Courtesy of Google Maps, every place I went in the entire month of April. It’s usually a much bigger map…
Category: Brooklyn
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Thanks for the reminder…
Playing Wordbubbles on my phone just now:
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Zipcar Tries to Ruin Christmas
Regular readers of this blog know that I have been using Zipcar since the very early days, over 10 years. I live in Brooklyn and happily do not own a car, in large part due to Zipcar. I’m a happy Zipcar member. Really.
Most of the time it’s easy to reserve a Zipcar, but there are certain days of the year (Memorial Day, 4th of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas) where you have to book well in advance. Our Christmas routine is to open presents at our place and then drive up to my wife’s sister’s place, about an hour and a half away, for dinner. Then we drive back after dinner.
Why such a quick trip? We have a dog Coby who is awesome but has one problem, he gets horribly carsick. I’m sure us not having a car and rarely driving is part of the problem. He’s never gotten used to driving. Yes, there’s doggie medicine for this but he still pukes and is generally miserable. So we just try to avoid driving with him. He’s a mature dog and can handle a long time between walks in a pinch so this means we can just leave him at home. Sure we could put him in a kennel, but we’d have to do it on Christmas Eve and my daughters couldn’t stand waking up on Christmas morning without Coby.
So a month before Christmas I reserve a Zipcar from 8 am to 11 pm on December 25th. All good.
Today my wife decided she wants to stay at her sister’s overnight and she finds a friend who can take Coby around 10 am Christmas morning until the next day. So I go on the Zipcar site to see if we can extend the reservation. The car shows up on the site as “unavailable unavailable” and when I try to modify the reservation I just get errors. That’s obviously not good.
So I call them up. I am informed that my car has been put into a maintenance window and is unavailable. And the only other car at that location is a cargo van. I point out that it’s Christmas Day and are you f*#$ing kidding me? The guy tells me there’s another car only 45 minutes away from our place. A 45 minute drive. At this point I suggest that maybe they not do car maintenance on Christmas Day and just give me the original car. That goes nowhere so I ask for the guy’s manager. He says there’s a long hold for managers. I say I’ll wait. So I do. After 15 minutes or so or bad hold music, there’s a break in the music and I get ready to battle the manager. But the line goes dead. They hung up on me.
I call them back and there must have been visible steam coming out of my ears because my wife tells me not to go crazy on the guy. I calmly tell the new guy that my Christmas Day reservation was messed up and I was hung up on and that I am really upset. I think he got the idea.
Guy #2 was more competent than guy #1. He did a better car search and found something only 15 minutes away. He said Zipcar would pay for an Uber to get there. And he was able to extend the reservation until noon the next day (which as you recall was the original reason I noticed the reservation was messed up). So a bit of a pain to get the car, but we’ll live. Christmas is not ruined.
But seriously Zipcar, somewhere in your algorithm is logic that puts a car into a maintenance window with no regard for existing reservations or critical holidays. In the early years, I’d write that off to growing pains. But you’ve been doing this for a long time. You know the critical holidays. You know you can’t just cancel reservations on those days. If I didn’t try to extend the reservation when would I have discovered this? Christmas morning?
Zipcar needs to figure out a better way to handle this…
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Central Park Tower – Oh My
Via NY Yimby, Central Park Tower Officially Tops Out 1,550 Feet Above Midtown, Becoming World’s Tallest Residential Building. The views are amazing but damn, that’s a bit too much for me…
Check out the article to see all the views, wow.
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Sorry Atlanta
I visited my favorite bar/pizza joint knowing that my favorite bartender, who is from Atlanta, was there. I didn’t really care about the game, but just on his behalf it may have been the most painful first inning I’ve ever watched…
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Food Coma
Yesterday was one of our favorite days, the Atlantic Antic street fair. We live on Atlantic, so this is a mile of food, etc. right out our door. You can see previous blog posts about it.
My youngest daughter and I like to walk the street around 10:30 while they are setting up.
The corn stands are always ready early. She’s amused at having roast corn for breakfast.
There’s music and kid’s stuff and vendors but for me this street fair is all about food. Things I ate include:
Spanish church food:
Local high end butcher shop:
- Beef Brisket
- Pulled Pork
- Fried Chicken (super good)
German stand had Bauernwurst
A Chilean street food stand was a big hit with this thing:
It’s a hot dog with guacamole, salsa, diced tomatoes and Merken seasoning. Yummy. There was an Italian lamb skewer stand that was awesome. And of course we had the standards, roast corn, sausage and peppers and the fried potato on a stick thing:
The local gumbo joint did a gator roast but I didn’t get any this year. They limited it to only being sold after 5:00 (the Antic runs from 12 – 6) and we just weren’t near there at the right time. It looked impressive:
Finally, this stand has been there the last few years and this year it was literally right in front of our place, the first thing we saw as we walked out the door:
These are Japanese octopus balls, but for the record, I did not eat Karls Balls…
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18 Years
Hard to believe 9/11 was 18 years ago. We lost a bunch of friends…
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Le Labo Santal 33
Om Malik has an interesting eclectic blog as well as a great url (om.co). He’s from New York but now lives in San Fran as a tech VC partner. It’s for paragraphs like this, about a visit to NYC, that I read his blog. It’s the strong smell of hustle…
Back in my (current) hometown, I saunter. Here, like a pitcher who suddenly finds a reserve of energy in the middle of the season, my pace picks up. I smell the summer as I move. You know the smell of New York: a heady blend of stench from the gutters, cigarette smoke, and sidewalk stalls selling everything from hotdogs to kebabs. It’s the strong smell of hustle.
And apparently, the Mayor has declared Le Labo Santal 33 the official fragrance of the season. Every girl walking on the street leaves a whiff of it behind. All the beautiful ladies (and they are all lovely) are lost in their own worlds, listening to their AirPods, which seem to be more commonplace now than white sneakers were a few seasons ago. It is no surprise that Apple’s earnings from wearables and accessories are going through the roof.
He’s also a photographer. He splits that pastime into a separate blog:
Caught in a downpour in Manhattan, New York -
Welcome to NYC
Sidewalk truth…
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Tripping Up
Thankfully not my subway stop…
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 