“Still posting self-pitying cringe banners at the end of the week.”
“Great, see you around”
Just back from the grocery store. The receipt has a QR code that leads to a survey. Why yes I will take your survey, because I know it gives me 5% off my next purchase. I also know how the survey works and answer accordingly.
There are five options for most of the questions, ranging from Extremely Dissatisfied to Highly Satisfied. I am always Highly Satisfied. According to my answers I float through the store in a state of exultation and completion. But I really don’t. I am satisfied with this jalapeño. To be highly satisfied would indicate I had particular jalapeño preferences that were not met elsewhere, and I was flooded with pleasurable brain chemicals upon discovering this green, perfect object. I was not.
If the scale was 1 - 5, I would’ve given my trip to produce to get one jalapeño a 5, that being a fair account of my opinion of the experience. All goals met. No objections. No complications. But the satisfaction had no dimensions of cosmic elevation. BUT if I don’t say I was highly satisfied, it will ask me what they could’ve done to improve the situation, and I have to say something. You can type “jalapeños could’ve been more varied in size,” but my God would someone have to get right on that? Given this store’s attitude towards customer service, it’s possible. Once I found some mushy habaneros and pointed them out to the produce manager, and if there’d been a long knife handy he would have opened his bowels in shame. It’s okay! We’re in a suburb of Minneapolis! Demand probably isn’t hectic at the moment!
How was my visit to the deli? I WAS SATISFIED . . . (draws deep breath, breaks out a wide grin) IN THE HIGHEST SENSE KNOWN TO MAN. I ticked that one off without thinking, then remembered: no. No I had not been highly satisfied. The clerk had struggled to put the lid on the coleslaw, gave up, and handed it to me, unsecured. It immediately leaked slaw juice on my pants. I handed it back and asked if it could be fitted better.
Next question: did anyone in Deli assist you?
Oh my, yes
Were you HIGHLY SATISFIED?
Of course. This time it asked why, and I said the container leaked, and when I asked her to use a new one, she did so promptly.
So now I look like a wimpy simp, because I was clicking Highly Satisfied about an experience that contained slaw leakage and pant leg moistening, because I was so eager to please my inquisitor.
I finished, got my code, wrote it on the receipt, put the receipt in my backpack, where I will find it with the others, in a fortnight, expired.
Thursday night I went to a different grocery store to see what subjective price the bacon’s going for this week. Bacon at this place is like ties at Macy’s. There might be two or three days a year when they’re full price. The rest of the year they’re on sale, depending on the brand. One week it’s “These pigs were fattened on sperm whale blubber and saffron” and the next it’s “oh god we had to slaughter every pig in the nation for reasons we prefer not to talk about anyway sure brought down the price eh”.
This week the absurd discount was on orange juice, something that’s gotten very expensive over the last year or so. Used to be about $3.29, top. Now it’s $4.29, baseline. Growing up we had frozen, and I remember that curious orange cylinder sliding out of the pliable can, and how you’d get some crystals in the first glass. It was better than pulp. Drinking pulp is like being waterboarded in the Sargasso Sea. I don’t understand the appeal.
Anyway. Another week in the void, with no word on my future. Josef K. sitting by the door that was made especially for him.
I was talking to one of Sara’s tennis friends and Stephen King about the fact that Todd Browning had the rights to Bob and Ted and Carol and Alice but never filmed it, and we were all being clever about how that might have turned out. We started discussing the disorder and fight outside, and the two combatants, and I said they looked like mid-1970s Marvel villains, thinking he would appreciate that. (I’d read at the gym that day that John Romita had died.) On the way out I thanked him for stopping and said it was always nice to see him.
Prompt: tennis players taking movies with a famous horror author
I guess DeNiro is in the shock-book biz now.
These are so stupid I actually like them.
From the director of Goonies, it's . . . .
The second from the right is a movie about witches in old New England staring Jason Robards.
And now, a related feature that will provide some Friday amusements:
World's Fair, 1893, ruins, early evening, somber.
I'm not opposed to these.
The AI is unable to do '39 or '64 with any degree of accuracy, though. I'm sure better prompts might work.
It added a bit too much "science fiction pulp mag cover."
So he's just passing by, and overhears some fraud?
