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What’s in a name? Plenty.

22 Mar

March 22, 2102

Those of you who read my first Celebrity Apprentice Recap will recall that the challenge was to sell the most sandwiches at a Café Metro location. Café Metro is a place where I take out food fairly regularly. In addition to pretty good sandwiches and entrees they make amazing salads, fresh, right in front of you, with almost any ingredient you can think of. But enough of that, this is not going to be a free ad for Café Metro. In fact, part two of this blog will demonstrate just how little they want my business.

As I said, I am a semi-regular at the Café Metro near the Company I Am employed by. The day after that episode of The Apprentice aired I was standing at the register and looking at a video screen they have mounted in front of the counter and of course it was showing highlights of the show and behind the scenes photos taken during the shoot at Café Metro. So who do I come face to face with, so to speak? Paul Teutul Senior, looking straight at me. Anyone who follows The American Chopper Weekly Rundown will know that being face to face with Paul Senior is not on my list of Top Ten things to do at lunch. But at least the salad was good.

Café Metro is not the only place to eat around where I work. A few blocks away is a slightly seedy place called Metrocafe. Metrocafe is a bit of a dump but it has an A rating from Mayor Bloomberg’s vaunted food regulators so it has to be good, right? Right? Anyway, they sell pizza in the front and upstairs they have a hot food counter. The pizza is passable if a little bland and the hot food is edible. There is a ton of foot traffic where I work so there is more than enough business for this place and the other 20 or 30 restaurants located within a few square blocks.

I was in the Metrocafe eating some bland pizza for lunch one day with Saarah when she asked “Isn’t the salad place named the Metrocafe? I was thinking the same thing. In fact, I was sure they had the same name but looking around at the cramped, old, and honestly dirty pizzeria I was sure there had to be no connection between the two. How could this be a part of the same clean chain we saw on TV and I see in person every day? It could not and the next day when I saw that the name of the salad place was not Metrocafe but Café Metro you can understand the dawn of realization that spread over my brain.

Obviously the Metrocafe is treading on the good name of the Café Metro. The similarities end there, however, as one place is clean and has good food and the other is the Metrocafe.

Now, much as I would like to stop here while the story makes sense I cannot. There is a third contender in the culinary obfuscation race, and sadly it is my own office building. We have a world class cafeteria (which for some reason we tend to ignore in favor of gas station food) in our back pocket and it was not until just this week when I was pondering the Café Metro/Metrocafe nonsense that I noticed that our cafeteria is called The Metro Café.

So we have:
The Metro Café in my building.
The Café Metro across the plaza.
The Metrocafe a couple of blocks away near the other end of the plaza.

I have to assume that I have simply not yet stumbled across the Cafemetro, which is the last combination left unused above.

Clearly, the Café Metro has a good name which they are failing to defend properly. But that is no surprise since they did so little to get my business in the first place and even tried to drive me away.

And all over a discount card.

To Be Continued
(But Not Tomorrow)

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My Memories of The Boy Who Cried Wolf

21 Mar

March 21, 2012


The Boy Who Cried Wolf takes place back in the days when child labor laws were nonexistent and it was ok for kids to play with guns. In fact, any kid over the age of nine who hadn’t shot a charging bull at ten paces was considered a wuss. The fable was written by Aesop way back around 600 AD. Aesop was popularly known as the biggest bullshitter in all of Greece.

The boy, whom I will call Arnold for no particular reason, was a shepherd. His father was a shepherd and his father’s father was a shepherd. What were his mother and his mother’s mother? Sexually frustrated. And why not? Their husbands were all day long out in the fields with the sheep.

So Arthur was another in a long line of shepherds and by the time he was ten years old his father had enough of watching sheep- it was a dead-end job- and it was Arthur’s turn to watch the flock. So he watched the sheep. He watched the sheep graze. He watched the sheep sleep. He watched the sheep stand around and bleat. He watched the sheep watching him. It was boring. Eventually he started to hallucinate that the sheep spoke to him. “Arnold,” they said, “what are you doing with your life? Why don’t you go out and meet a nice Jewish girl?” For some reason he daydreamed that the sheep were Yiddish.

Soon, after an intolerable amount of time spent staring at the wooly beasts, very nearly 15 minutes, Arnold was bored. The Boy Who Cried Wolf is the first recorded case of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. 

