Archive for the Adventures I Got My Dumb Ass Into Category

Bizzarro Grocery Universes

Posted in Adventures I Got My Dumb Ass Into on October 14, 2008 by themaroon

As I’ve moved around the country a bit, one thing that’s always struck me is just how weird going to a new grocery store is. Every area has two major grocery chains, and you fall into the habit of going to a particular one, usually the closest to you, but every now and then you have a reason to go to the other.

When you go to the other one, it’s like every single little detail is different, but they all add up to the same exact thing. It’s a lot like visiting a foreign country. They have all of the same stuff, but it all looks different, or is in a different place, or is just a little off in some tiny imperceptible manner, but it’s so close that you know that you could get used to it, and if you did, you know your former place would seem just as alien. You spend your week walking around the strange new world until it doesn’t seem that strange anymore, and then you go back home and do it all over again.

It’s amazing how every single thing changes from one store to another. One has metal carts, the other plastic. One has the Advantage Card, the other has the Ultimate Card. The entry is always by the produce department, but sometimes the rest of the store is to the left, and sometimes it’s to the right. One has Food Club generic brands, the other has Topco. One has red order separators with the name of the local newspaper written on them, the other has blue with USA Today.

I always feel like I’m in some sort of bizarro universe, where everything is the opposite. I’m waiting for the cashier to say “goodbye” when she first sees me, and “hello, and screw you for shopping here douchebag” when she’s done. The bagger will then throw my groceries haphazardly into the cart and say “please don’t ever come again.” And I won’t, because I like my grocery store, and this place gives me the creeps.

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This San Francisco Cab!

Posted in Adventures I Got My Dumb Ass Into on October 19, 2006 by themaroon

I think I’ve mentioned before that I hate cabs. I had that in mind as I was getting into one at the San Francisco airport yesterday but, as usual, I was trying my best to be positive. I was at the tail end of a week long vacation and had an early morning flight today, so I had driven back to the city a day early. We checked into the Marriot right by the airport, threw all of our stuff in the room, then drove the baby blue Prius we’d spent the last few days tooling around Napa in back to Fox Rent-A-Car, figuring we’d ditch it early and save ourselves time in the morning. As planned we took Fox’s shuttle back to the airport and then jumped in a cab to get us to the hotel, which was one exit further down the expressway.

The cabbie said hello and asked us where we were going and I quickly realized that that was about the extent of his English vocabulary. I told him “Marriott please,” and off we went. I was busy admiring the scenery, but after what seemed to have been at least five or ten minutes of highway driving I started wondering where we were headed. The hotel was only two miles from the airport, and I was pretty sure we’d gone at least double that distance on a road that didn’t look familiar. That’s when Chad asked him which Marriot he was taking us to. It turned out he was taking us to one in the city.

I’ll admit this one might have been my mistake. I simply assumed one of the following things were true:

  1. There was only one Marriott in San Francisco.
  2. If there was more than one Marriott in San Francisco the cab driver would have asked which one we were going to.
  3. If there was more than one Marriott in San Francisco and the cab driver didn’t ask which one we were staying at he would have defaulted to the closest one which, I also assumed, was ours since it was less than two miles away.
  4. Even if the cab driver had no idea how many Marriotts were in San Francisco the bellman who hailed the cab when I told him I wanted to go to “the Marriott” would have clarified for me, since that’s really the only reason for his existence. They aren’t there just to wave, I can do that myself. They’re there to figure out where I’m going and inform the cabbie.

But I quickly realized that all of those assumptions were false. There was more than one Marriott (no shocker), the cab driver knew that but didn’t ask which one, he defaulted to the one farthest away, and the bell man had heard Marriott and not bothered to ask which. In a bus I might have tried to compute the odds of all of those things occurring, but at that moment all I could think was “Damn, I hate cabs.”

So at that point the cab driver had two options. His first option was to get off at the nearest exit, turn around, take us to the airport Marriott, and collect a $40 cab fee, plus tip, for a trip that should have cost $10. His second option was to start yelling at us “How I know airport?!?! This San Francisco cab! This San Francisco cab!”, then proceed to call his friends on his cell phone and tell them, in Korean, about the two donkeys who didn’t specify which Marriott they wanted to go to while taking us back to the airport. Guess which option he chose. And before you place your wager keep in mind what I told Chad when we were back at the hotel, which is that it typically isn’t a lifetime of good decision making that leads one to a career in the cab industry.

