Tag: Family

French Security: Worse Than Nothing

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Whatever they’re trying to do, they’re failing.

French security sucks. It’s worse than nothing. At least nothing wouldn’t delay tourists.

I approach the metal detector. I hand the officer my backpack. I walk through the detector. He hands me my backpack. Sounds like a normal security process. Except he never looked inside my bag.

Same thing yesterday at the Paris catacombs: at the end, a man seated at a desk with a sign saying open your bags so we can ensure you’re not stealing bones. But he doesn’t open your bags. He doesn’t even wave you on. He just plays on his phone.

Three months ago at a Parisian rugby match: the security officers pat down every entrant. Partner stayed in my line. The officer gestured her to a line with a female agent. Partner walked past him. He let her go.

At Orly Airport, you must navigate through all of the stanchions in sequence, even if the line is 0 people. An extra 60 meters of walking per person. One white-haired woman ducked under the rope. The officers yelled at her. She said, “I’m old, it’s hard to walk!” They demanded she go back.

The Louvre was heisted last October. Has nothing changed? Do none of the workers know the point of their jobs? Do none of them believe in their work? Are they too snoozy from the fondue lunch? (Author’s note: fondue is Swiss. But it does make me snoozy.)

What game is this?

The goal of the game is to win. I say that a lot. Sometimes too much. The goal of the game is to win; you win by doing X. But it’s pretty fundamental: if you’re not trying to win, what are you doing?

Sometimes the goal is different. Sometimes it’s to not-lose. Sometimes it’s to survive. Sometimes it’s to tie. But this security bullshit? Whatever it is, it’s not achieving it.

Even some contrived goal, like “create a specific form of job stability for a certain number of people in France without disrupting the general French living and working systems”, couldn’t you do that better? And that’s already super contrived.

The best rebuttal: fake security still deters. Which is fair. True. Like the faux eyes on the wings of a moth, the mere existence of security may prevent me from attempting to sneak a gun into the [insert grand French monument].

But fake security works when it appears real. If the moth has a sign saying “These are just mock eyes; I’m actually a helpless moth, teehee”, that bug is getting nommed. And today, at the Palais de Justice, a guard waves visitors through a body scanner. The alarm went off on the visitor behind me. The guard ignored it, clicked “Ok,” and waved the woman through. You can’t advertise the fakeness! Bluffing is one thing! This is bluffing while turning your cards face up!

Even I get it!

I don’t like security. I’m fully anti-TSA. Considering the rate of deaths by terrorist attack vs the rate of deaths by automobile crashes, I’m even pro-shrug-it-off re 9/11.

But even I understand the point of security. I get why we have it. I just think it’s dumb.

This version of security is the worst version! Not only does it have no impact; it also wastes people’s time! What the hell are you doing, France?!

Do you want to get invaded by the Germans for the fourth time in 160 years? Because you’re sure acting like it!

The Walk Becomes a Sprint

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To inherit a game, serve the crowd its keepers forgot. To serve the crowd, cut the boring parts.

Four times, strangers have asked whether my hat is a Savannah Bananas reference. It isn’t. Now that I know what they are, I wish it were.

A month ago, Partner told me I’d like the Savannah Bananas. The recommendation sat on my to-do list (read: “email inbox”) until this morning, when I finally read up. I am hooked. At least on the concept. 

Two decades ago, my father told me he didn’t get the appeal of e-sports. I asked whether he got the appeal of regular sports. He did. So I asked: when you watch football on TV, how do you know those are real people? If they swapped every player for a digital avatar, how would you know? 

Professional sports is entertainment. The money comes from the people watching, not the people playing. Say that out loud, and a lot of baseball starts to look indefensible. (Partner thinks I should henceforth refer to old baseball as “indefensi-ball”. I like the joke, but fear readers would find it intolera-ball.) 

The Savannah Bananas play Banana Ball, which is baseball, except someone took the rulebook and asked, of every slow part, Who is this for? A walk is the most boring thing in the sport: four boring balls, a slow and boring trot to first, a predictable outcome, nothing to see. So Banana Ball has no walks. Ball four starts a sprint, where the batter runs as far around the bases as he can while every fielder but the pitcher handles the ball in turn. The dullest outcome in baseball became a footrace.

