On Fridays I intend to post a humorous story. I can’t promise one every Friday though. I call these stories FNF meaning “Friday Night Funny”. To be absolutely honest while the core of these stories is true, I have to admit I might embellish them just a little.
My first story is “The Kryptonite Story”. I hope you enjoy it.
As Sophia from Golden Girls would open, “Picture it, Dolton, Illinois, USA. The year is 1978…”
A movie came out called “Superman” staring Christopher Reeve as Superman and Gene Hackman as the evil villain Lex Luthor. Of course I was going to see it. What kid wouldn’t want to see a Superman movie!
My favorite cinema for seeing movies was in Lansing Illinois in a mall called simply River Oaks. The theatre was behind the huge mall. I think I went with friends, because I had some money but didn’t see the movie with my parents.
Standing in the line at the concession stand, I saw a placard that the stand was selling a necklace. From what I remember it was a glowing rock on a chain, and it was called Kryptonite. It might have been just glow in the dark. Even though I would have liked to buy one, I didn’t have the pocket money after paying for my ticket and concessions. So I was contrite to just watch the movie and enjoy my popcorn.
The movie was awesome! Lots of special effects, and even through Luthor didn’t have any superpowers he still had all the presence of a good villain.
Later on, my Mom tells me that her and Dad were going to see the movie themselves. They were going to make a date night out of it for just the two of them. I think my Granny was going to stay with me while they went.
I told my Mom about the Kryptonite and that I really wanted to buy a piece of the jewelry but couldn’t. I liked the movie and wanted a souvenir to remember it. She said she would get me one.
Then my Mom comes home rather upset with me. “Why did you play such a horrible joke on your Mother?” I was confused. Why was she angry? “You have no idea how embarrassed I was!” I was still confused.
She calmed down a little, and I finally got a chance to talk to her and find out what went on…
To my horror I found out that she didn’t go with Dad to the River Oaks theatre at all. They apparently went to a different theatre. A theatre that didn’t sell the necklaces.
My Mom went up to the counter, and asked politely for the concession worker to sell her some Kryptonite. The theatre employee had no idea what she was talking about other than the obvious movie reference, and asks her, “And what are you intending to do with this Kryptonite Mrs. Luthor?! Do you think you can stop Superman?”
My Mom tries to explain to the employee that there was supposed to be jewelry that he was selling and she wanted a necklace souvenir. The clerk hadn’t a clue what she meant, as he never heard of such a thing.
So Mom thinks that I set the whole thing up as some sick joke to embarrass her. Which it wasn’t. Still not sure to this day if she believes the truth or not. Maybe this will help convince her. Cause if it was a joke I would have admitted it by now. And it wouldn’t have been as funny as this freak accident.
The End.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Perceptions of God
I consider myself a Christian, meaning that I believe in Jesus Christ. However, while I consider myself a spiritual person, I don’t consider myself a religious person. In point of fact, I am very distrustful of religion. This has to do with many things, which I will address in a later post.
Having grown up in the United States, Christianity is a primary faith. Although broken into several religions, there is a basic doctrine that encapsulates them all. The most powerful for me is the concept of the “Daddy God”, that God is a father and cares for us as such. This is a very sharp transition from the Old Testament where God was more of the vengeance and authoritarian variety.
My belief is that something changed in God as a result of sending his son down to Earth. For God is powerful, all knowing, immortal, and indestructible. Through Jesus I believe that God learned what it means to be human, what it means to be mortal. For while God is able to do anything, being completely vulnerable and living a finite existence isn’t something he wants to do.
With God being a father, then human existence is his son. Like any child we have grown up. In the Old Testament days we were toddlers, being told what to do and being sharply disciplined when we did wrong. God was caring for us by using fear in him.
Jesus came at a time when we had gotten a little older as a society, and brought about change in our concepts of God. However we were still children, who were unable to completely grasp all the concepts.
Two thousand years later, and I think we progressed to the point of being teenagers. We know a lot more than we used to, and we think very highly of ourselves. We are still developing and questioning the world around us. Fear doesn’t work very well, neither does physical discipline. We have grown to the point where to be disciplined we need to be reasoned with.
Atheism doesn’t work for me. At the end of a very delicious meal or feeling a cool breeze on a hot summer day, I have to feel that something wonderful put these things in place. Something intelligent and with purpose. I also need an anchor to turn to when I need help or when things don’t make sense to me. For me, that is God.
