Burst: Meditations I

I've started keeping a journal with random thoughts that occur to me and have decided to post some of them in order to share them and to have people help me further refine them.  As they are fleeting and somewhat random thoughts they are by nature aphoristic, rough, and unpolished.  I hope that does not detract too much from them.  Here is the first one:

Electronic Information and Human Centric Businesses:

The distribution of information will be completely electronic.  Therefore, brick and mortar businesses will have to become human centric.  By this I mean that they will have to provide services and/or goods that require co-location with the client/customer.  Thus, these businesses will have to place the human being, not their product, at the center of their planning.  They will have to ask themselves: "What things do humans qua humans need and want that can only be provided to them when they are at hand?  What services and goods can only (or truly can best) be provided in person?"

The first thing that comes to mind is real experiences, which quite possibly also are the most basic of these products/services.  Perhaps in the future virtual reality simulacra will be able to provide all experiences, but to experience the real we have to go to it; it will not come to us.  Mohammed must go to the mountain.

Women can pee standing up!

Culture Shock

This entry is down on PR do deal with it.  After two weeks in San Diego County I'm back in PR.

The first thing I noticed upon returning was how totally run down things are in Puerto Rico.  The airport is not taken care of, way too many things in it are dirty and broken.  As soon as I left the airport I also noticed how many holes, more like lunar craters, there are on the roads in Puerto Rico.  After not having to pay attention to the topography of the road, and instead being able to look at the signage for directions as to where I was headed, now I was forced mind the hills and valleys of Puerto Rican roads lest I end up with a busted tire or worse destroy the car's suspension.  The roads here are a total mess, but it does not end there. The city is dirty, dirty, dirty.  I remember going to downtown San Diego and looking around the streets and thinking to myself the the streets in the middle of the city were cleaner than the streets anywhere in PR, even the rich suburbs.

The next thing I noticed was how horrible the vegetables are here.  I went and got a salad at a restaurant.  The lettuce and the tomatoes were both gross.  Which brings me to the next point.  A salad here consists of lettuce and tomatoes.  That's it.  After being treated to super fresh vegetables in CA coming back our decrepit produce options is depressing.

Another thing I noticed is how unhelpful and confrontational store employees here can be.  While I San Diego I went one night to a Rubio's only to find I was too late.  The employees were locking the doors as I drove into the parking lot.  I turned around a told Al Carbon that I would go ask them about any nearby Rubio's that might close later but did not feel like dealing with the attitude I would get.  For a second she assented, but then she said: "We're in southern California maybe they will be all happy and cheery about it."  Indeed they were.  If I had done that in PR, the clerk would probably have ignored me as I knocked on the glass door, until he got agitated because his continued exclamations informing me that the place was closed didn't make me leave, and then would tell me off.  "Service" in PR is so bad across the border that we have become accustomed to be abused as customers.

What is up people?  Why is PR so messed up?  Let's fix it.

The Sins of Affirmative Action

Carrot and Stick: 01/01/2010

Happy New Year to all of you out there!

This edition of Carrot and Stick comes to you from San Diego California.  I would like the first carrot of the year to go out to the Coffee Cup Cafe in La Jolla.  Al Carbon and I have been going to eat to the Coffee Cup since  1997 when we were spending the summer in San Diego while studying Italian at UCSD prior to our junior year abroad in Rome.  Every time we come to San Diego we try to make at least one pilgrimage to the Coffee Cup.  It is the best breakfast/brunch place ever.  Everything is fresh and tasty and the perfect combination of breakfast/mexican/asian food cannot be beat.

We went there today, a little older than that first summer accompanied by our two children who were not even close to being in the picture back then, to celebrate the first brunch of the new year.  And as usual the Coffee Cup delivered.  Al Carbon noted while we were eating that the quality of the food at the Coffee Cup, unlike many other places, has stayed constant or maybe even improved throughout the years.  I have seen many places start strong but go downhill after a while.  The obvious care and dedication of the people running the Coffee Cup stands out and the fact that the place has lost no steam in over twelve years deserves some serious props.  So props to you Coffee Cup you deserve them.

Now the first stick of the year goes to an establishment close by to the Coffee Cup, namely Warwick's Books also in La Jolla.  Warwick's is a strange amalgam of a store with one side having gifts, stationary, and office supplies and the other side being a bookstore.  I was there a couple of days ago and it was literally the first time I have been kicked out of a store in my life.  I went there to get a book I had seen a couple of days earlier to give to my father as a gift when we get back from our little trip to California.  I grabbed the book and was browsing, looking for other books to purchase, while #4 and Lulu drew in a notebook I brought for them.  While looking at books I heard Lulu give a little cry so I went over to see what had happened.  It seems that Lulu had drawn on #4's side of the notebook and he had pushed her as a result.  So I put #4 on time out and he screamed a couple of times.  Honestly, it was a level 3 tantrum on a 1 to 10 scale.  Immediately I heard the cacophonous sound of uppity rich white people expressing their disapproval: "children should be seen and not heard."  And then I was besieged by a sixty-something clerk instructing me to "resolve this OUTSIDE."  It took a not insignificant amount of self-control for me to not tell him to go fuck himself.  But I did, and I placed the books I had down and took the kids out and left, never to return again.   The entire attitude was stinky and left me so angry that I wished I could return every book I ever bought there, which is not an insignificant number given the many trips I have taken to San Diego in the last twelve years.  Warwick's has lost a client for good.

I am completely fed up with the bullshit, so prevalent in the US but present elsewhere too, about how children are a nuisance and the accompanying mistreatment parents and adults traveling with children receive.  You know what fuckface? You were a kid once too.  Kids misbehave and kids make noise.  It is the way it is.  Sure there are tons of overindulgent parents out there but that is just the other extreme and neither one is ok.  I've had people actually tell me that I should DRUG my kids before we go on a plane as to not annoy them with the noise the kids make.  Are you fucking serious?!?  Why don't we just drug you instead?


Stick: Warwick's Books in La Jolla.  (You just lost out on a couple grand in books in the coming years.)
Carrot: Coffee Cup Cafe.  (Long live Papas Loco!)