very useful feature, especially after Xmarks, the daddy of bookmark sync tools, decided to shut down (though there is a ray of hope). We included this method previously in our Xmarks alternatives post, and have also talked about it in detail here – How To Sync Chrome Bookmarks Using Your Google Account. (Update: as pointed out by our reader Phistuck in the comments, this feature can now also sync your autofills, extensions and more. )
Chrome has an option that lets you reopen previously opened pages before you closed the browser. This comes in handy if the browser crashes for some reason and you had a lot of tabs open. I recommend that you make sure this option is checked. Learn how to do it here – How to Restore Tabs & Save Tab Groups In Google Chrome.
14. Organize Thumbnails Using Full Screen Key
This tip was contributed by a reader over at Lifehacker. You might not have noticed this but if you’ve got more than one Chrome windows open and you are using Windows 7, their thumbnails would interchange positions if you do a full screen ( F11) on any one of them. So, if you want to arrange the thumbnails in a specific order, you could use the same F11 key to do it.
15. Copy Paste Only Text
And last, but by no means the least, is this hidden Chrome feature that I, personally, have found it to be extremely useful since the day I discovered it. You know that if you copy anything from a webpage and paste it on some other application (except for pure text editors like Notepad), they bring along all sorts of HTML and CSS stuff with the text, right?
Next time, when you copy stuff from Chrome, and want to paste it somewhere else, use Ctrl+Shift+V instead of Ctrl+V if you just need the text. Quick and easy.
Hope you discovered something new about Google Chrome today. I’m sure there are lot of other cool features which I might have missed. Well, that’s why we have you, the readers. Start commenting! 🙂
1. Old people are either very generous or give you one peanut. There is no in-between.
2. The cuter our costumes, the more candy we get.
3. Good loot: Tootsie Rolls, Kit Kats, Nerds, Twizzlers, Jolly Ranchers, Starbursts, Skittles, Snickers, and Whoppers. Bad loot: toothbrushes.
4. Pillowcases hold twice as much as plastic grocery bags and three times as much as plastic orange pumpkins.
5. Don’t get stuck behind little kids at the door. They take forever to decide.
6. Handing out candy is like serving wine at a party. People serve the good stuff first and save the not-so-good stuff for later. The longer you stay out on Halloween night, the worse the candy gets.
7. Lots of decorations in the front yard means good candy. They spend a lot on Halloween.
8. If a group of children gathers at the door, sometimes it’s best to be in the front so you won’t have to wait and can run immediately to the next house. But sometimes it’s better to be the last one: You might get two pieces of candy for being patient.
9. It’s always better to choose your candy than to have someone else choose it for you.
10. When parents chaperone, moms say “Be careful” and “Remember your manners.” Dads say “Wha’d ya get?”
11. Know your shortcuts. Slide through hedges. Jump over gutters. Dodge strollers. And run, do not walk.
12. Dads stay out later than moms.
13. Do not show your teacher what you have in your lunch bag the day after Halloween. Otherwise, he might point to his “Official Halloween Candy Taste Tester” button and ask for all your Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
There has always been a negative association, and for very good reason, with the phrase “no means yes.” It is most prominently, and unfortunately, linked with rape; just this past week, a bunch of idiots in a Yale fraternity caused a campus uproar by chanting “no means yes, yes means anal.” Not funny at all. To be clear, we certainly are of the opinion that rape or sexual assault of any kind is absolutely despicable. When it comes to sex, no always means no, and any Bro who thinks otherwise should just go ask for early admittance into Rikers.
That said, we believe that there are times outside of the bedroom when “no” can certainly mean “yes.” Below are 20 instances when you definitely know that the person answering “no” actually means “yes.” Add more of your own in the comments.
20. When the hot chick you want to fuck asks if you’d mind her bringing her fat friend with her to your party.
19. When your girlfriend asks you if you watch porn.
18. When you ask your girlfriend if she is going to make you late because she is fucking around with her hair and makeup.