Having grown up in the United States, Christianity is a primary faith. Although broken into several religions, there is a basic doctrine that encapsulates them all. The most powerful for me is the concept of the “Daddy God”, that God is a father and cares for us as such. This is a very sharp transition from the Old Testament where God was more of the vengeance and authoritarian variety.
My belief is that something changed in God as a result of sending his son down to Earth. For God is powerful, all knowing, immortal, and indestructible. Through Jesus I believe that God learned what it means to be human, what it means to be mortal. For while God is able to do anything, being completely vulnerable and living a finite existence isn’t something he wants to do.
With God being a father, then human existence is his son. Like any child we have grown up. In the Old Testament days we were toddlers, being told what to do and being sharply disciplined when we did wrong. God was caring for us by using fear in him.
Jesus came at a time when we had gotten a little older as a society, and brought about change in our concepts of God. However we were still children, who were unable to completely grasp all the concepts.
Two thousand years later, and I think we progressed to the point of being teenagers. We know a lot more than we used to, and we think very highly of ourselves. We are still developing and questioning the world around us. Fear doesn’t work very well, neither does physical discipline. We have grown to the point where to be disciplined we need to be reasoned with.
Atheism doesn’t work for me. At the end of a very delicious meal or feeling a cool breeze on a hot summer day, I have to feel that something wonderful put these things in place. Something intelligent and with purpose. I also need an anchor to turn to when I need help or when things don’t make sense to me. For me, that is God.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Tipping
I listen a lot to National Public Radio (NPR) while at work. I find it entertaining, and more on the liberal side (which I tend to side with typically). So I am listening to an NPR intern Danielle Gerson berate the public for their tipping. Apparently her internship is over and she’ll likely be waiting tables until she gets another opportunity:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126285599
I consider myself a good tipper. For sit down table service I tip 15-20% for good service. I view the tipping situation as something entirely within my discretion. I have the power to measure how I felt the service was and tip accordingly.
However, I also see it within the scope of tipping to reduce the tip for unsatisfactory service. My biggest complaint is usually not being attentive to refills. Yeah, I think I have the iced tea drinking records in several of the restaurants I visit. But to only get one or two glasses of tea and have my glass empty most of my meal is not satisfactory. So I will often leave a token tip of some change. The reasoning behind this is to communicate to the server that I didn’t merely forget the tip; I am expressing my dissatisfaction with his/her service.
I know waiters and waitresses have tough jobs, and I try not to be unrealistic in my expectations. If the server is busy, I rather understand that my glass has not been full as often as I would like. However when I see the server walking by my table, noticing my empty glass, and doing nothing I have to admit it affects my tip. I was a server myself back in my college days, and I try to be empathetic.
I am a regular customer at a local Mexican place in town, when I walk in all the servers basically know what I will order before I even sit down. They know I am an iced tea fan and bring a whole pitcher to my table. Perfect, I never go dry and they aren’t caught running back and forth for refills. It is a perfect situation all around, and they keep me coming back as a regular.
I have to admit that I am really reluctant to tip more than 20%. I was reading someplace they were encouraging people to tip 25% and I personally think that is excessive. However there are cases where I do tip more than 20%, but such service goes way beyond the call of duty.
Pizza delivery drivers should also be tipped, because they are transporting your food to your door. They use their own car and also have to travel up two flights of stairs to get to me.
However, when it comes to carry out, I have to admit I am reluctant to tip. It doesn’t matter if you phone the order in or order it at the counter; you aren’t getting the service you would expect in a full service restaurant. They don’t have to manage refills and they hardly spend any time with you. Plus you would be expected to tip them before you consume your meal. How do you know they got it correctly put together until you get it home? Would you be justified in asking for your tip back if you had to travel back because they got your order wrong? I don’t tip servers at the counter of a fast food restaurant, why would I tip for carry out?
Tipping is an extremely interesting social invention. Basically the restaurant saves money by cutting the wages of the waitstaff because it is expected that they get tips. The public the waitstaff serves evaluates that service and determines if and how much a tip is warranted. This puts the waitstaff into an interesting situation, while the restaurant actually employs them; their actual boss is their customer.
So when tipping, I think you should view it this way: Imagine your boss who judges your performance and pay. If you don’t think your boss is fair, this is your opportunity to prove that you can be fair in evaluating the performance of your server. If you think your boss is a fair person, then you should reflect that behavior in your tips. You are the boss of that waitstaff in deciding on a tip, and that person should be evaluated fairly. That doesn’t mean accepting bad performance and paying for it anyway. It means recognizing hard work and good performance and rewarding appropriately.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126285599
I consider myself a good tipper. For sit down table service I tip 15-20% for good service. I view the tipping situation as something entirely within my discretion. I have the power to measure how I felt the service was and tip accordingly.
