Tag Archives: Seattle

Messing with Trader Joes Customers

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The customers at the U-District Trader Joe’s in Seattle are an oddly-stressed bunch of students, employees, and housewives. They’re often terse, slightly confused, and more often than not extremely cranky. So I naturally like to mess with them in small controlled experiments. Here’s one of my favourites.

Setup

Go to Trader Joe’s in a mid-afternoon or other period where they’re busy, but not crush-level busy. When you’re ready to check out, look for two adjacent checkstands that both have customers currently being checked out, but have nobody else in line. Simply speaking, you’d be the first person in either line if you get in one.

Procedure

Instead of getting in one of these lines, simply stand in the middle between the two. The reasoning (which is entirely logical to me) is that I can just get the next available checkstand, and then anyone who wanders in behind me can get the other one. It’s simple. It’s fair. It works well.

The Results

I did this today, when TJs was hardly busy. There were two mothers and their children checking out ahead of me, and I just placed myself between the two, content to getting whatever one was next. Then a female (and it’s always a female, for some reason) walks up and we have the following conversation:

Customer: What line are you in?

Me: I’m in neither; I wasn’t sure who was going to be done first, so I’ll just get the next one that opens up.

 

She doesn’t respond. I consider the conversation over and that she accepted my plan of action.

Then I hear a line told in only a way that someone who has rehearsed it many times in the past with her failed relationships.

 

Customer (annoyed tone of voice): Can you commit?

Me (incredulous): What?

Customer: Can you commit to a line?

Me (seeing one that was almost done by then): Okay, I pick this one.

Conclusion

This whole exchange is a little unsettling, and it’s happened more than once to me. I’m basically forced to choose between a few different conclusions:

  • They are unable or unwilling to stray from the queueing paradigm in favour
  • They believe that by forcing me to choose a line, I may pick the incorrect one, and thus have to wait longer to be checked out even though I was next.

The latter concerns me much more than the former, as it implies that there are people who are basically saying “rather than being fair, I have a chance of making this person pick the wrong line, and thus I’ll actually be checked out before him.” They see it as something of a 50/50 chance of getting ahead by screwing the person in front of you. Well, howdy 21st century!

Suggestions when Dealing with Friends in Seattle (or any large city)

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I’ve started writing, and almost finished, a number of posts over the past few months. For whatever reason I never got around to finishing them, or didn’t feel like publishing them at the time. Congratulations! It’s your lucky day: time to read some of Nikky’s drafts and things that never quite made it before! Yayyy!

So I guess this post was going to be something about “what to do when dealing with a Seattleite, or any urban dweller.” But I could never really get it all threaded into one cohesive post without sounding like a pretentious douchebag. They aren’t really interesting enough to be split up into individual posts, so they languished around until I decided to release as-is.

What I’d like to talk about today is some general guidelines that I’ve accumulated the past few years (gosh, has it been SIX years?) living in Seattle. They’re things I’ve seen, experienced, and thought about quite a bit.

Don’t Assume We Own Cars

Chances are, your Seattle friend doesn’t own a car. We get around by walking, biking, and riding the bus to most places. The transit system is pretty swell here too, and we can go all around Seattle in our public chariots. And we can usually even go to the suburbs if required!

Now, making plans outside of Seattle is weird for us (why would you want to leave the city?), but okay, I suppose that happens sometimes. But if you do invite your Seattle buddy along to a place where transit doesn’t exist all the time, it’d be just super if you offered to give them a ride.

And in return? We let you sleep in our dwellings when you’re in our city overnight.

Suburbs are Scary

Now, some of you may like thin-walled townhomes, endless stripmalls, and medium population density. We don’t like any of these things, and that’s why we choose to live in Seattle City limits. The suburbs are outlying culture-free zones, and seem to resemble a place where fun goes to die.

I’m not talking about seanic places here, or the country. I’m talking about the suburbs where everyone looks the same, does the same thing, and has the same job. This culture (or lack thereof) scares the hell out of us.

We also have a very hazy idea of where outlying cities are: they’re all kind of a blurry spot on the map where IKEA lives.

