In which I’m not judging

On August 14, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Work3 Comments

… well, okay, I probably am. But I’m really trying not to judge. Especially since the thing I’m being judgy about directly benefits me. So take this post with as much salt as you feel necessary. I probably shouldn’t even be writing it.

(He said, before continuing to write.)

This was a slow week at work. I was closing about the same number of sales as anyone else, but for whatever reason it seemed like most of my sales ended up for low-dollar items and not anything really worth writing home about. When I make 5% commission on sales I can’t get too excited about selling a $200 bed to somebody, right? And the couple of bigger opportunities I had this week I wasn’t able to close for one reason or another. I walked into work today needing a great day in order to end up with an average week.

And, well, I got it, ending the day with a sale that ended up being damn near seven thousand dollars after taxes and delivery– my current high-water mark for a single sale. It was a mother and daughter, a random walk-in off the street, and they were setting up her new apartment for when she starts college. She literally got new stuff for every room of the house; a living room set, a bedroom set, a dining table and chairs, some chairs for the bar, the works. And then as I’m going over everything with them to make sure I didn’t miss anything, Mom says “Oh, did we buy you a desk?” And we hadn’t, so we went and looked at desks.

And this 19-year-old kid picks out a thousand dollar executive desk. And for some reason that was the detail that had me questioning the sanity of the entire endeavor. You know this kid’s gonna move, like, five times in the next eight years, right? Do you really want to be dropping this kind of cash on a houseful of Grown Person Shit so that she and her friends can fornicate and puke on it for the next four years? How many times do you want to move that heavy-assed executive desk? A king-size storage bed? For a 19-year-old?

And then Mom drops $5000 in cash on my desk in front of me and writes a check for the remainder, and it hit me: I’m looking at this all wrong, because these people clearly have so much goddamn money that it doesn’t matter if she wrecks it. She can leave that shit in the apartment and just move and they can afford to completely re-outfit her in her next place. They’ve got money like that. It doesn’t matter.

I suspect, what with Notre Dame starting back up in the next couple of weeks, that this is not going to be the last time I experience this. And, as someone who just made something like $315 for like twenty minutes of not-very-hard work for these (it should be pointed out, very nice*) people, it’s not like I have a lot of room to complain. But… damn. Some of these folks just do not live like me, y’know?

(*) Mom, after the “do you need a desk?” moment, actually looked at me and apologized for “being such pains in the ass.” I looked her straight in the eye and told her that at the amount she was spending I was willing to put up with about fifteen times as much pain in the ass before it became a problem, and I wasn’t kidding.

New hotnesses

On April 4, 2016April 4, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Photography1 Comment

The ones in the middle, but in white. Arriving next week. Woo!

In which I am full of contradictions

On November 22, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews12 Comments

So I discovered today that I can’t handle Costco. I’ve never been in one before, and one just opened nearby, and my mom and wife wanted to go, so I tagged along. I’ve never in my life had such a visceral negative reaction to a store before. I hated the place– from the fact that there aren’t any damn signs anywhere (even the bathrooms aren’t labeled) to the fact that the place where you walk in is nowhere near any registers to the utter fucking randomness of the layout– within a 15-foot radius you could find housewares, fresh seafood on ice, liquor, and piles of leather jackets, an item that should never be in a pile. I’d had enough after five minutes and told Bek and my mom that I’d be in the car; I had my phone with me to keep me entertained so they could take as long as they wanted.

On the way back to my car, it hit me just how much the place is like a casino. No signs, no markers, everything is set up to disorient you and keep you lost and wandering. And the $50 a year fee for the right to shop there as the icing on the cake. No thanks; I’ve had enough naked capitalism lately and this place, despite having a stellar reputation for how they treat their employees, is one of the most grotesquely capitalist places I’ve ever had the misfortune of entering. And I’m not even generally that down on capitalism, although it does get worse this time of year; it should be noted that the very next thing I did after leaving Costco was go to Best Buy and buy a new iPad. But, still… guh. If a store is going to try and manipulate my behavior I’d prefer it if it wasn’t so goddamned obvious. I don’t give a damn how cheap their diapers are, I’d rather go to fucking Wal-Mart, and I have literally never before in my life said the words “I’d rather go to Wal-Mart.”

Actually, that’s not true, because I still won’t be going to Wal-Mart. But walking into a Wal-Mart doesn’t immediately give me the creeping screamers the way Costco did. And note that all this is before we get to the fact that it was the second Saturday the place had been open and it was crammed full of filthy, stinking humanity. I’d have hated it empty; the people had nothing to do with it.

So. I’m crabby today, is the point. How’re you?

In which I wasn’t mad until you apologized

On January 19, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized11 Comments

I haven’t talked much about the Great Target Data Breachenationing of 2013, mostly because, honestly, I haven’t been terribly concerned about it– I was one of the ones theoretically affected, because there’s a Target basically in my back yard and I shop there all the time, but I also generally keep a really close eye on my bank account and so I would have noticed any suspicious charges basically immediately. I feel like for the most part Target has behaved as a relatively responsible corporate citizen while all this has been going on, my bank hasn’t made the decision to fuck me unduly like some other banks did; no big deal, right?

