Archive for October, 2006

Despite Maths Chris’s attempt to conceal his late night antics, Sarann noticed that he had aquired a hickey of recent. It’s somewhat of a change to the traditional scarring inflicted by B but nether the less fits with the pattern of her obsession with affecting raw flesh.

It’s the little things that annoy you.

“Can I have a beef and chedder toasted deli sandwich please?”
“We don’t do the beef and chedder any more, it’s now beef and red onion. Is that ok?”
“You don’t do the beef one anymore?”
“Yes but it’s now beef and red onion. It still has cheese on.”
“I’ll have a quarter pounder meal please”

Why is it people stop at the menu board then when they pull up to window one and I ask them what I can get them they stop and have a little think. Seriously, you’ve just been parked at the menu board looking at what you want, decided, then driven round to place your order, why do you need to think about this?

So today I was working window one (the drive-thru bit where we take orders). It’s easier than working front counter as you just take the orders, you don’t have to assemble everything. Though you do have to pass out straws, napkins, etc. As well as doing breakfast menu I went all the way today though and did main menu too, how fancy is that?

Back on point, my quote wasn’t really a little thing. Because I’d already selected deli meal and so the only way I could remove that was to total it which in order to do I had to specify a deli sandwich and a drink too. I then had to void both the sandwich and the drink each one requiring me to swipe a managers card through the till. How annoying is that? Every time a customer changes their mind or you get something wrong in order to remove it you need a manger card. Why? What’s the point?

Other than that is was quite cool, it’s doing something new. I’m sure it will be boring once I get used to it but at the moment it’s interesting. It’s weird though as like breakfast, when you have nothing to do, you actually have nothing to do. On closes or indeed in the kitchen generally there is always something to do. Wipe down counters, get more stock out, tidy up, etc but on window one there really isn’t that much to do. I found myself wandering into the kitchen to tidy, re-stock and sort out chicken orders when they were waiting on something.

CNET TV has come out of beta – it’s now a finished product. I don’t know why. It’s awful. I think one of the reasons YouTube worked so well because it buffered so well that you simply didn’t get the video stopping half way through while it buffers some more. CNET TV hasn’t heard of buffering apparently, it gets around 5 seconds or so before stopping and buffering for about 20 seconds. I’m on quite a fast connection and never have a problem with any other video streams so CNET really need to work on that if they think they have a finished product.

EDIT: Hehe, now their player has died all together. Great job guys :p.

I came across Firefox 2.0 and news of the latest release candidate for it. While it is looking good for improvements on 1.5, I was horrifed to discover that the close tab button has replaced by individual close tab buttons on each tabs. That is probably the most annoying feature I have ever experianced on a browser and so I’m hoping there is a way to change it back to how it is in 1.5 though I’m not sure how much chance there is of that.

Monday night brought another session of karaoke in the Old Bar, this time with everything finally working and they had even found the rest of their collection of karaoke CDs (which was like 80-90% of what they had) so there was a decent choice for Ant to entertain us all.

I also joined him kicking off with a good bit of Britney Spears’ Crazy and gradually working my way through S Club 7’s Reach, Blink 182’s What’s My Age Again and Alanis Morisette’s Ironic by the end of the night.

Past like 11, 11:30ish it had really thinned out, we were about the only group still left in there by kicking out time. Well good night.

Got out of work about 3ish last night / this morning and went over to pick Michelle up for some late night random driving about. I really, really hate Sunday trading laws in that the supermarkets are closed at like 4am two nights a week, Saturday and Sunday, the two nights I would geniunely want to use a 24 hour supermarket given I tend to work the Saturday and Sunday closes.

We tried about 3-4 different supermarket petrol stations none of which were open and ended up at Texaco (after dropping by the Tesco car park to shout at Rich for telling me the Sainsburys one would be). We then dropped by my McDs and then went off in search of stars. We ended up going as far as Otley but still couldn’t see any. Maybe they aren’t there anymore?

Ok, time for a rant. I’m sick and tired of people almost looking down on me whenever I mention I have a credit card. I actually have 2. And I’m applying for a third one. (There are reasons, I’m planning to cancel one and there are reasons for having two which I’m not going to go into here but ask me if you really want to know).

As soon as I mention “oh, I have a credit card” it’s all “oh well you’re going to end up in loads of debt you won’t be able to pay off.” No, I really won’t. Just because you may be a retard who can’t handle money, doesn’t mean I am. For your information I’ve had a credit card for a year and I’ve done just fine with my repayments thank you. And that is really the only bad side to credit cards, the fact you can get into debt if you’re not careful (even though students get really low credit limits anyway).

So with that in mind, here are the arguments for having credit cards. First of all, and I think this reason makes it silly not to have a credit card. Making purchases online. If you buy something that never arrives or you get ripped off, what are you going to do? Chances are loose your money and feel bad about it. But if you have paid for it on your credit card, your credit card company will refund you. Debit card purchases aren’t protected like this. PayPal’s “buyer insurance” is limited and doesn’t cover most internet purchases.” Your credit card does. Buying things on your credit card is the best fraud protection out there.

Secondly, if you need to buy anything in an emergency you have you’re card.

Thirdly, if you are using your card so you don’t need to carry as much cash around. Therefore if you get mugged they won’t get your cash and you can simply cancel your credit card as soon as you get home, they mail you out a new one and everything is good.

