Tag: augh

Hey joyfulagitator! Nail your sizzle points!

Can I bring you a non-refillable beverage while you look at the menu? Hey, don’t forget to save room for our sinfully decadent Chocolate Suicide cake! It’s my personal favorite.

TJI’m sure you’ll be able to follow some of of these key points below, but if that’s a hard slog just remember: you can always bring in TJ for one of his seminars, which are guaranteed stuff and not fluff!

Just thought I’d make sure you were keeping up with all the great tips in Service that Sells and Service That Sells 2: Managing the Sizzle!

  1. Personalize the guest experience and eliminate cookie-cutter service
  2. Nail “sizzle points” and wow every guest
  3. Embrace the steps you can follow to make the magic come alive
  4. Dramatically increase check averages, sales and profitability … and truly set your operation apart!

Maybe next you’ll get “Pour It On: 52 Ways to Manage Your Bar Profits”, which promises to:

  1. Improve the way you manage your inventory, your equipment overhead, your supplier relationships, and your bar staff
  2. Give your staff the techniques necessary to sell your beverages
  3. Show you how to entice customers to come into your operation, spend more money on alcohol beverages, and come back again — with their friends!

http://www.managersredbook.com/

Three depressing links about the war.

  1. Here’s a first-hand account of what it’s like to be arrested and jailed by the secret police in Iraq right now. If you’re lucky, that is.
  2. We’re scouring our poor island colonies for recruits. Young people in places like Guam have no jobs and no future in our WWII leftover archipelago, so we’re sending them to the next colony. It’s the new Gurkhas.
  3. Counterpunch is a marginal news source (I don’t trust Cockburn so much). However, if we really did lose nuclear warheads off Somalia in 1991 and someone got hold of it, we’re about to star in a really bad James Bond movie. We’ve certainly lost nukes before, including a spectacular incident off Spain a long time ago.

I’m going to go outside and pet puppies now.

The Theory of the Leisure Suit Class

Living in Newport Beach has always been strange, and has always been getting stranger. Satire fails us, as daily life teems with situations and images that are so outrageously perfect, they seem to have been dreamed up by a particularly unsubtle socialist film maker to hammer in some point. Welcome to Michael Moore’s Real World Newport Beach. Some recent examples:

  • Driving past one of the local high-class night clubs, I see that among the stretch Hummer limos and AMG Mercedes, someone has backed out his $250,000 Lamborghini and is revving and clutch-popping hopelessly, trying to get his thoroughbred Italian supercar to go into first gear. I stop and watch as our hero wrestles with his prancing bull. Finally he achieves traction and hurtles out onto the boulevard in a cloud of tire smoke.
  • At a street corner, a cop is handcuffing a middle-aged Mexican man whose bicycle lies on the ground next to him. Behind them, another middle-aged Mexican man is holding up a sign that says INDULGE YOURSELF LUXURY APTS with an arrow on it, and waving the sign at passing cars.
  • At the local shopping mall, it is Tuesday at 3 pm, and the place is full of young marrieds without employment buying everything that glitters. One thirtyish man in a $2000 suit, sculpted hair and spray-on tan, is saying loudly into his cellphone “Yes. It has to be on a yacht, that’s where we’re making the sale. The presentation is on a yacht, and I don’t know the dress code yet, but you are going to be there.”
  • At Target. A small, nervous man dressed in a $200 Aloha shirt, cargo shorts, and a very shiny pair of Timberland hiking boots is gazing at a barbecue that is eight feet long and costs as much as a used car. His wife comes up behind him and says “Do the utensils match?” and he says “Of course! OF COURSE!”

My mom is sick. It’s just some digestive bug but when someone is 76 it makes me nervous, plus she never gets these. There’s something about the illness or weakness of parents that’s still very psychologically undermining even in adulthood; it shouldn’t happen.

At the shrink’s

The bipolar lady having a bad high, the worried mom, and her disgruntled and possibly insane 16 year old boy all just agreed that we preferred silence to KOST 103.5. “Soft Jams”, Faith Hill’s song from “Pearl Harbor”, and the Phil Collins version of “You Can’t Hurry Love” make psych patients something something.

I switched off the radio to general approval.