So we headed back to the airport with him alternately talking on the cell phone and screaming something incomprehensible at us. His phone conversation was hilarious. It sounded something like “dai hoc hong wen Marriott ching chow chun San Francisco, choo chong ching Marriott.” I mean, if you’re going to make fun of us with your friends at least try to hide “Marriott” by using whatever is Korean for hotel.

That’s when I got pissed. Up until that point, despite my hatred for cabs, bell men who don’t do their job, and people who live and work in a country and don’t even passably speak its language, I was willing to foot the bill because in the end it was my fault. I should have just said “airport Marriott please”. I was going to just pay whatever cab fare was necessary to get me back to the hotel and be annoyed about it until the morning, when I discovered that my brand new $500 pair of headphones was missing and had something far worse to be annoyed about. But when the cabbie started ridiculing us in a foreign language and then yelling at us all bets were off.

At that point I decided to egg him on a little. I asked him why he didn’t ask us which Marriott. He said again “This San Francisco cab! This San Francisco cab!” I wasn’t really sure what he meant. Did he think that I thought it was a Boston cab or something? Of course it was a San Francisco cab, I got it at the San Francisco airport. What else would it be? I asked him what he meant but his response wasn’t even vaguely intelligible. I told him that he should have asked us which Marriott and that that was standard practice in the cab industry, and again his response was excited but entirely unintelligible.

So we got back to the airport and he started complaining to the bell man. The bell man was also Asian but obviously not Korean (I suspect Japanese) and spoke English with only a slight accent so he couldn’t understand the cab driver any better than we could. I was actually glad for that, the fact that he was asking what was going on made me think he had some sort of decision making ability and if he was fluent in Korean I wouldn’t have liked our chances much. But he seemed just as annoyed at the cabbie as I was, maybe more so because he had, at some point in his life, apparently done the only sensible thing and learned to speak English, which I can’t imagine is easy for someone whose native tongue is entirely different. I hated French class, and half of the words are at least almost the same as their English equivalents, so I couldn’t imagine learning a language where none of the words were the same. But I know that if I ever move to a country that speaks a different language I will learn it and despise those who don’t bother to even more than I do now.

So the bellman promptly shut the front passenger door, mid-sentence (and when he did that I knew we had won), and came back to ask us what happened. We told him and he said that the Marriott we wanted was in Burlingame. I asked him how we were supposed to know that and told him that in any other city the cabbie would ask “which Marriott?” If it wasn’t for the fact that he was obviously going to side with us I would have pointed out that it was his job to prevent that sort of mess, but it since he was in our corner it didn’t seem prudent. He seemed to grudgingly accept our argument that the cabbie should have asked, which was good because it turned out that part of his job apparently was to resolve disputes between customers and cab drivers. The cabbie asked him what to do about the $45 fare and the bellman told him with a shrug that he was going to have to eat it. I was rather happy about that because at that point there was no way in hell I was paying that driver a cent. I would have spent all night complaining to whoever was in charge about how rude he had been to us if I had to, just on general principle, but I would have suffered just about anything short of a night in jail before giving him the fare. And while I would have gotten some sick pleasure in trying my best to get the driver fired I really just wanted to get back to the room and play some Tetris on my DS.

After the bellman absolved us of payment he told us that there was a Marriott shuttle just one level above where we were standing so we hopped the free bus back to the hotel. And you better believe the first question we asked when we got on the shuttle was “is this going to the airport Marriott?”

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Why I Hate Cabs

Posted in Adventures I Got My Dumb Ass Into, Stuff That Pisses Me Off on July 24, 2006 by themaroon

One question that’s plagued humanity for thousands of years now is “What is hell like?” One great movie (Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey) put forth the theory that Hell is whatever you fear most in life. If that’s true then my Hell is an eternal cab ride.

I hate riding in cabs. Hate, hate, hate riding in cabs. You get into a smelly old American car (Hondas go to heaven, Fords go to hell) and pay someone who barely speaks English a per-minute rate that would make a phone sex operator jealous to take you on the most circuitous possible route to your destination. And all that would even just be slightly sub-purgatory if it wasn’t for the fact that the cabbie always wants to talk to you.

