Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to 3410,
I just think he might have felt as though he'd be at risk of being sacked for accepting money from a customer that didn't go through the till.
Quite possibly. But if so, he could always just take it straight to his boss and say what happened. There is no law against giving people a tip, nor is there any reason why the company should get a piece of it, unless they had a prior arrangement to that effect. Even if they did, the presentation of the tip to his own manager would surely count for as much as a hundred people writing in and saying he was awesome. It might say "pay this guy more, you idiots".
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Rich Lock,
My point in posting wasn't really to reward this guy. I already did that. It was to highlight his reaction to it, which was, in my opinion, really strange. It's also not the first time that I've got that reaction to giving a tip in NZ.
Personally, I think getting bitter on tips is part of what's wrong with this country. A tip is money paid directly to the actual human doing the work. It's hard to imagine a fairer deal.
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
The guy's probably wondering what you mean by it, what you want, if it's okay/legal for him to accept it...I feel a little sorry for him now, actually.
I don't. He has $50 tax free he can spend, or if he really does have false consciousness, he could just give it to all the other useless salespeople that kept plaguing him as their favorite "go-to-guy" the entire time. Or even better, he could just give it straight to JB HiFi, and totally miss the point. I expect he doesn't even know that he was 8 shades of awesome, and they were fucking lucky to have him working there.
I've been in similar circumstances a couple of times. I took the time a day or two later to write to customer services/branch manager, naming the staff member and saying how pleased I was to get good service.
Yes, that occurred to me. But knowing that JB HiFi screw their staff over (he did, after all, complain about this while selling to me), I opted to just put the money straight where it would be of some use. Also, writing a frikken letter to the manager is just something I don't have time for. I hate doing that kind of shit - that's like giving the manager a pat on the back for how awesome their shop is. I don't think it's awesome, I think it's exploitative, and I wanted to give the actual person being exploited some actual gratitude.
Personally, I'd rather write about it here, where upwards of ten thousand quite intelligent, conscientious and tech savvy people might read about it, rather than writing to some management dusch whose only angle would be to work out how he can personally profit from it.
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re: Tipping. It seems benign enough, so long as they already have a living wage. I often tip in NZ. It's odd - sometimes people are actually affronted by it. I tipped the guy at JB HiFi who sold me my phone, he was so frikken awesome. He tried to give it back to me, got all embarrassed, and next time I went there, when he saw me he took off. Weird. This was after him explaining that the total commission to him for selling me $1000 worth of phone was about $3. He worked at that sale for about 90 mins going well beyond what I have come to expect from any shop salesperson, and I thought giving him $50 was fair enough.
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I reckon they took the roof off to keep out the bums. Hunkering down against the wall was popular, not so much when it's a metal wall with no roof.
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Yes, the most sensible advice for smoking tourists is probably to buy a big carton of them duty free at the airport. Or give up.
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Russell Brown,
Advice for visitors: spend the $13 you would have spent on a glass of wine on a marked-down bottle of same wine at Countdown on Quay St. Take it back to your hotel room with delicious takeaways from a food hall.
Then watch all the games on the TV? You're thinking like a Kiwi.
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Sacha,
I believe said vendor's business model relies on being notified.
Yes, Google is free for a reason.
You would think, however, that some of their employees in NZ might notice the grosser deficiencies. Or are they all hipsters who live in apartments in the city and never drive anywhere?
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to 3410,
Had that too - it directed me down a country road to Stillwater, which turned out to be a private road in the middle. I could have just barreled through their fence and farmhouse driveway, to connect up with the other side of the road which did, indeed, go through, but the farmer had a big sign saying that trespassers would have the dogs set on them. I was tempted to jump out and go looking for mushrooms, but wimped out and went the long way.
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Sacha,
You'd think ensuring major map providers are updated might be part of any area upgrade project by now.
To be fair on the council, it's not their job to fix up the maps of third party vendors, and it's not like major roading upgrades are a big secret. Google didn't have the new alternate motorway by Upper Harbor Highway, when I went there the other day, and insisted I was hurtling through farmland at 100km/h.
It's quite fun navigating by Google. You never know what curveball they're going to give you. Very often, they're right. Sometimes, they're horribly wrong. I think their public transport search leaves a lot to be desired - when the top 3 routes suggest "walk 2.8 km to x bus stop (31 min)", you have to figure they haven't really grasped why people like to get on vehicles for longish trips. Yes, they're probably right that their route would be quicker, but they don't factor in that walking for half an hour wearing a suit and carrying a laptop is something most people don't want to do, particularly when there is a bus stop only 100m from their front door.
ETA: I'll be the first to admit that good routing is hard software to write, having done a reasonable amount of it myself. There's a lot of little heuristics, which differ from purpose to purpose, and a lot of data to get right, and the potential to waste a lot of time/money for people by getting it wrong.
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