17. Anytime Sammie asks Ronnie on the “Jersey Shore” if he did something behind her back.
16. When a hot girl at the bar asks if you have a girlfriend.
15. When someone asks a closet homosexual if he or she is gay.
14. When your parents ask if that weed, stowed neatly away in a shoebox under your bed, belongs to you.
13. When a stranger asks if you just farted.
12. When a dominatrix asks you anything.
11. When a cop pulls you over and asks you if were aware that you just committed vehicular manslaughter (or that you were speeding).
10. When a girl asks if you’re starring at her titwagons.
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9. When your girlfriend asks if you hate her mother’s terrible cooking because you barely ate.
8. When anyone asks you if you enjoyed “The Notebook.”
7. When someone asks you if you’d like the final slice of pizza.
6. When your parents ask you if you’ve been drinking (or doing drugs, or building a bomb in the garage).
5. When your girlfriend asks you if you have been cheating on her after she catches you sexting another girl.
4. When someone asks if you’ve ever masturbated using alternative lubricants, such as melted crayons or blueberry jam.
3. When the dean of students asks if you know who threw cups of urine all over Sig Ep at a football game.
2. When your girlfriend asks if she looks fat in those jeans.
1. On opposite day.
Bonus: Got my new plate in. Now maybe people will stop asking me “how was it?”
Okay, OP, I think I have a competitor. I work at KFC, so I see hambeasts like that ALL the time. Most of them are pretty well-behaved – I mean, you don’t fuck with your drug dealer, do you? And that’s what we are to these hordes of greasy stinking fat-asses.
Anyway, it’s time to close. I start rolling the shutters – mall store – get about halfway when this monstrosity lumbers up to the counter.
She shouts “Hey! Boy! Hey!”. I stop closing the gate to tell her we’re closed and can’t sell anything to her.
She says “No,” in a really flat voice, “no. Not closed.”
I pause for a second, say “Well, it’s five minutes past the time we usually close at, so I guess, yes, we are closed. Sorry.”
Then she said no again, and tried to slap the counter. This is the sad bit. She couldn’t reach the counter. Her arm was shorter than her gigantic larddumpster belly.
She was squished up against the counter, I could see her rolls pouring onto the table, greasing it up with her filthy slimy sweat. I’d have to clean that off. She finds she can’t reach the counter, flails her arm ineffectually, then says no again. I tell her our closing time isn’t negotiable and start pulling on the shutters again.
This is where shit got surreal. With what must have been a massive effort (driven by her fear she wasn’t going to be fed, no doubt) she hauled herself onto the counter. She managed to get one hand on the inside edge of the counter, with her feet sticking up in the air. God forbid you were sitting in the food court: this heaving bulk of lubber, this whale of a human being, had the forethought to wear a DRESS. Then again they don’t make pants in her size, I’ll bet.
With her other greasy hand she grasps my arm. Sounding like she’s dying of thirst, she rasps “Give me my FUCKING chicken, boy!”
At this point I am in shock. A walrus has just attacked me. I’m being held hostage by a warthog. Assaulted by a fucking huge cow.
“What … what do you want?” This isn’t even the standard KFC response; I just want to know what I have to give her so that I won’t be a headline tomorrow: KFC Employee Crushed to Death by Wild Hambeast. Still gripping my arm with her pudgy hand, she wheezes: “I want ten drumsticks.”
Ten drumsticks. I tell her we have no Original Recipe left; she can’t have ten drumsticks. She squeezes my arm, groaning, grunting: “Give me ten drumsticks!”
Now, I don’t know how many of you know how cooking chicken works: The raw chicken comes in bags. Each bag is 2 head, or two chicken’s worth of pieces. One chicken is nine pieces: two drumsticks, two wings, two thighs, two ribs, and a breast piece.