I got an email from Target a few days ago; so did my wife and so did, very likely, a whole lot of you, offering me a free year of credit monitoring as a way to make amends. I’d love to know how much coin Target had to shell out to make this happen or if Experian is just figuring they can make it up on the back end by convincing a shitton of new customers to keep going after that year is up. I don’t currently have any kind of credit monitoring turned on, although I have in the past, and I’m considering taking them up on their offer. The email is, generally, very apologetic about the whole affair, and it appears that they’ve located a seventeen-year-old (of course it was a teenager) in St. Petersburg who wrote the malware that made the hack possible.

It didn’t hit me until yesterday that, at least for me personally, there’s sort of a big question hanging over my head about the whole thing, and that question didn’t come to light until I got that email:

How the hell did Target get my email address?

I have never ordered anything from Target.com. Target doesn’t ask for emails as a part of doing business. I have– and I checked, and since I use gmail my email archive goes back to forever— never received any emails from them before. I don’t have a Target credit card, and never have, and certainly didn’t in December when the breach happened. We had a wedding registry with them six years ago, but that was with my wife’s email; mine wasn’t on it.

I can think of one way and one way only that they might have it, which is that I applied for a Target field trip grant for the DC trip this year– but that wasn’t attached to any bank or debit card information, and the address and phone number I provided them was my school address and phone number, so even if they’re cross-matching databases the address and phone number wouldn’t match what they (might?) have through my debit card. They could, maybe, have done a match with my name and town and made an assumption– but that itself assumes that they’re willing to have a pretty fair number of false positives, and also that they’re working their asses off to collect and consolidate customer data that they have, in turn, then never used until this data breach. If they got it from my bank, I kinda feel like my bank ought to have told me that, and they didn’t.

I find myself more curious about how they got my email than I am about how the hack was able to happen. I don’t know if that indicates skewed priorities on my part or not. And maybe if you’re going to send a giant email to millions of people about how your data collection process got screwed up and compromised, you include a line somewhere about how you got the information that allowed you to contact them in the first place.

Is that a plank in my eye?

On November 29, 2013November 29, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, Parenting, Politics3 Comments

So here’s a novel way to have Thanksgiving: don’t have any turkey, because your oven betrays you again and the turkey doesn’t even come out of the goddamn oven until everything else is on the table and cooling, and then you find out (because you didn’t make the turkey, and you’ve never made a turkey, and you didn’t know this) that a turkey has to “rest” for half a goddamn hour after coming out of the oven and therefore everything else is going to be well and truly goddamned eaten before the turkey is even ready.

S’fun. You should do it. We call it Side Dish Thanksgiving. My mother did some sort of corn casserole thing that was basically just corn and sautéed onions and bloody cream cheese, of all things. It was delicious. We did Thug Kitchen’s stuffing recipe (needed a teensy bit more liquid, but otherwise great) and Albert Burneko’s mashed potatoes with roasted garlic, because we can’t cook a meal around here anymore without referencing either Thug Kitchen or Foodspin and really why would you even want to cook without using recipes from one of the two anyway. And green bean casserole and crescent rolls and a multitude of pies (which is the proper collective for pie) and two different kinds of deviled eggs, because have you ever made deviled eggs with sriracha? Holy God.

I am not going to be shopping today.

I’m getting more conflicted about holidays as I get older. I boycotted Christmas entirely last year; I made it clear to everyone that I wasn’t buying any presents for anyone and they were not to buy anything for me either; I really want to raise the boy in a way that he grows up substantially less materialistic than I am and one of the main ways to do that, I think, is to cut the emphasis on getting stuff around holidays.

Sounds great, right? All principled and shit, until I get to the part where I tell you that I ordered a PS3 (not a typo; 3) from Amazon yesterday so that I didn’t have to go stand in line at Gamestop at midnight to fight for one of the eight exactly-identically-ridiculous PS3 packages that they have in-store. A 250 GB PS3, which can’t be had for $199 by itself, plus two games, one of which is the entire reason I want a PS3, for $199, plus Saturday shipping for less than tax would have been. It’ll show up tomorrow sometime.

Which is as far as my “no materialism/no shopping on Thanksgiving/no shopping on Black Friday” thing gets me: I spent $200 on an electronic doohickey that I don’t actually need, on Thanksgiving, so that a low-wage Amazon employee can package it and mail it on Black Friday so that somebody else can scramble to get it to me on a Saturday by 8:00. Which should be about when I’m getting home from work. So, yeah, I’m all big and bad and principled and won’t go shopping on Black Friday… because I ordered my shit online on Thanksgiving.

Maybe I work on my own materialism before I try reprogramming the boy.