May I Take Your Order For Less Than I’m Worth If You Can Find Me?

Meet Freshii’s new ‘virtual cashier’ — who works from Nicaragua for $3.75 an hour
A couple of things here.

  1. I’ve never been to a Freshii. To tell you the truth, I’m not entirely sure what they sell or even how to pronounce the name of the place. Is it freshy? Fresh-eeeee? Fresh-eye? Fresh-2? But whatever. I may not even have to bother worrying about it, since it’s not like I’m going to be able to eat there anyway what with them going the unusable by design route.

    Many Freshii customers have already encountered “Percy.”
    The video-calling device is attached to cash registers at a select few Freshii locations across Ontario, and it lights up when customers approach the counter.

    Yet another place bereft of humans capable of pointing me in the right direction (like, say, towards the counter,) should I need it. Good times. Thanks for thinking of me, whatever your name is.

  2. On the other end of the screen is a cashier wearing a headset, ready to take orders. Unlike the Freshii workers that wrap burritos and mop floors, these “virtual” workers are nowhere near the store. Instead, at least some of them process orders from a Nicaraguan call centre nearly 6,000 km away, where they earn much less than Ontario’s minimum wage.
    The program is only in the early stages of testing, but Freshii’s virtual cashiers are part of a wave of outsourcing and automated technology that is slowly changing Canada’s retail industry.

    So how are we doing on that universal basic income? Might want to start thinking about it again, guys. If this is the future, we’re going to have to find a way to pay for everyone priced out of the job market to exist, and that’s likely going to be the best way forward.

    If I might make a suggestion, how about an automation and outsourcing tax? We haven’t traditionally been in the business of forcing corporations to solve the problems they create in any meaningful way, but it’s never too late to start. I’m not against innovation, but if you’re going to be ruining lives and perhaps entire industries with it purely in the name of cost savings that are going to end up lining your own pockets, the absolute least you can do is put a good chunk of those cost savings into making sure that the streets you’re throwing people out into are nice ones.

Yes You Can Do It! You Know You Can Do It! Baby All You Gotta Do Is Try!

Of all the things I may have expected to get firmly lodged in my head this morning, I can safely say that Guy Lafleur teaching me how to score a goal to a soundtrack of disco music complete with cheerful, encouraging background vocals was not among them. And yet, here we are.

In 1979, an entire album of disco hockey lessons was dropped by Lafleur in both English and French. I can’t seem to find out how many copies it sold, but this report on its release from the CBC says that the people behind the project expected to move at least 100000 of them. Yes, Lafleur was popular, but that seems a little optimistic.

If you’ve got a big game to prepare for and could use a little coaching, you can check out the whole thing below.

Here it is in French:

And English:

And here’s a tracklist so you can follow along. There are more photos of the album and its accompanying booklet at that link as well.

  1. Face Off
  2. Skating
  3. Checking
  4. Power Play
  5. Shooting
  6. Scoring

Produced by Peter Alves and Jack Lenz — the latter of whom co-wrote the Toronto Blue Jays’ seventh-inning anthem “OK Blue Jays” — Lafleur! also taught aspiring stars about “Skating,” “Checking,” the “Face Off” and “Power-Play.” The record also came packaged with a booklet with photos of Lafleur in action, corresponding to each of his recorded lessons, and a colour poster of him looking ready to give in to his Saturday Night Fever.

Somebody’s Putting The Long In Long Beach


Yes, there’s the obvious meaning of the joke in the title. No, nobody in the video bothers mentioning whether or not the man cannon being utilized in full view of the hair salon was, in fact, long. But what was long, and also the reason why I really titled this the way I did, was the police response. It took them 40 minutes to bother showing up, by which point our hero had…well…cum and gone. That’s some fine police work there, lube.

A man in Long Beach, California, sat in a chair in front of a hair salon during business hours and masturbated as he looked through the window.
It took police 40 minutes to arrive, by which time the man had vacated the premises.
When the hair salon owner posted the video to social media, a nail salon responded and said the same man was spotted masturbating and looking through the nail salon window, too.

Now They’ve Got Two

It’s not every day that the same person is involved in multiple hit-and-runs, especially when that person is the victim.

The details are pretty gruesome and I feel awful for this woman and her loved ones. But holy hell, how drunk do you have to be in order to be the second perpetrator? Is it possible for breathalyzers to go off the scale? Good lord.

Authorities were investigating the death of a 49-year-old woman who was walking along a grassy shoulder of a Dade City roadway before being struck by a hit-and-run driver at 3:30 a.m. Authorities found her torso on the shoulder and her legs in the roadway.
Thomas Krummen, 23, approached the scene at a high speed, driving directly at investigators. He ignored commands to stop, ran over the victim’s legs and fled. Troopers chased him and used a maneuver with a patrol car to force him to stop, the highway patrol said.