A little math will tell you we’d need to cook 5 head to satisfy this beast’s desire. Which means three bags, so actually 6 head. It takes about four minutes breading 6 head at top speed, and then 16 minutes of frying to cook it. So, roughly 20 minutes. And our cook still has to clean the floors, the polishing pump, the racking off table, the breading table, change the flour, everything. Not to mention, we’ll waste 44 pieces of chicken. That is a fucking massive amount of waste for a store that will only sell maybe 260 pieces in a whole day. It’s not as bad as all that; we have blue-bags which are 8 thigh 8 drumstick, but that’s still 24 wasted pieces and cooking well past close.
It’s fifteen minutes past close, a gigantic fat woman has launched herself over the counter and is holding my stomach contents hostage, it will take another 20 minutes at least to satisfy her, and I’ve had it.
So I went and told my manager I’d been attacked by a whale. He came out, took one blank look at the situation, and said, quietly, “What the fuck.” She shouted to him – still spread out over the counter, fat pooling around her head – “You have to cook me my chicken. I’ll wait.” She looked like she was ready to wait on top of the counter for it, too. He called mall security and we just stood there, looking at her. She stayed quiet, giving us the patented Hambeast Glare of Death, until two big security guys hauled her off. My manager went with them, to file a complaint with the centre, to get her banned for life.
He came back with a bottle of Jack Daniels, called his Area Manager, resigned on the spot, and sat down in the office. He and I and the cook drank out of a paper soft-drink cups. He left us clocked on for two weeks straight, until the very moment he was no longer required to work out his contract with KFC. His last act as a manager was to sign off on 320-something hours of overtime for me, and similar for the cook. I don’t think he said a single word in those two weeks, just silently plowed through everything that needed doing and gave anyone who tried to talk to him a blank stare.
My paycheck from those two weeks is one of my most treasured possessions. It says:
It’s common knowledge that almost every single geek hates Internet Explorer with a passion, but have you ever wondered why? Let’s take a fair look at the history and where it all began… for posterity, if nothing else.
Contrary to what you might think, this article is not meant to be a hate-fest on Internet Explorer—in fact, we’re pretty impressed with the hardware acceleration and new features in Internet Explorer 9—but keep reading for the whole story.
In the Beginning There Was IE, and It Was Good?
We’ve all been so used to thinking of Internet Explorer as that slow, buggy browser that is behind the times, but it wasn’t always that way—in fact, way back when, Internet Explorer pioneered many innovations that made the web what it is today.
Here’s a quick tour through the easily forgotten history of the infamous browser:
1996: Internet Explorer 3
This version of the browser, introduced in 1997, was the first browser to implement CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Yes, you’re reading that correctly—in fact, it introduced many new features like Java applets and sadly, ActiveX controls.
1997: Internet Explorer 4
IE4 introduced a blazing fast (at the time) rendering engine as an embeddable component that could be used in other applications—this was a lot more important than people realize. This version also introduced Dynamic HTML, which allows web pages to dynamically change the page using JavaScript, and added Active Desktop integration.
Even more weird? Seems like nobody remembers this anymore, but IE4 was actually cross-platform—you could install it on Mac OS, Solaris, and HP-UX—and by the time IE5 was released, IE4 had reached a 60% market share.
1999: Internet Explorer 5.x
Microsoft invented Ajax. Wait… what? That’s right, it was this version of IE that introduced the XMLHttpRequest feature in JavaScript, which forms the underlying technology behind every web application you’re using today—you know, like Gmail. Of course, the term “Ajax” wasn’t actually coined until years later by somebody other than Microsoft, but this release supported everything required to make it work.
So Yes, Microsoft Innovated
From IE3 until IE6, Microsoft used all their resources to simply out-innovate the competition, releasing new features and better browsers faster than Netscape. In fact, Netscape 3 Gold was a buggy piece of junk that crashed all the time, and Netscape 4 was extremely slow and could barely render tables—much less CSS, which would often cause the browser to crash.
To put it in context: web developers used to complain about Netscape the same way they complain about IE6 now.
What Made It Go So Very Wrong?