The rest rhymes. No mound visits. No stepping out of the box. A 2-hour clock, so the game can’t sprawl. Catch a foul ball in the stands and the batter is out, which turns the crowd into a tenth defender. One guy plays on stilts (Dakota Albritton). Another bats in a cape (Reese Alexiades). I’m surprised the players still go by their own names. 

The cape doesn’t help him play baseball better. It does help him play banana ball better.

Scoring changed too. Win an inning (i.e. score the most runs in it), and you get a point. One point per inning, like sets in tennis. My grandfather leaves every baseball game before the 9th “to beat the traffic.” He couldn’t pull that in banana ball, because in the final inning every run is its own point, leaving every banana ball game to a dramatic finish. He would stay.

One detail sold me. This scoring system means the home team has an obvious edge: batting last every inning, it only has to hit until its ahead by one run. (Baseball fans would notice this as a host of walk-off opportunities.) I noticed that and assumed it was a flaw. But they even invented a rule for it! It’s called the Equalizer Point. If the visiting team pulls off more trick plays than the home team by the 8th (a behind-the-back toss for an out, a backflip catch, popping the ball off your glove and into your bare hand for a catch), the visitors get a free point before the last inning. The home team’s structural advantage, paid back to the road team in degree of difficulty. Whoever built this spends their showers thinking about the same fairness questions a real league does. They just answer them in the currency of the show. Because this league is just as real as Major League Baseball. 

Even the charity is a pun: the team’s nonprofit, Bananas Foster, supports foster kids. It’s a real charity. And also a pun. It’s bits all the way down! 

You could file all of this under parody, and parody has a ceiling. It works only while you remember the original, so it can never outgrow the thing it mocks. But the Bananas aren’t mocking baseball. They kept the bones (a pitcher, a batter, a diamond, innings) and rebuilt the rest out of love. That is what an heir does.

Heirs don’t stay capped by the thing they came from. They inherit it. Rome spent the better part of 3 centuries feeding Christians to lions; then, in the year 380, the empire made Christianity its official religion, and the church went on to inherit Rome’s whole apparatus: its language, its hierarchy, its capital, even the old chief priest’s title, Pontifex Maximus, which the Pope still carries. The offshoot outlived the host.

Games run the same play on a faster clock. Cricket already did it. A Test match can last 5 days, and the purists love every hour, but a stripped-down, made-for-TV format called T20 showed up and became the sport’s commercial engine, the version with the crowds and the money. Later this week, I’m attending the Rugby 7s world championship. I’ve only been to one match of full rugby (15 per side) – never again! – but the 20-minute, seven-person format has made me a diehard fan. 

In 2023 Major League Baseball, the incumbent itself, gave itself a pitch clock. Games got 24 minutes shorter, attendance crossed 70 million for the first time since 2017, and ratings rose for the first time since 2012. Banana ball has had a game clock since 2020. (It started in 2018.) That is what the early innings of a succession look like.

The mechanism is always the same. A game gets, well, gamed to the point where it’s no fun anymore. It calcifies. It gets boring to watch, which is fatal, because the watching is what pays. Then someone arrives who treats fun as an engineering problem, and the crowd starts to drift his way, and the money follows the crowd. I’ve made this argument at the scale of a sandwich shop. The Bananas are making it at the scale of America’s Pastime.

You could call the Bananas a parasite. They feed on a host they need alive; half the jokes only work if you know the real game. (“What counts as a trick play?” requires a frame of reference.) Sure. But a parasite that devours its host and moves into the empty niche is just evolution running on schedule. We mammals also once lived in burrows, waiting out the dinosaurs. (As a PhD in biology, Partner does not support this analogy.) 

Give Banana Ball 30 years and it will have its own record book, its own purists, its own slow sacred stretches no one is allowed to touch, maybe even its own children’s rec and traveling teams, and some new weirdo will turn up to strip it for parts. Christianity inherited Rome, then spent centuries hardening into the thing Luther showed up to protest. Every heir becomes an incumbent. Every incumbent grows an heir.

None of this works unless there’s nothing sacred underneath, and there isn’t. No essence of baseball is being betrayed, because there is no essence of baseball, the same way (as I’ve argued before) there is no essence of golf. “Real baseball” is just the version that happened to harden before you were born. Strip it down, hand it back to the crowd, and the purists will call it desecration. It’s only the next version.

