Citizen of the World

The other day on my photo spree of Chelsea and the upper W. Village with a friend of mine, we stopped in at Tea & Sympathy on Greenwich Ave. I hadn't been to that tea house since the early 90s, although I'd passed it a number of times. I remembered how sweet and utterly British it was to have tea there - promptly at 4:00 PM.

We sat down at a very small table (it's VERY cramped for bear bellies in that place) and looked over the tea menu on the back. I glanced at the food offerings, but since we'd already had lunch, there was no reason to think about actual food. But the desserts sounded good - bread pudding, toffee pudding with vanilla custard, carrot cake, etc., etc. I thought I might order an Earl Grey with extra Bergamot and my buddy wanted some coffee.

The waitress came over to take our orders; very quickly into our order, she interrupted and said, "You have to order a food item. What food items did you want?"

Looking at her dumbfounded, I said, "Well, we've just had lunch; we wanted tea and dessert. Our drink order with my cake should cover the $10 minimum per person nicely."

"Each person at the table must have a food item with a $10 minimum to sit in here, but you can get just drinks at our take out next door," the waitress said loudly.

We were FLABBERGASTED!! In THIS economy with their neighboring stores all around closing their doors, people getting laid off, and no one going out that much to restaurants, to think that they would lay out or maintain that kind of restriction on willingly paying customers!! It was 3:30 PM. Who wants actual food at that time?? Plus, it's tea time - not food time. It's a fucking British tea room!! They would rather NOT have our money than God-forbid "bend the rules" for us.

We left on principle alone and didn't go to the take-out store. On our speedy way out the door, I said hopefully loudly enough, "To think in THIS economy, they're willing to get rid of paying customers! It's a shame we won't be able to come back here ever again," and left - still dumbfounded.

We went down the street to a very charming neighborhoody place with great service on 8th Ave next to Shoegasm - also quite small - and ended up spending $4 apiece on good coffee, a piece of coffee cake, and a piece of diet pumpkin ricotta cheesecake (stupendous). I've also cataloged that place for a re-visit for one of their Argentinian meat pockets. Yummy!!

Much to many people's surprise, mornings often find me clicking on job postings on Monster and CareerBuilder, and even sometimes going to other job posting sites, LinkedIn, Craig's List, and others. The thing that irritates me the most about job postings is that companies posting the jobs don't realize the outside impact of their verbiage and title choices.

"Project Manager" should not be used as a catch-all phrase to describe what you want for a candidate. If you are looking for a Civil Engineer, Construction Design Specialist, Senior Engineering Architect all of whom have project management experience, THEN SAY THAT.

"Account Manager - non-commissioned" should not include things like Accountants, Sales Manager, Audit Specialist, etc.

One of the biggest issues I have with job posting sites, which allow you to save your searches and turn the saved searches into email alerts is that the search agents don't allow you to save the advanced searches. The advanced searches always allow you to exclude certain words, such as "accountant," "audit," "sales," and "specialist." So, each time I get the email alerts from searches that I have saved, I have to go into the site and "re-search" each time. That wastes my time and might actually cause me to miss an opportunity that would be perfect for me and the interested company. But we'll never know.