Anonymous asked: Biggest regret?

Huh. I don’t even post here anymore. Imagine my surprise when I log into my email and see an email asking me about my biggest regret. I probably would have ignored it if it wasn’t so interesting. What IS my biggest regret?

Sorry, but I have to give a non-answer. I don’t have one. Who knows what their biggest regret is? I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life. Some I look back on wince when I think about them. Like (according to my teacher) orchestrating a fight. Like ignoring things instead of confronting them. There are things I’ve tolerated for too long. Like screwing up my grades last year and this year. Like a million other things that are too personal (read:embarrassing) to share on here. Especially with a stranger who I might not even know.

We can’t live perfect lives. I feel perfectly logical about things I do now, but it won’t be so 10 years from now. I’ll look back and wonder why I did what I did when it’s so obviously (to my future me) stupid. All of our actions and their consequences shape us in ways we can’t comprehend just yet. When I’m dying, I’ll know what I regretted the most. Although I very much doubt I’d have time to come back and answer the question again. And there’s also the thing with the bad memory that comes with old age, aha.

Anonymous asked: hey gary.... who are you? can you send us a picture? we would like to see your face... we're not creeps or anything, we're just curious. soo post a picture of you on tumblr and maybe we'll follow you! (: THANKS!

Um, super creepy.. Picture on »>, not gonna send you any pictures.. D:

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family of five

“Eggrolls come with that?”
“No.”
“But I’m trying to feed a family of five.”

Please, and you only wanna spend $14.20? I know you’re not broke, because you’re carrying a Blackberry. Get out of here and go to McDonald’s.

i now own garymei

.com. I now own garymei.com!! Bought it for a dollar today, and I am super happy! Some other Gary Mei owned it since 2004, I think. He finally relinquished it this summer, and I picked it up. Now the question of what to do with it.. I could set up a blog at blog.garymei.com, I suppose. But I think I would want that blog separate from this one. Decisions, decisions..

going out of my mind

Restaurant work is tiring, but more in a mental way. I hate incompetence, whether it lies in the workers here, or the customers. Dealing with people everyday from 11 to 10… It’s enough to drive a man crazy.

I’m there right now, and I can feel my anger rising with each phone call coming in.

First of all, ANSWER MY QUESTIONS. When I ask “You want a delivery? Ok, what’s your address?”, it does NOT mean you can just ignore me and go for your order. Minor annoyance, but please people, this isn’t rocket science. I ask the questions, you answer the questions, I get you your food.

Second… What the hell is “H9”?? I know that we do put letters and numbers on the menu (which is a retarded idea because it leads to this), but please don’t order your food like that. I can write down Fried Rice and also automatically know the price (once you’ve been at it a while, the prices become more familiar than family), but with “H9”, I have to take a moment to hunt it down. Jesus, why do you think I say “H9? The fried rice?” every time you use that stupid letter-number combo!? Because I’m trying to hint at you to STOP. I can’t be expected to memorize about 200 letter-number combos, the meal associated with it, and the price too. Sheesh… Just say fried rice.

Third, be direct with what you want. “I want a shrimp egg foo young”. But whenever I ask “Large or small”, they say small. Dude, if you want a small, say it. You’re just lucky I’m nice and I didn’t leave it at that, or else I would have charged you for a large. The customers around here are cheap as hell, so I know they mostly want smalls…

There’s also the “Can I have some more soy sauce?” question.. I don’t mind giving extra, but goddamn, if you want extra soy sauce, sweet and sour sauce, another fork, AND a plate, TELL ME ALL AT ONCE. I don’t want to walk back and forth a billion times for such small things. Grrr…

Stupid stupid chefs. I’m in charge of answering the phones, taking orders from whoever comes in here, AND getting the food packed up. When business is slow, that’s fine. But as soon as people start calling, the system breaks down. All of a sudden, you got people at the front ready to pick up their food, but their food isn’t ready yet because I’m answering phones. As soon as I’m done with the phone, it rings again. One person can’t do all of this. The chefs also idle around when this is happening, because they don’t speak English and so can’t contribute to it. Maybe they pack up the food (one of them knows how to), but they can’t work the register because they didn’t bother learning that. So again, we’ve stopped progressing. It’s annoying to the customers, and it’s annoying to me.