Catholics took 3 centuries to get from the lions to the leadership. Baseball is only up to the pitch clock. The new game is less competitive than the old one. It is also, at last, worth watching to the end. Even my grandfather would accept the traffic.

I’m Now a Pirate

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To guard your blind side, see it coming. You can’t. That’s the trouble.

At the Saturday market, the fruit vendor asked what happened to my eye. Surgery yesterday, I said. Then: “I’m now a pirate.”

He laughed. He handed us a banana and a peach for free, then offered a pair of melons for 5 euros. I said no. He said 3 euros. I said no. He said the French version of “come on.” I thanked him and said no. (I have one working eye, not one working braincell.) 

He totaled it up. Partner counted out the change. (We play a game when we’re about to leave a country. It’s called spend all the fiddly little coins. Yesterday I paid my rent in cents.) He held out his hand. I dropped the coins three inches closer than where his palm actually was. He tutted. “It’s new,” I said, about the eye.

Depth perception. One of the main benefits of binocular vision.

The costs since have been small and physical and easy to laugh at. I have to put medicated drops in the bad eye 3 times a day, and I can’t see well enough out of it to aim, so the eye can’t guide the drops that fix the eye. Tonight Paris Saint-Germain won, and Étampes spilled into the street to celebrate, and I caught about half of it. Partner walks on my left now so I can see her. I poked myself in the eye briefly when blowing my nose. None of it bothers me for more than a few seconds. The eye will heal in a week or two. I agreed to this difficulty. 

At the bakery, Partner said, “He’s staring at you. You should say some pirate things.” Or that’s what she told me later. She talks fast, and I don’t always catch her, so in the moment I missed it and bought my bread. 

Outside, she said, “How come you didn’t make pirate noises for the little boy? He’d have loved that.”

“Little boy?”

She laughed. “He was on your right side.”

That’s the blind one.

The drops, the coins, the half a celebration, the side she walks on now: Unlike things on my right side, I saw those coming. The boy, I didn’t see at all. A kid was standing right there, wanting a gift I was eager to share, and he’d picked the single spot where I’ve got nothing. I only know because Partner saw it and told me. 

Guess I’ll need a parrot for that shoulder. 

Two Service Industries

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The waiter has two jobs. So does everyone in the service industry.

A waiter who doesn’t bring your food has failed. A waiter who brings your food but ruins your experience has also failed, just in a different way. We refer to both of these elements with the same word: “service”.

Two completely different failure modes, one job title. The waiter sells a result (correct order arrives, hot) and an experience (the welcome, the rhythm of the table, the small talk, the upsells that don’t feel pushy).

Most service jobs are like this. A masseuse sometimes sells a result (your glutes stop screaming) and sometimes sells an experience (60 minutes of affectionate touch from a fellow primate). A hotel sells a result (somewhere safe to sleep, proximity to the places you want to be, a gym, food without leaving the building) and an experience (the pleasantness of all of it).

The word “service” hides two different products. Once you notice this, every purchase decision gets easier, because you stop accidentally paying for the one you don’t want.

(People miscategorize their purchases all the time. Doctors, for instance, are in the service industry. Personally, I only value “bedside manner” insofar as it impacts my medical results, generally through team cohesion.) 

The Hotel Switch

This idea showed up today while I switched hotels in Budapest.

Hotel 1 was the Kimpton BEM. $340 per night. Sauna, gym, restaurant, bar, room service, a quick walk to the Danube. A small room. No refrigerator. Paid laundry. Beautiful experience, modest result.

Hotel 2 is an aparthotel. $61 per night. A one-bedroom apartment (separate bedroom and living room). A kitchen with stove, oven, microwave, dishes, refrigerator. A laundry machine. One block from the biggest ruin bar in Budapest.

For the same money, I’d take the aparthotel every time: twice the space, a real kitchen, a better location, an in-unit laundry machine. The Kimpton costs roughly 5.5x as much. At that price, you’re buying 1) The experience of being attended to, and 2) Reliability (of room, food, and experience: Kimpton is a reputable brand.

The Preference

I’m probably odd in that I almost always want the result.

I prefer my infrastructure solves specific needs. If it solves the need, the work is done; the pleasure of the experience is secondary to the solving of the problem.

