|
|
|
what the fuck is wrong with Moonburger's workflow
Sunday, November 28 2021
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
We'd be driving back to Hurley today, but not before having another morning of coffee and Spelling Bee (a somewhat ugly combination of letters producing the panagram "vaguely," with "g" in the middle). The day was sunny and the woodstove was working great, but at some point I wanted to cut wood with the chop saw, so we powered up the generator. Fortunately it came to life without producing an error. But who's to know when the next error will come?
The other day Gretchen had removed an ugly shelf made of white-enameled steel wire from the entryway closet, and my first chore of the day was to install three one-by-six planks to support a wooden shelf. Those planks would also provide a good surface for attaching a number of coat hooks. I wanted to conserve one by six pine planks for use as baseboard in the rooms that still need it (both bathrooms and the upstairs bedroom), so I found some planks out in the pile of leftover larch outside to use for the two shorter pieces I needed.
Once that was all in place, I cracked open a beer and called my brother Don, who had just called. Apparently our mother Hoagie is still suffering from shingles and has yet to receive any medication. I can't do much about it, since I am not a medical contact for my mother. This is the price of thinking you're sticking it to your one competent son by not having him as an official medical contact. I know from Gretchen's experience with shingles that medication works miracles, but Hoagie's only competent medical contact, Joy Tarder, is a firm believer in herbal medicine (and, don't forget, she's a coronavirus vaccine resistor). I also told Don that a book Gretchen had ordered for him had accidentally been addressed to our house and that we had it. It was The Common Loon: Spirit of the Northern Lakes, a book about loons that Don had found out about and expressed interest in after a conversation he and I had had. I told him that it was a great book, full of illustrations and detailed scientific information and low on the cutesy fluff that you might expect. I said we'd be keeping it at our cabin and sending another copy to him, this time addressed correctly.
In the second, smaller bedroom on the first floor is a queen-sized bed whose headboard doesn't fit the metal frame. So Gretchen wanted me to install it on the wall. That was what I did next, fully expecting Gretchen to dislike where I placed it, a location dictated by the studs in the wall. (This wasn't the first thing I'd placed that seemed a little off to Gretchen, but I am loathe to use anchor bolts as little as possible, particularly for heavy items like bed headboards.) Surprisingly, though, Gretchen was delighted with the results.
At some point in all this, Gretchen took the first shower in our first-floor bathroom. Initially the settings on the knob were wrong and her shower was too cold, but after making an adjustment, she successfully took a shower and said it had been a damn fine one at that.
I wsas still feeling ill-at-ease about the sudden unreliability of our generator setup. So I wondered if perhaps the generator's much-touted web integration might provide a way for me to remotely reset it. I was doubtful that this would be the case, since everything I'd seen about this functionality said that it provided information, not that it allowed for remote control. But the only way to know for sure was to give it a try. Initially I tried setting it up from the generator itself, but when all it did was hang, perhaps until the heat death of the Universe, I did some web research and determined that I needed to install a Generac's stupid app on my phone. And stupid it was; after creating an account and giving those assholes far too much information, I went to "add a product," but then the app just hung, again seemingly until the heat death of the Universe. I found myself mumbling, "What a piece of junk!" more than once. I just wanted to be able to keep my generator running reliably, and here I'd jumped through all these invasive hoops for nothing. Fuck you, Generac!
Before leaving for the week, Gretchen and I waged a mini jihad against all the construction clutter, most of which was in that second bedroom (the one where I hung the headboard on the wall) and along the bottom of the stairs in the great room. Most of this stuff ended up in neat piles and "work areas" in the basement (where, I forgot to mention, is a new set of steel shelves that we'd bought at the Noble Ace). All this stuff and a need for places to put it has me wanting to buy yet more multi-container storage solutions. I especially need places to put things like finishing nails, electrical components, and plumbing bits.
At some point yesterday after the snow had stopped, I'd moved the Bolt down near the cabin so I could top off the charge in the battery. We'd had a little light snow since then, but it hadn't added up to much, and I'd gone over the driveway with the snow shovel and thought it was pretty clear. So this evening when we left for Hurley, Gretchen initially tried to drive us out. But the Bolt couldn't make it more than a dozen feet up the driveway before its wheels began to spin in the snow. So then I took the wheel and tried a few running starts at that the part of the driveway, starting from the relative flatness of the septic field. Still, though, I couldn't make it past a certain point that was no more than about fifty feet from the cabin. So then I got out the snow shovel and did some more snow removal. In so doing, I figured out that there was a band of very slippery compressed snow where the car had driven in the past, and that if I just kept my wheels off of that, I might be able to make it up the hill. This proved correct, though even so I only just barely made it to the top of a local elevation maximum. From there, though, Gretchen could easily drive us out to Route 309. The only other problem was on a downhill grade when a herd of hunting-season-terrorized deer appeared in front of us, Gretchen slammed on the brakes, and the car just kept going. Fortunately, though, the deer were well out of our way as we slid by. By the time we made it out to Route 309, we were mostly driving of bare (if wet) asphalt. Temperatures had started out at 27 degrees Fahrenheit and rose to about 30 in Johnstown. Temperatures continued to slowly climb from there, reaching 32 degrees in Amsterdam and rising as high as 36 by the time we got to Kingston.
By then we were hungry, so on a whim Gretchen decided to drive over to Moonburger to see if there was a line. There was, but it was only two cars long, so we joined it. Everything was going great until Gretchen placed a simple order: for two vegan hamburgers (not cheeseburgers), a large fries, and a regular fries. Moonburger doesn't have a lot of items on its menu, but those all are things they claim to make. Somehow, though, the three or four people in the kitchen became hopelessly confused by this and made us burgers with dairy cheese on them and then corrected themselves after questioning Gretchen again on what exactly she'd ordered, and again she was perfectly clear. Somehow we sat parked at the pickup window for something like five minutes, watching with alarm the utter disorganization happening in the Moonburger kitchen. One of the employees had a spatchula and kept having to run around to the other side of one of the other employees, who was also doing something on the grill. And all while the woman at the window, who had just been seen reaching her ungloved hands into a bag (our bag, probably) was fondling the glass of the takeout window. Eventually the woman at the window told us to drive ahead, that they'd be hand-delivering our order in a bit, claiming, wrongly, that Gretchen had changed her order. In the end what we got were two burgers, both of which contained some sort of cheese (who knows if it was dairy or not). Yes, after all that, after a huge stupid delay, they'd still gotten our order wrong. Neither of us knows what the fuck is wrong with Moonburger's workflow, but all I know is that if you go through a Burger King drive through with ten cars in front of you, you can expect to receive your correct order in about five minutes. This isn't rocket science.
Back at the house, Gretchen ate her burger with Powerful. We hadn't gotten him a burger because Natalie reported having gotten him a Moonburger that he then didn't eat. But Powerful seemed to be doing a bit better. He said he'd completely weaned himself off the oxycodone and was able to poop again, even if his appetite has yet to come roaring back.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?211128 feedback
previous | next |