Forthly, as well as giving you protection online it more simply allows you to buy things online. I’ve come across instances where online stores will only take Visa or Mastercard, without one you simply can’t get what you want.

Indeed, to extend that point some highstreet stores won’t take all cards. Lots of places didn’t take my Solo card and just the other day I was in Debenhams who were telling customers trying to pay with a Visa Electron card that they couldn’t accept it. That’s one of the biggest department stores in the UK.

Fifthly, I’ve just applied for a credit card that gives me cash back on everything I buy just for using the card. They are giving me money to use this card. Why would I not want that?

Finally, you get a period of a month or two between spending the money and having to pay for it. That is a month or two, the money you have spent is still sitting in your bank account earning interest.

So, to conclude. I fully understand some (indeed many) people have problems managing money and so should avoid credit cards as they can cause lots of debt. But used wisely, credit cards are amazing things so for those of you who like to preach the evils of credit cards please hold your judgement and take a minute to consider the fact it is you who has the problem managing money, not us.

I love the internet industry. It’s probably the only industry in the world where it can be better to be the new and tiny tech start-up than the massive corporation. Being big means nothing. It didn’t save any of the major search engines from Google kicking their ass. A decade latter and it didn’t save Google from YouTube kicking their ass.

More recently however the response from the established media is just to buy out the new start-ups. There are a million examples of this that I can’t think of but here’s a quick few: Google bought Picasa and Blogger, Yahoo bought Launch, Fox bought MySpace. Those are bad examples as they aren’t really Web 2.0 except MySpace in which case Fox is old media rather than established new media. But I hope you can get the point.

Yahoo are currently in talks to buy Facebook while recently Google closed a deal to buy YouTube. The price was a hefty $1.6 billion adding yet more fuel to the idea that Fox got an absolute bargin when paying only a third of that for MySpace.

Is this a good thing though? I wasn’t big on the idea. I was naive enough to believe YouTube CEO Chad Hurley when he said he wasn’t planning to sell out (I know, I know but I like to believe there are some people out there like myself who are in it for the business and not purely for the money, he seemed like one of them). YouTube was amazing because it so powerful even though it was still an independent and brand new tech start-up (it’s only been around like 18 months or so) and there aren’t really any problems for Google to come in and solve like Fox could have done for MySpace (but haven’t for some reason).

Of course it was a good move for Google – their currently offering, Google Video sucks. It really does. Yeah it’s an ok service but it’s not the type of offering an exciting new tech start-up would roll out. It was the type of offering a large corporation that can leverage it’s existing userbase would roll out. YouTube rolled out the exciting tech start-up style offering, Google just isn’t that company any more.

Last night I got 14 hours in! Well almost, Michelle came round to mine at 6 to pick up her clothes and after that I just kind of lay on my bed and feel alseep. She then came back to wake up up a few hours later. After that I thought I would get a bit more rest then order dinner as I hadn’t eaten. But I just kind of didn’t wake up again until the next morning. Quality night’s sleep!

I’m tired. After my lack of sleep on Sunday night I managed to increase that to 6 hours on Monday night as I got watching a movie. Then last night I tried to get to bed as early as possible but it was still like 11 or something. Reason being I had to be up at 6am this morning for work.

Work was fun though. I wasn’t looking forward to it to be honest, I don’t like breakfast shifts because they have a whole different menu which I’m not 100% on and I just generally prefer main menu. Maybe if I had, had as much experiance on it but then I can manage grill side by myself easily enough on a night whereas Debbie said she hated when she had to do breakfast kitchen by herself.

But when I got there I was pleasently suprised when James suggested I should have a go on front counter. I was quite pleased with this as I was going to start nagging people for this. Ever since Neil showed he can do grill side I’ve needed to up my game a little. I don’t know why I wanted to do it actually as everyone says kitchen is way better and they hate front counter.

It does have some advantages though. It means I will be able to get a bit more job variety, I will be able to mock people who can’t work the tills without fear that I won’t be able to work them either. Finally it makes me a more valuable crew member when there are shortages so I’m less likely to get stuck on dining area.

As with anywhere you work the till system is awful. You can’t actually take anything off once it’s one without a manager’s swipe card so if you put something on and then the customer changes his mind or you put the wrong thing on you’re basically screwed.

However I managed ok, James seemed to think I had done well. I managed to get it spot on which was cool as people can come off tills and be like £20 down or something. I’m not sure how, you get a total, you get the money from the customer, type it into the till how much they have given you and it tells you how much change to give them. Even when I entered the wrong amount I just gave them the right change and it’s all good so as long as you can do basic subtraction it’s not a real problem. Still, I shall reserve judgement until I have worked it more, when we’re busy it’s probably a different story and I can see plenty of places where it can go wrong if you struggle with maths or aren’t paying mega close attention which I am at the moment while I learn but probably won’t be later.

I only worked the breakfast menu on till anyway as it’s easier to work than the main menu and so I could get used to how it works on there first. I might suggest to Liz that I do tills on my closes on Saturday and Sunday when it’s quite although front counter might not be possible as I can’t do front counter close so if there is stuff to do all night on front counter I won’t be able to do that. I could do booth one (drive-thru) though I don’t have anyone around up there for when it all goes wrong.