The key exception: play. I don’t play golf to get the ball in the hole. I play golf to play golf. Play is the rare context where the experience IS the product, and I’m clear on that going in.

Perhaps some people see visiting a hotel as play. I see it as infrastructure. 

The Cost

The aparthotel model isn’t free. You have to learn it. Photos lie. Hosts ghost. There’s no front desk at this residence: if you fail their check-in process, their automated system won’t email you the login code.

The variance is real: I once caught a nasty cough from a booking.com stay due to mold on the walls.

The result-first approach trades reliability for upside on the days nothing goes wrong. Most days, nothing goes wrong. And my skill at spotting good residences has improved. But I improved… by making mistakes.

The Result

As I write this I’m on the couch in our new living room, and Partner is squishing my feet. My feet hurt because the Kimpton was a 45-minute walk from the lively downtown area (from which Partner and I walked back to the Kimpton at 2am last night).

I’m enjoying the experience of a feet-squish from someone I love. Still, I’d rather we jumped to the result where my feet stopped hurting.

Top-Secret Games: Airport Edition 

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Serious places make the silliest games

Airports pretend they’re fancier than bus stations. Some games to remind them of their silliness: 

Packing

  • Try “one–bagging”: no matter how long the trip, pack everything in a personal-item-sized backpack. Partner and I traveled through Europe for 4 months with one 20L backpack each. Benefits include: 
  1. Less to lug
  2. Recognize how little you actually need. 
  3. Save $50+ per budget airline flight (which charge for carry-ons). That $50 (or $75!) could go toward a new shirt or hat or socks or whatever-you-neglected-due-to-your-limited-space-and-probably-won’t-need-anyway. 

Checking in

  • Snap a picture of the airplane seatmap. This may come in handy. 

TSA Checkpoints

Which line?

Most people choose by line length. But length is often less important than throughput speed. At a fork, neither line is likely to be 25% longer. But one TSA agent often is 25% slower. 

Free Awkward Massage

When you’ve arrived to the airport with ample time to spare, tell the TSA agent, “I’d like to opt out of the body scanner”. 

They’ll summon an agent who aligns with their perception of your gender appearance (androgynous people: I have no idea). 

That person will blandly-and-with-dead-eyes presage the next two minutes of your future. Their articulation will be simultaneously formal (“I will first pat down your upper body, then your lower body…”) and ridiculous (“When I get to your sensitive areas, such as the waistband, I will use only the back of my hands”). 

The experience feels like a procedural drama crossed with a lazy streetwalker naming service prices. You know it’s pointless and dumb. They know it’s pointless and dumb. And now they’re obligated to touch you. 

For an added joy, leave something innocuous in your pocket: your passport or a few coins or a used dental flosser. 

While they’re performing this intimate massage, try not to laugh. 

Or guffaw at their pointlessness. 

Or lean on them while they’re bending over to pat you. 

On a societal level: there’s no winning. It isn’t a game. It’s a farce.

In the Lounge

0. Play credit card games to acquire lounge access. (These games are pre-preparation.) 

  1. Before leaving the lounge, choose between Future Fueling Level 1 (stuffing your backpack with canned drinks to go), and Future Fueling Level 2 (squirreling food into the ziplocs you brought). I play level 1; Partner Level 2. 

At the Gate

  1. If it’s your birthday, tell the counter check-in people it’s your birthday. (Most of their work is dealing with annoyed travelers, so they really love this refreshing opportunity!) 
  2. If it’s not your birthday, ponder the ethics of telling them it’s your honeymoon. (Decide against it as your partner doesn’t have a ring and you really don’t want them to ask, plus lying to win games is cheating.)
  3. Ask the gate agent whether the airplane is full. If it’s not, ask them if they could move you to better seats. Do not pay for the change: that’s how the terrorists win. 

When lining up for budget airlines with your Onebag®, do the following:

0. Have a bag that, if need be, is small enough to fit in the sizer if you put on all your layers and jam your pockets full. (The first step to winning is choosing a game you can win.) 

  1. Seek the person who is least interested in doing their job correctly. 
  2. Position your body to hide your bags. 
  3. Upon approaching the desk, ask them a question that distracts them without increasing their engagement, something like “Have you been to [destination city]? It’s my first time.” Be kind and friendly and light. You’ll know you’ve succeeded when their dead eyes shift energyless to the person behind you. 