Stop Saying the City is Dangerous and Full of Crazy People

Protip: crazy people exist everywhere, we just don’t see them as much. And violence? Hey guess what! It happens everywhere too! Wow! It’s just that cities have a) effective newspapers, b) crime blogs, and c) more freaking people. We live in a city and we know what is and isn’t dangerous. If we’re with you and we seem nonplussed that some shirtless dude is karate kicking the phone pole, it’s because that’s pretty much the norm. He won’t hurt anyone.

The beauty of urban living is that you’re exposed to all walks of humanity, not just the hand-curated circle of friends that you see on a daily basis.

Okay, I guess that’s it

Ka-blamo.

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Historic Railroad Hike

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Sean, Serene, and I went on a series of hikes this weekend to the Snohomish/Granite Falls area: Lime Kiln and Old Robe Canyon. The former roughly followed an old railway grade, whereas the latter closely traced the ruins of a railway abandoned in the early 1930s as the owners finally gave up trying to maintain it. For you see, they built it right next to a river. Not the best idea ever.

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Seahawks Care-O-Meter

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Despite my well documented love for Husky Football, I’m usually rather lethargic about the Seahawks. Sure, I’ll watch them when I get the chance, but more often than not I’ll discover that they played when I’m checking the Seattle Times at the end of the day. That doesn’t stop me from offering forth comments about their performance, however. My typical reactions are something like this:

Nikky Discovers the Seahawks Win

“WOAH. Who replaced the Seahawks with a good team?”

“I see we’re trying really hard not to win the Andrew Luck bowl this year.”

“Too bad we still suck.”

“Seahawks? More like Seahonks.”

Nikky Discovers the Seahawks Lose

“Seahawks are dead to me.”

“I wish I got paid to play football as poorly as we did.”

Conclusion

I only have room for one team in my heart, and that’s the University of Washington Huskies football team. The Seahawks are but a poor substitute. With colors that aren’t as awesome.

Crime! Theft! Stolen Property!

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After debating and discussing the acquisition of televisions for months, Serene and I finally found the willpower and action plan to go to Fry’s and goddamn it, buy TVs so we could play Playstation 3 and watch Netflix until our brains exploded. And by “Netflix” I meant “Deep Space 9.”

And it was good. MGS4ing it up while starting to consider my proto-living room home was a good first step in adjusting to the idea of actually decorating and filling an apartment rather than just a room. EXPANSION OF THINGS AND STUFF COMMENCING.

Exactly a week later, I got back from the Apple Cup to discover something odd: my apartment door was unlocked it was certainly cool and drafty inside. And what is this? Oh, there’s a hole where one of my windows used to be. Interesting.

I suppose someone else wanted my TV more than I did. And take it they did after busting out one of the windows (which is rather hard to get at from the outside, so they must have certainly wanted it) with a brick and climbing through the non-safety glass and wounding themselves quite a bit.

They certainly took a particular path. My TV and HDMI cable were gone, but the PS3, Blu-Rays, and PS3 games were all there. My laptop from 2006 was missing too, but my desktop, monitors, and DSLR WHICH WAS JUST SITTING ON THE FLOOR were all untouched.

My large hiking backpack, partially filled with really awesome things, was taken to presumably stuff the laptop into. Brown Argyle sweater from high school? Gone. Merlino Wool Purple sweater? Gone. MY FAVORITE TEA INFUSER? Gone. One of my gloves? Gone.

In a calm and collected manner, I called our friendly 911 and a nice SPD officer showed up about an hour later to look things over and take some fingerprints. It was a fun converstation when I mentioned that my hammer was also stolen.

Me: “Oh, and they took my hammer.”

Officer: “Your hammer?”

Me: “Yeah, I keep a hammer in my bedstand in case this happens when I’m home during the time.”

Officer: “And they took it?”

Me: “Well, it isn’t there now!”

Officer: “Hunh.”

So anyway, I have Renter’s Insurance that doesn’t include depreciation, so things should be pretty good. The residents around me were cool and were pretty shocked about what happened. They haven’t had another incident like that in recent memory and we figured that there was literally nobody around Thanksgiving weekend that probably let them scope out the places a bit. I didn’t have curtains in my living room yet (which actually was on my to-do list), but I certainly do now.

After half a decade in Seattle, I suppose this was bound to happen sooner or later. And Capitol Hill is still super cool despite this little incident.