Krummen is said to have had two passengers in the vehicle with him who tried to flag police down and get out, which leads me to wonder what kind of shape they were in if it was decided that old Thomas here should be the one driving.

He was charged with a slew of offenses. Aggravated assault with a motor vehicle upon a law enforcement officer, reckless driving, DUI, fleeing and eluding, destruction of evidence, driving while license revoked and false imprisonment.

Hey! Newsflash! It’s the *World Wide* Web!

Here’s a rant for people who build an online shop, and then forget what that www at the beginning is all about. Let me just describe five incidents I have had where I have wanted to buy something for someone in another country, and I couldn’t do it, because I didn’t live in that country. These five incidents come readily to mind. I’m sure there are more.

I wanted to buy some C’s Candies for someone who was in guide dog class in the states. Everything was just going tickity boo…until it wasn’t. It asked for my zip code, and the form would not take letters. It would not! I had to phone a toll free number and negotiate with someone to get them to enter my stuff manually!

I am well aware that C’s Candies doesn’t ship outside the U.S. But that doesn’t mean people in other countries don’t have American friends and don’t want to give C’s Candies their money. This is a global market, and no, The US is not the centre of it.

The next three incidents stemmed from the same situation. I was in a secret Santa gift exchange. Whenever I have been in a secret Santa exchange that had members in Canada and the states, I always said I was willing to pair up with people from either country. But after this shit show, I might change my mind, even though that would narrow the pool drastically.

The person said that she liked gift cards from the Old Spaghetti Factory, iTunes, or somewhere called Batch & Brine. So I thought I would get her something from the Old Spaghetti Factory. I thought it would be fun! I also thought it would be easier because we have Old Spaghetti Factories up here.
Nope! Postal codes were not possible, and even if you want to send it to someone in the US, you need to enter your billing address to order anything. When I reached out to them by email, they flatly said no.

So I tried the Batch & Brine place. They valiantly tried to help me, but their system just wasn’t built for it.

Then I tried iTunes, ya know, the giant seller of apple products? Nope. You can only buy iTunes cards for people in your own country. This is harder than you would think to find out, and even when I called Apple directly, I got the biggest runaround imaginable, and the people answering my call didn’t even know!

I got her an Amazon gift card, but I had to remember to not use Amazon.ca, because if I had, she couldn’t have used it on amazon.com! Like seriously, Apple and Amazon, I’m sure you could manage currency conversion.

In another secret Santa exchange, the person said she liked pizza, so I was looking for a gift card for a local pizza place in her town. But I ran into another example of only zip codes allowed. I had to keep calling for days until someone could help me out. They are lucky I’m determined. I never heard from the secret Santa person if that pizza was any good. I sure hope it was at least decent.

You would think after COVID, when people were shipping all sorts of parcels, that stores would realize the whole international space. But nope, this is not the case. In fact, it almost feels like it’s gotten worse. But maybe I just never had to try and buy from so many American retailers.

Miltons To Cease Beating Up Disabled Patrons

I wrote about the service dog denial situation at Miltons restaurant not long after it happened, but hadn’t talked about it since.

Boy oh boy, a lot sure has happened since.

Charges were filed and later withdrawn, settlements were reached, apologies and donations were made. And now, for reasons that the owners won’t comment on but that you’re going to have a hard time convincing me weren’t at least in part due to their awful behaviour getting out, the place has closed down.

In a way I feel bad for them. Everyone deserves a second chance, assuming this was their first one, of course. But on the other hand, you can only curse out and rough up so many defenseless customers before it starts leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths. We don’t live in a fair world, but sometimes people do get what they deserve. As much as I enjoy a bad guy makes good story, I have trouble shaking the feeling that we’re landing anywhere but on the people getting theirs end of the spectrum here. What we saw in that video went on too long and too loud for it to have been a momentary lapse in judgement.

Miltons Restaurant has closed but remains for sale at a reduced price, after two brothers who operated it sparked outrage by forcefully removing a customer and his service dog in 2021.
The incident, captured on video, led to a boycott and a torrent of bad publicity. In the days that followed, people gathered outside the restaurant with signs, urging people not to support the business.
A police investigation led to assault charges against both men. One man, named in a business document as the person who registered Miltons, was further charged with uttering threats.
Last October, all parties including the customer agreed to the withdrawal of charges after the victim did not want to testify. The two men each made a $1,500 donation to a charity for the blind, and wrote a personal letter of apology to the customer.

John Q. Public’s Intro To Guide Dogs

This article about getting a guide dog does a pretty good job of describing the complexities in the matching process, the relationship between the dog and the handler, and lots of other stuff that people often ask us. And the best part is it’s written by someone I know! Shermeen is graduating with her new guide dog today. I hope people enjoy this article, and show it to others who might be interested. And I hope Shermeen’s graduation and trip home go smoothly.

