On Dasher!

I love and respect Door Dash drivers. I do. That’s hard work. But do you ever drive to pick up dinner, and when you get to the restaurant your food’s not ready and you stand there with the door dash people, and one of your old friends or somebody from the club sees you there and they think that you lost your day job or your retirement’s not working out and you had to become a Door Dash guy? That happened to me last night. I was at a nice restaurant waiting for my food and saw some old friends. I couldn’t tell them, “I’m not a Door Dash guy”, ‘cause I was standing there with the Door Dash/Uber Eats guys and I didn’t want to embarrass them. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a Door Dash guy. I respect them. 

Actually this is how Door Dash gets you to use their service. They know you maybe don’t want to stand around with the Door Dash guys in restaurant lobbies. So you use Door Dash. Pretty simple. It doesn’t take a genius to figure this stuff out. Yeah. I took a marketing course in college.

Text Mess

Today I tried to call a business consultant I know. He didn’t answer but I immediately got a text from him before I could leave him a message. The text read: “Sorry I can’t take your call now. I’ll call you back very soon.” Well, I fell for it. I did. I always do. Yeah. I pulled the phone from my ear to read his text. By the time I got the phone back to my ear, his voicemail message was over, so I didn’t know if he was maybe in a meeting or maybe off skiing or something. (I’m not sure if he’s a skier, but he sometimes wears one of those cool tight ski caps.) And I missed the beep, so I didn’t leave him a message.

I’ll take partial blame here. Yeah, I shouldn’t be checking texts when I’m on the phone (driving or not!). But, do we need his text message if there’s already a voice message on his voicemail? At a minimum, the following needs to be added to the above text message: “And sorry if this text caused you to miss leaving me a voice message.”

Vows

Friends of mine renewed their vows on their 50^th anniversary last month. They did it on a beach in Mexico surrounded by family. (That “surrounded by family” bit sounds a little too much like dying to me but maybe that’s just me.) At any rate, it sounds like it was a wonderful ceremony. The beach, the sun, mariachi music, a nice meal afterwards. And they each wrote their own vows. I like that!

I didn’t have the heart to ask him, (and I don’t think he reads this), but are vow renewals in Mexico legal in the US? Do they even count? Do I offer to have them read their vows to me here in the states, at least on a zoom?

Sea Cruise

Today when I was doing a bit a shopping, I asked a friendly clerk if she was ready for Christmas. She said that, yes, she was, and she had better be because she was going on a cruise the week of Christmas. She proceeded to tell me that one of the stops was in The Bahamas. I asked her if she was aware that none of the NASA  rockets lifted off from Nassau in the Bahamas. She, totally missing the joke, told me the rockets take off at Cape Canaveral. Frustrating…

In hindsight I guess I could have asked her if all the Carnival Cruises ship out there at Cape Carnival…

The First Norelco

I love to travel. You learn so much. I saw my first holiday billboard for an attorney while traveling last week. The sign just said “Fa la la la Law” or something. Harmless, I suppose. Maybe one of the wise men was an attorney…

My favorite Christmas commercial on TV was the Norelco commercial where Santa rides the Norelco shaver down the slope. He hits a mogul and goes flying and comes down right in front of the lodge. At the end of the commercial they showed the name of the company, but they replaced the ”R” with a snowflake, so it became “No*elco”. It was a clever touch. People dug it. That commercial aired for like 20 years.

The most amazing thing about that commercial is that they selected Santa as the guy to represent their company, to represent their shaver. Yet, ironically, Santa never shaved – at least not that we know of. I wonder how hard it was to convince Santa to do the commercial. I bet him shaving his beard was part of the original script and he negotiated that out…

All the Trim(mings)

I went to the barber today for my Thanksgiving haircut. It’s a one chair shop. The guy ahead of me talked on and on about how his family got their Thanksgiving meal last year from Bob Evans and how terrible it was.  He said the meat was “just sliced cold cuts” and that the dressing was “inedible mush” (not the more edible Bob Evans corn mush I mentioned on this blog (3/16/25)). They had given up on Bob Evans and were getting their food somewhere else this year.

When it was my turn in the chair the barber asked me what we were doing for Thanksgiving. I told him we were having family over. I asked him what they were doing and he said they were getting food from Bob Evans. Well, talk about putting a damper on the conversation! It didn’t seem to affect my haircut but it was awkward.  When I left I gave him a half-hearted “Have a nice Thanksgiving”.

So, do I bring this up at my next haircut? I’m afraid to ask him what he’s doing for Christmas…

Wizards

When I was a kid the Baltimore Bullets were a good basketball team. Wesley Unseld, Gus Johnson, Jack Marin, Kevin Loughery. Oh, and Earl “The Pearl” Monroe. I wanted to play like Earl Monroe. I was disappointed when we read Steinbeck’s “The Pearl” in 7^th grade and found out it had nothing to do with basketball. Well, eventually the Bullets moved to DC and became the Washington Bullets. Then the NBA decided they wanted a less violent nickname for the team so they became the Washington Wizards.

The rest of the world needs to fall in line with appropriate name changes:

•                 “Wizards Over Broadway” – Woody Allen needs to change his movie title.
•           “Wizard” – Frank Bullit becomes Frank Wizard in the Steve McQueen classic
•            “Number One with a Wizard” – Yeah
•            “Red Wiz” Energy Drink – OK, we need to re-visit that one…
•           “Wizard Proof Vest” – Uh-huh
•           “Wizard Points” in a blog post – Uh-oh. You caught me…

We need to replace the black dots with little wizards. Anybody got a phone # for Microsoft?