Why is that? Why can’t cabbies just drive silently? None of them ever do. Not one. I can’t imagine the average customer wants to talk to their cab driver. All the conversation I want is me telling them where to go when I first get in the car and them telling me how much it cost at the end. We’ll both exchange “have a nice day”s at the end and then go our separate ways. Deal?

I usually only ride in cabs when I go to Las Vegas. But it’s gotten to the point where I just rent cars now so I can avoid them. And when I absolutely must take a cab I try to find the least Caucasian looking cabbie I can. It’s the white guys who want to be your best friend. Indians or Mexicans may engage in a little small talk, but whitey always wants to know every last detail about your life, as if a situation might some day occur in which they can use the fact that they know your third grade teacher’s name to their advantage.

On every trip to Vegas I get one cabbie who is totally insane, the way only a middle-class white male can be. Last time it was “Blowjobio guy”, so named because he called The Bellagio, our destination, The Blowjobio at least ten times on the way there. And every time he did so he looked at the three of us waiting for us to break into tears laughing. I just wanted to yell “BAHAHAHAHA. Did you hear that guys? He called the Bellagio the Blowjobio! Get it? Blowjobio! That’s funny because it has blowjob in it, and that’s a sexual term! Blowjobio! Hahahaha! That’s funny!” But he was behind the wheel and we were barreling down Tropicana at 60 miles per hour, so I decided to exercise a little restraint.

(I should mention that I’m the sort of person for whom that sort of restraint does not come naturally. I always, in the back of my mind, weigh the odds on jokes like that. It’s my own form of dementia and I expect that one day, after it causes me to die in some horrific manner, it will even be named after me. Maroon’s Syndrome has a nice ring to it.

Often something so funny pops in my head that I’m willing to risk life and limb just to say it. I’d probably dodge a draft, but I’ll gladly throw myself in harm’s way for comedy. And the blowjobio monologue, if delivered properly, might have been the funniest thing I’d have ever said, but the risk was high (other than the small probability of him intentionally driving off a bridge, there’s the risk that he would kick us out of his cab for my being an ass, forcing us to walk miles through the 110 degree heat). Still I probably would have just gone ahead and said it (he might have been dumb enough to not realize I was making fun of him, that happens more than you might think) but I didn’t feel comfortable potentially putting my two roommates in that situation. Instead I just chose to make fun of the guy with Ethan and Mike for the next two weeks and then get this blog entry out of it.)

That cabbie had numerous crazy quirks (a bad sense of humor isn’t really insanity) that I won’t bother to recount here, but was still only the third nuttiest cab driver I’ve had this year. Maybe it’s just been a banner year for loonies in the Las Vegas taxi industry. Or, maybe, like in poker, I’m just running bad in the cab driver department. Or maybe cab drivers are just fucking insane.

Still, even the craziest of cab drivers are tolerable when the conversation stays away from the topic of poker. A couple years ago, when I was new to the whole going to Vegas ten times a year thing, I would gladly tell cabbies why I was there. “I’m here for the World Series of Poker” or “I’m here for the World Poker Tour Championship”. Or, if asked what I do for a living (possibly the most common American small talk question) I’d tell them “I’m a professional poker player.” It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I quickly learned that there is nobody in the world I’d less rather discuss my career with than a Las Vegas cab driver. Not that I particularly care for talking about it with anyone; I usually just tell people I’m a writer to avoid being asked the same questions over and over. But cab drivers are the worst. They come up with the most idiotic questions known to man. “So, if you have an ace of clubs and a five of diamonds, do you fold it or call it? What about an ace of diamonds and a five of clubs?”

If I’m ever a cabbie (and it’s certainly not impossible that I someday will be) I’m only going to speak when spoken to. I’m not going to ask people what they do for a living or why they are in town, unless the conversation that they began leads to that point. I’m also not going to play hair metal on the radio, because that’s just wrong and possibly criminal, but that’s a topic for another entry.

Either way, if any cab drivers ever read this please don’t take this as a scathing indictment of you and your peers. It’s just that when I get into a cab I don’t want to talk. I’m not a cab talker. A lot of people aren’t. I just want to get to where I’m going as quickly and quietly as possible. I’m sure some of your customers would love to talk, and they will initiate a conversation. If you want to talk to someone for hours on end, get a wife. They sell them in Russia for less than you charge to take me from Mandalay Bay to the Bellagio, and I’d be more than happy to purchase one for you if we can just make that trek down The Strip in silence.

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