However, I also see it within the scope of tipping to reduce the tip for unsatisfactory service. My biggest complaint is usually not being attentive to refills. Yeah, I think I have the iced tea drinking records in several of the restaurants I visit. But to only get one or two glasses of tea and have my glass empty most of my meal is not satisfactory. So I will often leave a token tip of some change. The reasoning behind this is to communicate to the server that I didn’t merely forget the tip; I am expressing my dissatisfaction with his/her service.
I know waiters and waitresses have tough jobs, and I try not to be unrealistic in my expectations. If the server is busy, I rather understand that my glass has not been full as often as I would like. However when I see the server walking by my table, noticing my empty glass, and doing nothing I have to admit it affects my tip. I was a server myself back in my college days, and I try to be empathetic.
I am a regular customer at a local Mexican place in town, when I walk in all the servers basically know what I will order before I even sit down. They know I am an iced tea fan and bring a whole pitcher to my table. Perfect, I never go dry and they aren’t caught running back and forth for refills. It is a perfect situation all around, and they keep me coming back as a regular.
I have to admit that I am really reluctant to tip more than 20%. I was reading someplace they were encouraging people to tip 25% and I personally think that is excessive. However there are cases where I do tip more than 20%, but such service goes way beyond the call of duty.
Pizza delivery drivers should also be tipped, because they are transporting your food to your door. They use their own car and also have to travel up two flights of stairs to get to me.
However, when it comes to carry out, I have to admit I am reluctant to tip. It doesn’t matter if you phone the order in or order it at the counter; you aren’t getting the service you would expect in a full service restaurant. They don’t have to manage refills and they hardly spend any time with you. Plus you would be expected to tip them before you consume your meal. How do you know they got it correctly put together until you get it home? Would you be justified in asking for your tip back if you had to travel back because they got your order wrong? I don’t tip servers at the counter of a fast food restaurant, why would I tip for carry out?
Tipping is an extremely interesting social invention. Basically the restaurant saves money by cutting the wages of the waitstaff because it is expected that they get tips. The public the waitstaff serves evaluates that service and determines if and how much a tip is warranted. This puts the waitstaff into an interesting situation, while the restaurant actually employs them; their actual boss is their customer.
So when tipping, I think you should view it this way: Imagine your boss who judges your performance and pay. If you don’t think your boss is fair, this is your opportunity to prove that you can be fair in evaluating the performance of your server. If you think your boss is a fair person, then you should reflect that behavior in your tips. You are the boss of that waitstaff in deciding on a tip, and that person should be evaluated fairly. That doesn’t mean accepting bad performance and paying for it anyway. It means recognizing hard work and good performance and rewarding appropriately.
And so it begins...
In the beginning, I saw facebook, and it was good. However the 420-character limit per post was too limiting. So I needed a way to allow me to type more. I think I have so much more to say. So many stories to tell. So many opinions to give.
I called this blog the “Grimoire of Gergel”. A grimoire is a magical text. While this blog isn’t going to contain magical spells, incantations, or circles of power, I think it does have something to say about life and my view of same. So in essence it is a book of wisdom and wit that could be said to have magical properties upon the reader.
The stories and opinions are all my own. I am not intending to make this a factual text or a spiritual text. But rather as an outlet to how I think and feel about the universe. At times I think I can be rather spiritual, opinionated, and rather odd. I am sure that will be reflective in the things I write about.
So don’t hold me to any facts, as this isn’t that kind of blog. There are better sources if you want that. This is merely opinion, entertainment, and conjecture.
The challenge will be now that I have a basically unlimited amount of space, for me to pace myself. Though I think quickly this will turn into what would be a massive grimoire should it ever be printed.
I called this blog the “Grimoire of Gergel”. A grimoire is a magical text. While this blog isn’t going to contain magical spells, incantations, or circles of power, I think it does have something to say about life and my view of same. So in essence it is a book of wisdom and wit that could be said to have magical properties upon the reader.
The stories and opinions are all my own. I am not intending to make this a factual text or a spiritual text. But rather as an outlet to how I think and feel about the universe. At times I think I can be rather spiritual, opinionated, and rather odd. I am sure that will be reflective in the things I write about.
So don’t hold me to any facts, as this isn’t that kind of blog. There are better sources if you want that. This is merely opinion, entertainment, and conjecture.
The challenge will be now that I have a basically unlimited amount of space, for me to pace myself. Though I think quickly this will turn into what would be a massive grimoire should it ever be printed.
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