Other stupid things:
Them: “Where’s the shrimp egg foo young on the menu?”
Me: *points at the exact spot, its under “Egg Foo Young”* “It’s right here.”
Them: “And which one is it? The combination?”
Me: “…No, it’s the one the says shrimp.”

Them: “What comes in the lunch special?”
Me: *thinks to myself ‘READ THE GODDAMN MENU. IT SAYS IT RIGHT UNDER LUNCH SPECIAL’* and says “Shrimp fried rice, an eggroll, and a soda. After 3, no soda and add $1.25 to the price”.

Them: “I want a small pan fried noodle.”
Me: “Ok, what kind of meat?”
Them: “Meat, I don’t want no meat.”
Me: “Ok… but you need meat. Beef, chicken, shrimp.. it’s on the menu.”
Them: “No.. I want the side order of it.” (sounds really frustrated)
Me: “Ohh.. Sorry, you threw me off when you said ‘small’. The side order doesn’t come in a large or small. Just one size.” (feeling really frustrated)
Them: “Oh, ok. I want a small pan fried noodle.”

Them: “How much is the large orange chicken?”
Me: *I tell him*
Them: “Well, I don’t want a large. I’m just eating by myself, that’s too much.”
Me: “There’s also a small..”
Them: “Oh, how much is that?”

Them: “The lunch special comes with shrimp fried rice, how about the normal one?”
Me: “It comes with white rice.”
Them: “So just the chicken and sweet and sour rice?” (what on earth is sweet and sour rice?)
Me: “No, white rice.”
Them: “Sweet and sour and rice?”
Me: “White rice.” 

I can not stand incompetence! And I see it all the time.. Sad face here. All this is just the stuff I can remember in a few minutes. There’s a bunch more where this came from. I hate it, it’s making me crazy. So mad. But I do it every week because it gives my mom a break. And she still has the audacity to yell at me for tiny things.. To demand it of me (yesterday, she asked me to work and I said I’d think about it and she kept asking over and over. God, I said I’d think about it), and to say it is my duty.

I don’t get paid for this.. Jessica did, and that is bullshit. She’s family, (uncle’s daughter and my uncle owns half of this) and I’m family, so what’s the difference? Eh, I’ll talk about that another time. Point is, I hate this stuff, AND I get lectured on top of that.

life in 80 pages

Damn, nothing’s original. Rent already said it, but whatever, here’s my version.

Just got BusinessWeek in the mail today (first issue in a one-year subscription), and it got me thinking. What if life wasn’t measured in years or decades, but in.. magazines?

BusinessWeek comes once a week, which would mean I get 52 of them per year. By the time I read 52 issues, one year of my life has gone by. When I think about it that way, life seems short!

If I live to 70, then I have 54 years left, meaning there are 2808 more issues in this story known as my “life”. I can probably read 2808 relatively (compared to 54 years) fast.. It just serves to show how short life is, and that the important thing is.. what is it?

free? free!?

I’m feeling good right now! Not only did my free BusinessWeek (one year!) actually go through, I also got my FREE mousepad tonight! There’s always these little offers for free stuff, and man, I am LOVING them!

What else do I have coming? Entertainment Weekly (6 months, I think), Newsweek (8 issues), Science Illustrated (3 issues), two years to a tennis magazine, a planned one year sub to Wired, and one year to Popular Mechanics. I should be getting a Mountain Dew wristband soon. Heck, I should (if it goes through) be getting a $15 check in the mail! All of this.. free. There’s probably a few other things I’m forgetting too. And as always, I get $5 Amazon gift cards all the time.