Boarding the Plane

  1. If the plane has open seating, board earliest. See the “final note” (below) for methods to keep your neighboring seat empty. 
  2. Board last. If the agents ask, tell them it’s because “Boarding last is lucky!” And it is! The last person on the plane gets to see what seats are available before taking theirs.
    1. This approach enables the harnessing of what million milers call “poor man’s first class” (an open row).

Final Note 

  • Throughout this experience, if you ever want to repel someone’s attention (maybe your bag is slightly too big; maybe the plane is open-seating and you want the open seat beside you to remain), make a grotesque face and pick your nose. (Only pull this trick if you want to distract their attention and don’t have to interact with them. If the interaction is mandatory, this move can be dangerous.) Really get into it. Remind yourself, “No one expects a nose-picker to be strategic. Some people actually look like this or pick their nose like this. I wouldn’t want to interact with them, either!” 

Pets, Colleagues, Livestock

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The creature is the same, the category is the frame, the frame is the game.

Is your cat a pet or a colleague?

Our categories, often arbitrary, shape our relationships.

Snickers

My parents’ cat died yesterday. She was a comfort animal, treated like a member of the family — albeit one who would literally bite the hand that feeds her. Upon receiving scritches, Snickers would drool, then grow overwhelmed by the pleasure and bite you. Her teeth were quite sharp, prompting the end of the scritching and Snickers’ confusion.

Dubbed The Belle of Amherst, Snickers hermited upstairs, leaving her room only once or twice per year. A working cat? She hadn’t caught a mouse in her life. Snickers would meow so my mother would lift her up to the food bowl on the windowsill. My mother laughed about Snickers forgetting the location of her food. I laughed because Snickers had learned to take the elevator instead of the stairs.

Snickers was a family member. We will miss her.

Smidgen

After ending a relationship in 2018, a best-friend-sized hole throbbed in my heart. Since dog is man’s best friend, I considered adopting.

Unsure for how long I would want a dog, I reasoned: I would delightfully care for a dog for the next few years. After that period, I wasn’t so sure.

Most people in this circumstance wouldn’t adopt a dog, at least in cultures where dog is family-member. I understand that dogs feel emotional attachments. It does seem cruel to adopt and abandon.

However: 

  1. “Abandoning” is meaningfully different from what I planned to do (I wouldn’t simply leave it on the street)
  2. In that world, one more dog sits at a shelter and I wallow without a dog.

Many shelters are over-crowded, especially with chihuahuas, and often kill the animals they can’t care for. Even if somebody took a dog for a year, then returned it and the dog was immediately put to death, didn’t that dog get an extra year of life? By caring for a dog, even temporarily, don’t you improve the dog-shelter ecosystem? It’s hard to say that some amount of dog separation pain overrides the value of a happy year of a dog’s life.

I concluded the “dog-as-commitment” perspective didn’t fit my values, so I adopted a dog with the plan to rehome her if my preference changed. When I called the shelter to put Smidgen on hold, the receptionist laughed, saying she had been at the shelter for months: no one would swoop in to steal her from me.

Smidgen and I traveled together for around three years. More than anything in the world, she loved lap-sitting. She’d sit on my lap while I drove across the country. She’d sit on my lap while I read a book. Sometimes we’d go to dog parks so she could sit on my lap and watch the other dogs.

Six months into our relationship, I mentioned the uncertainty I had about keeping her. Consistently, people responded with comments like, “Well, you’ve made a commitment.”

Where does this social pressure — that a dog is a family member — come from? It might be the social shaming of abandoning or abusing dogs (which is categorically different from re-homing them). It might be the strong vocality of people who grow incredibly attached to their dogs.

In my uncertainty, I only found one write-up about a family that adopted a dog, had it for six months, and decided it wasn’t for them. The write-up lamented the absence of shared experiences like this.

Partner

Partner grew up surrounded by animals: cows, chickens, sheep, ducks, geese, guinea pigs, parakeets, a rabbit, and dogs.

Two weeks ago, our general contractor brought over some eggs and mentioned he has a sick chicken. His wife has spent about $2,000 trying to revive this chicken. Partner noted afterwards that she had newly realized she didn’t grow up with pets: she grew up with farm animals. One cow was named T-Bone after its future. When raccoons raided their coop, the family shrugged and replaced the chickens. (As Partner puts it, “Chickens are like 3 for $10.”)