The trouble all started when Microsoft integrated IE into Windows as a required component, and made it difficult to uninstall and use an alternate browser. Then there was the whole business with them exploiting their monopoly to try and push Netscape out of the market, and a lot of people started to view Microsoft as the evil empire.
Microsoft Stopped Trying
By the time Microsoft released Internet Explorer 6 in 2001, complete with lots of new features for web developers, since there was no competition and they had a 95% market share, Microsoft just stopped trying—seriously, they did nothing for 5 years even after Firefox was released and geeks started migrating left and right.
Microsoft-Specific Features
The whole problem with Microsoft’s innovation is that much of it was done in ways that didn’t follow the web standards—this wasn’t as big of a problem when Internet Explorer was the only game in town, but once Firefox and Webkit came around and started following the standards correctly, suddenly it became a huge problem for web developers.
Security Holes and Crashing
Since Microsoft decided they didn’t need to try anymore, and they didn’t keep up with the competition from Firefox and other browsers, bugs and security holes just cropped up left and right—really terrible ones, too. For instance, this code is all that is required to crash IE6:
<script>for(x in document.write){document.write(x);}</script>
In fact, the screenshot at the beginning of this section was a live example of testing out this particular bug.
IE7 and IE8 Were Too Little, Too Late
It took 5 years after IE6 for Microsoft to finally get around to releasing IE7, which added tabs and made the browser slightly more tolerable, but for web designers it was still a nightmare to deal with, and only complicated the issue since now you had to make pages render correctly in two lousy browsers instead of just one.
It took another 2.5 years for Microsoft to finally release Internet Explorer 8, which greatly improved CSS support for web developers, and added new features like Private browsing, tab isolation to prevent one bad page from taking down the whole browser, and phishing protection. By this point, most geeks had already moved on to Firefox, and then some of us to Google Chrome.
Here’s the Real Reason Geeks Hate IE
Just because we’re geeks doesn’t mean we hate everything that’s inferior and outdated—in fact, we often love retro computing—that’s why we love Atari, NES, Commodore 64, etc. We take pride in our geek knowledge. So why’s Internet Explorer a different story?
Here’s a couple of reasons that fueled our hatred of the buggy browser, and finally put us all over the edge:
Supporting IE is Like a Fork in the Eye for Web Devs
Here’s a sample of a day in the life of a web designer: You spend hours making sure that your page looks great, and you test it out in Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and even Opera. It looks great, awesome!
Now you open up IE and the page looks like somebody put it into a blender and hit the Whip button. Then you spend double the amount of time trying to fix it to look tolerable in IE6 and IE7, cursing loudly the entire time.
Geeks Forced to Use Internet Explorer
And here’s where we come to the real issue—the whole reason that geeks can’t stand Internet Explorer:
Geeks everywhere were forced to use Internet Explorer at work even when there are better browsers, forced to support it for corporate applications, forced to make sure web sites still work in IE, and we couldn’t convince everybody to switch to a better browser.
Geeks don’t hate something that’s inferior—but they do hate it when it’s forced on them.
The Good News: The Future Might Be Brighter
Thankfully it seems like Microsoft has finally learned from their many, many mistakes in the browser world. They are below 50% in the market share wars, and they’ve finally learned to focus on using web standards.
Microsoft is billing Internet Explorer 9 as the browser that’s going to change the world, and they aren’t wrong—they just aren’t mentioning that they were the only ones holding the web back with their anemic browsers. And now that mess is finally over.
Netflix reveals something about your own behavior you should have noticed by now, something which keeps getting between you and the things you want to accomplish.
Google Chrome has been steadily gaining in the browser market share since its launch 2 years ago. It’s not without its flaws but it definitely falls in the “kinda cool” category. Its simplicity and minimalistic, yet feature-rich, interface caused a lot of users to ditch their old and trusted browser in favor of this new tool.
Okay, OP, I think I have a competitor. I work at KFC, so I see hambeasts like that ALL the time. Most of them are pretty well-behaved – I mean, you don’t fuck with your drug dealer, do you? And that’s what we are to these hordes of greasy stinking fat-asses.