Arnold figured that if he cried out that a wolf was attacking the flock all the villagers would come running. Crying wolf was actually his second idea. He rejected the idea of crying duck.

Arnold looked around,  took a deep breath, and texted into his iPhone “OMG! EMFBI but HLAC a wolf is attacking the sheep! IDBI! WTF?” Typical kid. As you would imagine, no one came.

Arnold was still bored so next time he simply yelled out “Wolf! A wolf is attacking the sheep! Come quick! Bring me a soda!” This time all the villagers came running because the whole village depended on the sheep for their livelihood. Villages were very sheep intensive back then. In fact, there was an era in history when sheep were considered currency, just as good as gold coins. However, with a loaf of bread costing three sheep, it was a pretty unwieldy operation to go shopping and people soon went back to coins, which could be carried much more easily in a purse than a dozen sheep.

The villagers arrived and there was no wolf, which made them very relived. They looked around, counted the sheep (which put not a single one of them to sleep) and complimented Arnold that it must have been his yelling that scared off the wolf and saved the flock. The villagers soon left and went back to whatever the heck they were doing. No TV, no wifi, what were they doing anyway?

However, far from being happy with all the attention, Arnold was very upset. Not a single villager brought him the soda he had asked for. He decided he’d try it again.

“Wolf! A wolf is attacking the sheep! Come quick! And don’t forget my soda this time! I want a Mountain Dew! Seriously, I want a soda! And oh yeah, there’s a wolf attacking the sheep too!” See what makes this a fairy tale? Who would ever intentionally drink a Mountain Dew?

The villagers came rushing back, guns at the ready, pitchforks sharpened, and would you believe it? By the time they got to the field there was not a wolf in sight, only the sheep and Arnold, looking very smug and maybe just a bit thirsty.

“Arnold,” they asked, “are you sure you saw a wolf?”
“I cannot tell a lie. Sure I saw a wolf.”

Unfortunately, Arnold had a bit of a reputation around the village. People still remembered the time he claimed to have been abducted by a UFO to avoid his chores.

“Can you describe the wolf?” Seriously, this was the best the villagers could come up with.
“He had big teeth and furry ears.”
“Just like my grandmother!” exclaimed Little Red Riding Hood, and since everyone knew that she was still traumatized ever since the time a cross-dressing wolf ate her grandmother the villagers dropped the subject and went home. And of course, they once again failed to bring Arnold his soda.

Arnold waited an hour to give the village time to cool down and he even fell asleep for a few minutes (in which time a wolf really did devour three of the sheep) and when he woke up, he screamed at the top of his lungs “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!”

The villagers didn’t come running quite so fast this time. In fact, many of them didn’t come at all. A few of them were at Arnold’s house giving his father an earful about what a miserable son he had, but still, some came running to the field and when they saw no wolf and Arnold rolling around on the ground laughing like a loon, it crossed the minds of more than one villager that they had found the new village idiot.

Silently, wordlessly, but with a great deal of glaring and evil looks, the villagers trudged back home.

It wasn’t long before Arnold got bored. Sure, it was fun for a while, but what did crying wolf get him? Nothing, not even a Mountain Dew. Being full of energy and ADHD, It wasn’t long before Arnold found new diversions, like throwing rocks at some frogs and pulling the wings off flies. It was while he was torturing a small snake that he looked up and saw- and this is going to be quite a shock so hold onto your hats- a wolf stalking the sheep.

“WOOOOLF! There’s a wolf after the sheep! For realz this time! And no, ‘realz’ is not a typo!”

Hearing yet another Arnold wolf alert, none of the villagers bothered to investigate, except for one kindly old man, the village elder, the wisest man in the area. He went to fields, saw the wolf, and raised his gun. With one sure pull of the trigger, he let his bullet fly and his aim was sure and true. It flew into the field, a full ten feet to the left of the wolf, and right into Arnold’s chest.

Satisfied, the wise old man returned to the village, secure in the knowledge that they might have lost a few sheep, but no one likes a smart ass.

The moral of the story? Undiagnosed ADHD can be dangerous for a young child. Have your child screened before being allowed to tend sheep.

Can you stand more?
Read My Memories of Cinderella here.

Read My Memories of Snow White here.

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