I don’t think there’s clear superiority to the pet perspective over the farm animal relationship. The relationship seems more driven by one’s background and emotional experiences than logic.

I’m reminded of the Supreme Court case National Pork Producers Council v. Ross. In oral arguments, the Humane Society argued for the ethics of pigs in kinder conditions. Pork producers rebutted with the ethics of affordable pork. A plurality of the Supreme Court ruled the ethics “incommensurable” – impossible for courts to compare.

Mother

My mother grew up with a large extended family, all in their forties or older when she was born. By the nature of aging, they began to pass away when my mother was quite young.

My mother sees each pet as a family member.

I grew up without an extended family. My four-person nuclear family has always been healthy. I don’t have that particular pain that causes me to strongly desire more family. (But I did adopt Smidgen from a best-friend-sized hole.)

When my time with Smidgen had neared its end, I asked my mother: “If I rehomed her, would you want her?” My mother said yes.

She relates to what she sees as a family member. I relate to what I see as a dog.

What’s it like to be a pet? 

Smidgen and Snickers shared the same bed for about four years. Snickers hissed whenever Smidgen got too close. I wonder whether they considered each other family.

Will Smidgen be sad that Snickers is gone?

Reply to tell me: what’s your relationship with the animals in your life? And if you’ve ever rehomed a dog: did anyone in your circle understand?

The Hand of My Dreams

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If the logic doesn’t follow, keep going. Don’t go back.

This actually happened earlier today: 

The Setup

Two guys had run out of money in the poker game. One of them – the host – had lost angrily. He was displeased with two other people at the table, and responsible for the other broke-guy’s buyin. The host said, “And if we’re down by $54 and we send $50, what will you do…” 

Then he told us, “You’ll take it and be grateful and not hound us for the other $4.” 

A while later – minutes or hours, I don’t know – the final three of us were playing double-handed omaha. 8 cards per person, split into two hands. The board was A99Q. I had AAxx in one hand for the over-full: the second-best possible hand. Even better: my two aces were both spades. 

The Opponents

The woman on my left – an Asian girl from my highschool – had KKxx for the kings-over full house. (The board now contained A99QK, with still the final card to be dealt.) In her other hand, she had 99xx for quads, but also definitely did not have quads. 

The woman on my right – a different Asian girl from my highschool – had 8cTcJc spread across her 8 cards, which went with the 9c, Qc, and Kc on the board to make a straight flush. Fortunately for me, the cards were separated across her hands so she didn’t actually have a straight-flush despite having the cards. 

The Accounting

We were already all in. I performed the accounting. The hundred-dollar chips were exhausted, so we used the silver bracelets each valued at $200. 

The pot totalled around $1500. We hadn’t all contributed equally. I wasn’t concerned since I had so much equity. 

The Broken Protocol

We agreed to run the river three times. 

We clicked my computer mouse to run the first river. It dealt an entire new board. We tried again. Same issue. I suggested we should use the same physical deck we were already playing with to run the river (duh!). 

The Showdown

I awoke.

A Game You Can’t Decline

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The goal of the game is to play well. You play well by knowing you’re playing.

Last night, friends came over. They’d baked cookies. They brought the cookies in a Tupperware container. As they were leaving, Partner went to retrieve the Tupperware and hand it back at the door.

I winced internally. I should have said something. 

Here’s the game I saw and Partner didn’t: you don’t return the Tupperware at the door. You keep the Tupperware. Eventually, you need to return it – which means you’ll see them again, which means there’s an open thread between you. The Tupperware is a mild promissory note. Yes, we’ll have you over, or you’ll invite us, or we’ll see you at the thing – because also, here’s your Tupperware.

Returning the container at the door closes the loop transactionally. Everyone walks away even. But the loop is what builds the relationship. Even is not what you want when starting a relationship if the other person would find you returning the tupperware weird.

When I mentioned it to Partner afterward, she got it instantly. She’d just never thought of it that way. We also agreed that it isn’t logical. Of course they want their Tupperware back. The whole thing is illogical. Most social dynamics games are.