I Think You Should Name Him Cash, As In Hand Over A Bunch Of Your

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that naming a baby is easy. Whatever you settle on, you, and more importantly the kid, are wearing it forever. Clearly, it’s a choice that you’re going to want to get right. And yeah, sometimes it’s nice to have a little help. But if you ever find yourself getting to the point where paying some lady who has never had to name a child of her own up to $10,000 to suggest names for yours seems like a thing you should actually go ahead and do, I say with every ounce of sincerity I possess that perhaps you may not be prepared to face down the many challenges that parenting is going to present you. To be fair, I say this as someone who also doesn’t have any children of his own. But it does come from an oldest child who’s been through some things, so there’s that. I’ll let you decide what it’s worth.

Taylor A. Humphrey, 33, helped name more than 100 babies in 2020, raking in more than $150,000 from cashed-up couples.
Some panicked parents are even turning over an eye-popping $10,000 so that Humphrey can help them settle on an impeccable name for their offspring.

The New York businesswoman — who does not have any children — bills herself as a “passionate writer and storyteller” who is “adept at branding, marketing and social media.”

Depending on how much expectant parents pay, Humphrey’s services “range from a phone call and a bespoke name list to a genealogical investigation” with the aim of unearthing old family names, as reported by The New Yorker.

Recently, the innovative entrepreneur chose the baby name Parks for a couple who had their first kiss in a town called Parker.

In a recent video, Humphrey advised a mom who was expecting baby No. 3 and needed a name to flow with those of her two older sons, Emmet and Miller.
Humphrey’s top picks: Grady, Wilson, Waylon and Fletcher.

Her website is here if you feel you need it or if, like me, you’re tempted to spring for a list just to see what she might come up with for your own hypothetical kid.

There’s also a “What should I name my baby?” quiz you can try. Most of the decent names in my highest scoring categories are things I likely would have come up with on my own or names that other people in my close family are already using, but it’s a general quiz, so your mileage may vary. But please, tell me that nobody out there is naming their little girl Buttercup. Buttercup is a cow.

Dear Google:

I don’t care how many times you ask me (it’s been three today alone), I am not turning on the fucking vignette ads. No, not even if you predict that my revenue will go up by 20% were I to do so. There is also no need for you to explain to me what they are. I know what they are. They’re annoying as shit and my decision to turn them off was a deliberate one. A deliberate one made by a man who does not enjoy being infuriated by the user experience of his own blog for reasons that are within his control.

Quite obviously, I do not mind ads on a website. The bills aren’t going to pay themselves. But what I do mind are ads that interrupt me while I am performing a basic task and in which I subsequently become trapped with no reliable means of escape. As a screen reader user, that is exactly what vignette ads are. I’m sure that most folks, as you say, can skip them at any time. I am not most folks. What happens to me is almost always some combination of the following:

  • My page load gets interrupted.
  • my arrows and navigation keys stop working, leaving me unable to properly navigate the window.
  • Sometimes I can tab once or twice and things will come into focus, but not always.
  • Sometimes I can shift tab once or twice and things will come into focus, but not always.
  • Sometimes I can tab and then shift tab and things will come into focus, but not always.
  • Sometimes I can shift tab and then tab and things will come into focus, but not always.
  • Sometimes I can hit escape, the ad will disappear and I’ll be back on the page I started on and will have to click the one I wanted again, but this is rare.
  • Even when I madly start mashing buttons until one of the above methods for regaining control works, half the time I still can’t find the close button on the damn ad until I madly hit a few more keys.
  • Sometimes, even after all of that, there is no close button.
  • In that case, I have to refresh, end up back where I started, then click once more on the page I wanted to visit in the first place before I got caught in the vignette and hope to god I don’t get caught again.
  • Thankfully I generally don’t, because the one good feature of vignette ads is that only so many of them are served to the same user in a given day.

There aren’t nearly as many steps to this dance on mobile, but vignettes are no picnic there, either. The worst thing that happens to you in that case is wasting a few frustrating seconds figuring out whether or not there is a close button and then just doing the refresh thing if there isn’t.

With all of this in mind, I decided several months ago that the number of vignette ads that will be served to my users on any given day will be zero. And it’s a funny thing. Once I turned them off, my revenue actually went up. Funny not only because it sure is odd that not making people hate your face on the regular might actually work as a strategy, but also because I’m not sure how all of the screen reader users who visit the place weren’t constantly clicking on the damn things by accident.

I’m glad we were able to have this talk. Hopefully it has helped you understand my position on this matter more clearly than before. And hey, if you ever figure out how to make vignettes less awful for guys like me, let me know.