fragments of an attempted writing.

Some lights I made for a petit-bourgeois restaurant in Memphis where you have to pay 10 bucks to make your own damn sandwich.  These lights were super easy, but bossman still managed to quote them too low.  They get many hundreds of people a week to pay them $10 to do nothing; we should have charged the hell out of them.  But this is the way of things...

15 comments:

  1. Well, that sounds like the exact opposite of the "labor theory of value". No wonder it cheeses you off, pun intended.

    I wonder... would they give me a dollar off it I brought my own meat? What if I brought my own bread also, and plate and sat outside? I can set up a small card table right under one of your lights, they are very nicely done....

    Oh, hell, I'll just make a sandwich at home in my kitchen and send them a money order for $5.99. How's that sound?

    ReplyDelete
  2. LOL, Pauli. :)

    Well, I bring my own butter to the little Greek restaurant in Walnut Cove, NC, where we like to eat breakfast on occasional Saturday mornings after the kids get their hair cut by Barbara the Barber Lady. (Barbara, BTW, charges just $2 more per haircut than Owen's restaurant charges for DIY sandwiches.)

    Anyway, this little Greek restaurant serves the best biscuits and gravy, and they pipe in country music for atmosphere. Only in North Carolina.

    (Later in the day, they do serve souvlaki and such. Even then, though, you can get you your Southern food. And country music.)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oops, forgot to mention that I bring my own butter because I can't stand that "Spred" stuff. Usually, while the kids are getting their hair cut, my husband does some grocery shopping at Ingall's; so the butter is right there in a bag in the back of the car.
    I'm sure y'all are finding this endlessly fascinating....

    Diane

    P.S. I agree that those lights are cool.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Pauli,

    I have this idea for a business model. I get together a collection of these organic and nature friendly cleaning agents and several of the latest neato dirt-clingy smart designed cleaning devices, and I go over to the home of some rich tennis bracelet wearing kept woman, and I hand over the cleaning products to her and watch her clean for 90 minutes, giving her tips and answering her questions as needed while I drink a beer (microbrew, of course, to fit my trendy image) and read her husband's latest issue of Garden & Gun. When she is done I charge her $50. Your friendly greenclean facilitator. Whad'ya think?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Wouldn't it be even more trendy to drink a PBR or Old Style?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Sean,

    Yes.

    The bar where I was longest a regular in St. Paul was an Irish bar where you could actually hear Gaelic spoken and where bands would play who passed the hat raising money for Sinn Fein. Then a bunch of students from the business department of a Catholic college in St. Paul discovered the bar, and the owner realized that he could make a hell of a lot more money turning it into an Irish Disney land bar than what it had been. Before easily more than half the Irish bands that played there played country, which was what is would have been like at the sort of bar Irish people (not drinking alcho-pops) in Ireland would have gone to. But then all of a sudden there were these bands made of up 23 year olds playing bodhrán and Irish bouzouki.

    Then I move to Memphis and a similar thing happens, exactly correspondent to what you suggest. One of my favorite dive hang-outs here which had been a hang-out of local drunks mostly gets discovered and all of a sudden the majority of people there are wearing Izod shirts, khaki shorts, and fucking flip flops even if they are grown men. Aarggh!

    So, point taken, but I think tennis bracelet women who go for greencleaning still think microbrew when they think beer.

    ReplyDelete
  7. LOL. My favorite local Celtic group, Naomi's Fancy (now disbanded, waaaah), went to Ireland a few years ago to pick up material. They were distressed to find that all the pub musicians wanted to play was American country.

    I confess that I cannot stand contemporary country, whereas I love traditional Celtic stuff. But, being half-Irish, I come by this honestly. Haunting Irish ballads are in my blood and always have been. Even though my late mom brought me up mostly on Plastic Paddy dreck like "Galway Bay" and "If you're Irish, Come into the Parlor."

    Diane

    ReplyDelete
  8. Owen, $175 sounds better to me.

    Diane, favorite local Celtic groups always disband, don't they?

    ReplyDelete
  9. LOL, Pauli! Well, Naomi's Fancy's core members are husband and wife. I sure hope they haven't disbanded!

    One of the group's sometime-members has recently joined an all-woman Celtic group, Immigrant's Daughter. They are fantastic!!! But I still miss the incredibly onj-stage energy of Naomi's Fancy. :(

    Diane

    ReplyDelete
  10. Oy, sorry for typos in last post. "incredible on-stage energy"

    ReplyDelete
  11. Cubes propped on crooked wooden posts -- can we get Kunstler to comment here? I think he might consider your work for Eyesore of the Month.

    Just kidding, I swear.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Baudy,

    I'm not into hobbit goes bauhaus chic either. The posts were put in by some contractor other than my company - when I saw how crooked they were I could not help but think that they were purposefully placed that way, but, then again, this is Memphis so you never know - that's the sort of thing that happens constantly when there are so few union contractors around.

    As for the lights - their design, we just built what they asked them for, and charged them far too little, given that these people are both rich and clearly stupid -- we should have milked them.

    ReplyDelete
  13. we should have milked them.

    Yes, well of course you should. Really you are helping people get to heaven by "overcharging" them, if you believe what our Lord said about camels, needles and all that.

    I always charge more than everyone else at a given site and (1) it ensures that I work harder and (2) it allows my family to live better. Getting to that point isn't easy, esp. for nice people (which I'm not) and some people get irritated by it. But I have enough friends.

    ReplyDelete
  14. LOL, I'm just the opposite, Pauli, but it's not 'cuz I'm nicer, believe me. It's because I am a total woooosss. I hate haggling -- yet another reason why I'm so lousy at freelancing and therefore doomed to live out my working life in Dilbert-World. When I freelance, I always underbid and then go overboard with the actual work, so I end up almost working for free. This is the result of sheer cowardice -- that, and the sneaking suspicion that advertising copywriting is not really worth much of anything. Of course, the latter feeling is reinforced by my anti-copy / graphic-design-is-all-that-matters bosses.

    Poor pitiful me! LOL!

    Diane

    ReplyDelete
  15. "hobbit goes bauhaus chic" -- ROTFL!

    diane

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.