I’m reminded of a buddy of mine this past summer. A woman had stayed over at his apartment. Now, she wanted her ring back. He told her to retrieve it from his roommate. No, buddy! She left it so you have to see her again! 

I once had a 9 AM appointment with a doctor. Due to a series of errors made by his office and lab, my appointment ran until 2:30 PM. Around noon, I mentioned wanting to grab a sandwich. He gave me cash and offered to pay for mine as well.

Something felt wrong. I bought both sandwiches and gave him the cash back.

I suspect he didn’t even register the move. But Partner had the same instinct I did when I told her: pay for his sandwich, refuse the cash. The discomfort was real and shared, even if neither of us could immediately articulate why.

Here’s why: the cash created an obligation flow that didn’t match the relationship. He had spent five and a half hours of my day on his office’s mistakes. The appropriate flow was him owing me. His offer to buy me lunch was a way to pay down his debt of guilt. But not an appropriately-sized one.

Buying the sandwich, refusing the cash, was the right move. It accepted the kindness implicit in offering food while refusing the implicit power-move. Imperfect, but instinct steered correctly. 

And as we left his office, he apologized at least 8 times for the delay. By the end, he said, “I’m done apologizing. If I apologize again, hit me.” That’s the appropriate obligation for someone who’s wasted 5 hours of your day. 

Recently, I made a friend who pocket-vetos any activities that are emotionally intense for him. He only plays the games he wants to play, in the ways he wants to play them.

It’s no surprise this correlates with power and resources. As friends have gotten more powerful, more of them have developed this stance. No explanation, no apology, no negotiation. Generally no answer, not even a “No”. 

If you’re young and broke and unattractive and awkward, you can’t pull this off. People stop inviting you. Every social interaction has to be navigated, every gift has to be reciprocated, every obligation has to be honored. The poverty of optionality forces you to play every game offered. 

As you accumulate power and resources, you can decline games without consequence. People still invite you. People still want you around. They accept this trait because you’re still worth it. Like the celebrity who’s notorious for being prickly in interviews, the rudeness becomes a feature: a filter mechanism.

Three observations: 

1. Refusing to play is itself a move. 

  • A recurring claim of this blog. It holds here.

2. Not-playing a game requires winning sufficiently in other games, or people will stop playing games with you entirely. 

  • The friend’s pocket-vetos work because the rest of his social game is in order. He’s not refusing because he doesn’t understand the games; he’s refusing because losing this game doesn’t matter for him anymore. If Warren Buffett never set a schedule, only meeting with people willing to show up at his offices in Omaha, people would still gladly sit in his office for hours, waiting for the possibility to talk with him. 

3. Winning generally comes from choosing which game is being played and at what level. 

  • Most of us learn how to act in specific spots in specific games. That’s a fine level one, but it misses out on level two (shifting the odds in your favor) and level three (dictating the battlefield). 

One more thing: the move I should have made about the Tupperware was overruling Partner in real time. I saw the game. I knew the right move. I let her make the suboptimal one because I didn’t want to interrupt.

That’s a habit of mine – letting people make moves I see as wrong, then discussing afterward if it matters. The discussion-afterward version doesn’t recover the move. It just generates retrospective alignment for next time.

Sometimes the right move is to interrupt. Saying wait, I’m gonna eat all those in the moment would have been weird. It also would have been the right move. Weirdness is sometimes the price of playing well.

[It’s late. I’ve read this one too many times to like it. The daily-publishing game is hard tonight. I hope I like this post in the morning. Sigh.]

The Sleeper Agent at Chipotle

JulianLeave a comment

The goal of the game is to notice when you’re being played.

In December of 2008, I unwrapped a burrito-based scheme.

My local Chipotle had a promo: buy a $20 gift card, get a coupon for a free burrito. I asked the cashier what the gift card could be used for. “It’s as good as cash.”

I paid $20. They handed me a $20 gift card and a coupon. I asked for another. I handed them the $20 gift card; they handed me a functionally-identical card and a second coupon. I did this four times. The cashier said she might need to check with her manager. I smiled and said I was done, leaving with my four burritos, $20 gift card, and twenty fewer dollars in my pocket.

Chipotle ran this same promotion every December and May through 2011. I always had a $20 gift card on me, ready to use it to buy another. I ate essentially free burritos for three years. Even as a high schooler, I couldn’t eat them fast enough.