Ah, feeling content right now.

CAPS LOCK

I just noticed that the caps lock button on my laptop’s keyboard is awesome. The sheer ingenuity it must have taken for it to be designed cannot be overstated. But I shall try to explain it in words.

So the caps lock button takes up a certain amount of space, but it’s actually raised on only part of that space. Why is this awesome? Because it increases the space between the “a” button and the caps lock button, reducing accidental presses.

Oh, I can hear your thoughts right now. “Wtf, did I just read about caps lock?”. Um, don’t underestimate this! How many times have you accidentally pressed caps lock while typing on a laptop? This solves that problem.

In fact, the rest of this keyboard is genius. Bigger keys with little space in between (as opposed to “island style”) to mimic a fullsized keyboard. The fn key moved to the very left and the ctrl key in its place instead. I mean, why put the ctrl key there? It just makes you stretch more, which is stupid when such an easy alternative exists.

Man, someone spent time designing this. Someone gets paid to think about caps lock. And that someone deserves a raise.

Ha! If you’re reading this, that means you just wasted your time reading this WHOLE meaningless post about a keyboard!

jumping the gun

Too often, people take a small detail and blow it out of proportion. They ignore the facts, and only look at that one detail.

The iPhone 4 really illustrates what I’m trying to get at here. The main problem with the phone is that holding it a certain way (left side, google it for more info if you want) makes the signal drop and eventually, your call is dropped. Oh no! Why would anyone want to buy the phone then, if it has such a serious defect?? That’s exactly what the media has been harping for the past few weeks. What they’re not saying is that they’re making this a bigger deal than it really is.

First of all, some facts.

Yes, the signal drops when you hold it a certain way. But wait, that’s true for the 3GS too. And not just the 3GS, but all phones. The phone is of course going to have weaker reception when you cover the antenna with your hand. There have been many demonstrations that Blackberrys, HTC phones, Samsung phones, and older iPhone models drop signal when held a certain way.

A case fixes the problem completely, and they’re available for $29.

Compared to the 3GS, the iPhone 4 results in 1 more dropped call (out of every hundred).

The return rate for the iPhone 4 is 1.7%, which is less than the return rate for the 3GS. 0.55% (that’s less than 1 percent!) have called to complain about the problem.

Now that we have all that info, let’s break it down and analyze it without bias.

First, the fact that other phones have the same problem. If other phones have the same problem, and people have been using it without complaints before, why start now? Because they’re sheep. They’ve been hearing that the iPhone 4 has this reception problem, so they start thinking “Oh, that means I can’t make calls at all! What a terrible phone”. What a terribly wrong idea.

Who grips their phone so tightly, and on the left side, while making a phone call? Most people are right handed, and I’m just going on a limb here, but right handed people tend to hold their phone in their right hand while talking on the phone. The problem exists on the left side. Also, no one encompasses their phone the way you would have to to drop the signal significantly.

Second of all, cases do fix the problem. You would think that’d calm everyone down, but there are seriously people out there who shout that cases are too expensive. Really? $29 is too expensive compared to your $200 phone with a $30 a month data plan for 24 months? $29 compared to that is chump change. Besides, Apple just made them free for all iPhone 4 owners, so no reason to complain now!

Now finally, the fact that only 0.55% of iPhone 4 owners are calling to complain about it. That’s probably because people don’t actually hold it by the Death Grip, and that existing phones already have the same problem that they’re used to.

If people just took the time to consider all these things, then they would see that the iPhone 4 isn’t such a terrible phone. But, the media realizes that proclamations of fail tend to attract more attention than news about phones being.. phones.

I just had to write all of this because I die a little bit inside when I see people being so stupid. The iPhone 4 antenna news is getting really old really fast, and it would be great if people stopped talking about it like it was the end of the world!

My resources:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/16/antennagate-complaints-returns-and-call-drops-are-all-extremely-low/
http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/16/steve-jobs-were-not-perfect/