I have a fairly mild case of Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID), and I wound up at one of these places with co-workers in San Francisco one time. This is basically a nightmare scenario for me. I'm socially expected to eat, and I'm presented with strange dishes and lots of unwanted attention when I inevitably don't eat.
But we spoke with the server, and she found me a dish from the prix fixe arrangement that I could eat, and spent the night just making sure there was always some of that dish on the table.
Everything went better than expected. Sure, I don't have to be worried about death from being exposed to food I won't eat, but I could've called ahead, and would've, if the stakes were that high.
I guess all that's to say: good restaurants are pretty accommodating, even when they aren't doing the normal menu thing. It's really not that crazy.
> I'm socially expected to eat, and I'm presented with strange dishes and lots of unwanted attention when I inevitably don't eat.
I'm a very similar way as you wrt food, but not the social pressure part. I don't like eating in professional settings (eating is messy, for one), so I will usually eat alone beforehand and then only order something very small and light (or even just beverages) at the meeting meal. The social pressure thing I find to be easily deflected.
Same goes at bar/drinking events. I don't like drinking alcohol but everyone seems to report perceived pressure to drink alcohol at such things. I haven't found drinking nonalcoholic things to be the big hassle others claim it to be.
I think people build up the expectations more than they actually are in reality. Most other people don't really care that much what you're eating or drinking, if they are eating or drinking what they like.
It really depends on the culture. If you’re invited to meals and you consistently don’t eat, you will just stop getting invited (unless they are formal meetings).
WRT drinking, it can take a lot longer to build trust without the shared alcohol experiences. You’re correct that there isn’t direct social pressure, but you end up getting left out of “after-event” drinks as well.
I noticed these things when I had to go on a strict diet with no alcohol for about a year. You might argue that nothing important happens during non-formal events, but that’s a big mistake.
I used macOS for about seven years before someone told me about this behavior. Never would've found it, otherwise.
I guess if I had been using it for twenty years I would've known about those old patterns you describe and would've thought to randomly try that key combination.
A tooltip at some point would've gone a long way. Pretty much an impossible feature to discover unless you're a toddler randomly pressing buttons or a greybeard that remembers OS 9
Apple Finder engineer here from 2000 - 2006 and would never have guessed about double-clicking or option-clicking window edges. This seems more like something I would have added to the Nautilus code in 1999.
Actually my wife does this all the time and it works, especially for small businesses. Larger companies have websites, and small businesses care enough to do things like check the stock for you.
The previous posters experience resonates much more with me than your experience.
Even when you do go to a shop you are often redirected online. That item isn't in stock on the computer. No attempt to upsell you or suggest an alternative which they might have in stock. It's no wonder high street stores are dying out.
To be fair, small specialist stores are usually much better. I even got a call back from a company the last time I was trying to buy a specific BBQ. Sadly they didn't have it in stock and a day or two later I found it online.
The underlying problem with these anecdotes is that All of these experiences depend on who is working that day.
It may even be influenced by who is working that week or that month or who runs the place this year.
Ecommerce is imperfect in many ways, but it is far more consistent in its imperfection than local retail.
W.C. Winks Hardware Inc. in Portland, Oregon has been around since 1909 and is amazing.
You can go in there with some odd piece of hardware and someone will personally wait on you, assess your request and find the exact item or closest likeness.
The staff is patient and friendly, in my experience it is ideal local retail. But Winks doesn’t do ecommerce at all, so I often must relegate it to unusual hard to figure HW needs, because not every project needs this level of service.
I’m in agreement that retail has some pretty serious work to do to stay in the running. It might not be fair or “right” but it has to happen nonetheless.
I live in a fairly small town. Almost every store is minimally staffed, often by a single person. Phones regularly go to voicemail. Calling up the local shoe store to ask whether they have something in my size will get an interesting response. I’m also thinner than average here, so entire pants racks at the local clothing stores just don’t carry a single piece in my size.
One store I frequented was owner operated with probably their daughter as an employee. They would walk around with a cordless phone on their hip so as to not miss a call. If there's enough interest, people find a way.
This goes for San Francisco retail shops but also I'm sure other places: Some of the stores don't open till noon. Some are only open 3 days a week. Some stores are open the days the other stores are closed. I'm talking about some of the most popular retail storefronts in SF.
There are no good options. I went through this recently where I had to call different stores on 3 separate days, waiting till 10am, 11am, or 12pm. And you still don't know the product you are asking about is really the one you are after. There are so many versions of products and specific use cases nowadays.
ActivityPub is more than lightly used, it just isn't used by people you want to associate with. You pretty much have to either accept radical leftism and hang out with tankies or you get to hang out with the actual Nazis that are blocked by the "mainstream" leftist servers
Yes yes, there's radicalization for everyone! God forbid you want to use social media for something besides political fighting though
There's such political fighting everywhere on the 'net. I use ActivityPub for musicians, programmers and Cory Doctorow, and don't have to deal with much of that, because I just avoid it.
The Federated Timeline is slightly cursed (I haven't curated it for a while), but less so than Twitter. (My instance, Fosstodon, doesn't really federate with the Nazi instances; those it has ended up federating with have been swiftly blocked, because Fosstodon's admins don't like admin-condoned harassment of their users.)
> My instance, Fosstodon, doesn't really federate with the Nazi instances; those it has ended up federating with have been swiftly blocked, because Fosstodon's admins don't like admin-condoned harassment of their users.
And I'm glad that with email we don't have server operators deciding on politics for their users. ActivityPub has a long way to go if labeling instances as "Nazi" is enough break federation.
But we spoke with the server, and she found me a dish from the prix fixe arrangement that I could eat, and spent the night just making sure there was always some of that dish on the table.
Everything went better than expected. Sure, I don't have to be worried about death from being exposed to food I won't eat, but I could've called ahead, and would've, if the stakes were that high.
I guess all that's to say: good restaurants are pretty accommodating, even when they aren't doing the normal menu thing. It's really not that crazy.