I was very proud of myself.

I hadn’t been to Chipotle in years. Today, they had a two-for-one deal – officially for the start of the Stanley Cup Finals (and coincidentally on the biggest stoner holiday of the year). 

I ordered. And, like a just-activated sleeper agent, the skills came back.

Bowl, not burrito – they fill the bowl more.

Say “extra [item],” then pause. Wait until they finish scooping. Once you give them the next task, they will stop the previous one. Wait until they finish and you’re sure to have extracted the maximum.  Ask for half-and-half meat. They always overshoot; you end up with closer to two-thirds and two-thirds. (Combine this trick with the pause for even more.) 

Sour cream on the side. Guac on the side. The containers hold more than the spoon puts on the bowl.

I watched myself do it. Pause after “extra cheese”. Sour cream on the side. My bowl came out about 30% fuller than Partner’s order of the same item. The skills were still there, fifteen years later, like riding a bike.

Here’s the thing I didn’t see in 2008.

Chipotle ran those gift card promotions for three years. If exploiting them had dented the company, they would have stopped after year one. Instead, the promotion kept running. The fraction of people who figured out the loophole was, presumably, priced in. (Or maybe only my Chipotle failed to stop this loophole. As Partner’s mom says, “It’s better to be lucky than smart.” Unfortunately, I’m usually smart.)

I thought I was beating the system. The system was too big to care. 

Today is even funnier. Chipotle is doing two-for-one on 4/20. Their margins on a 30%-overfilled bowl are fine – the whole promotion exists because they must make more than 50% margins on food sales. The tactics I was proud of – pause-after-extra, half-and-half, sidesies – if everyone did them, Chipotle would be ecstatic. My “exploits” meant I ate at Chipotle when I otherwise wouldn’t have. And as long as I do that, they win. 

It’s like the credit card companies with their 5%-cashback offers. They’ve run the math. They’re making profit. Go ahead and max out the offers: That just means you’re playing the game. 

Being Wise to the game sometimes means: 

  1. Noticing that winning the game means you’re playing; and sometimes playing itself is losing.  
  2. Making games that entice others to play, and where any play is a win for you. In casino parlance, this is being The House. In Chipotle, it means having such high margins that a 50%-off deal plus customers bowlmaxxing still leads to a profit. 

And, fine: sometimes a teenager actually does beat the house. I did. Sorry, Chipotle.

Still, that nostalgia brought me back to Chipotle today, over ten years later.  

On long enough timelines, with large enough groups, The House always wins.

Game on. Or maybe: Got played.

Know what you’re hiring for (Apr 15 2026)

JulianLeave a comment

As long as you do your job 🙂 

My contractor is excellent. Exquisite. Delightful. Perfect for the price point. 

His project manager is new.
Not in a bad way.
In a just-moved-to-the-U.S.-from-Pakistan-where-he-used-to-be-an-architect way.
In a living-with-eight-relatives-out-in-the-boonies way.
In a this-is-his-first-project-at-his-new-job-in-a-new-country way.
In a hungry way. 

Yesterday, he sent me a long email saying we need to stick to timeline.
I replied appreciating him for his work and telling him, respectfully, that the delays have all been on his side.
I also texted the contractor to follow up about a question he and I had discussed thrice, but that the project manager had a different conclusion on.
I received a reply that included both the answer I expected and a note that he was looking forward to seeing me tomorrow.
I replied: tomorrow? That works, but did we have a scheduled appointment? 

And at 8:36am, Partner prods me in my half-torporious slumber to say that project manager is en route.
I check my email. At 5am, the project manager emailed to say we were meeting at 9am. 

The amusing part is: this is actually fine. None of these minor hiccups have actually been problematic for the specific job I want him to do.
And also, if his timing is a bit slower because he’s green, we’ve signed a sufficiently solid contract to be okay in that eventuality. 

I’m still very sure that the project manager is a good fit, and that the contractor is excellent.
I’m also suspicious that the project manager might have been up all night working on my project. (He said he had sent the 5am email “last night” and I’m not sure when he slept before taking the metro north train in.)
And that he dresses differently depending on whether he is going to meet designers (black turtleneck on one occasion, stylish black t-shirt on another) or subcontractors (blue jeans and a baseball cap).
Lol.
Keep up the good work!