The Best of Blogs awards are now open for nominations, so please go there and nominate a blog you love but which others might not know about. The BOBS are not about well-known, famous blogs, so please don’t nominate those; the BOBS are about those blogs that are fantastic, that you LOVE, and that you personally feel others would like, too, if only the others knew about their existence. This year, you can even nominate your own blog.

I found many of the blogs I love best on the BOBS website, in previous years. If you click on the BOBS link, you’ll see all the directions and the rules and the procedures, etc.

Remember, NO BIG-TIME BLOGS THAT EVERYBODY ALREADY KNOWS ABOUT! (Just you wait: somebody will try to nominate Dooce; it happens every year.) Nominate a blog that deserves a readership but doesn’t have one because nobody has ever heard of it. This way, you see, good writers with witty, helpful, interesting blogs can get “discovered.” Blogs that are already discovered will be disqualified. The BOBS are a fun and creative way for all of us to meet new people and become readers of their blogs!

I know there have been problems in the past with voting glitches, etc, but this year, things are looking good in all aspects. Please look through your blogrolls and RSS readers, find a blog or two, or three, or four, that you love but that gets few readers, and nominate it.

Thank you.

I return you now to our regular programming.

My husband bought an HP scanner a week ago. It’s an especially nice one, because he planned to use it for, among other things, scanning all the slides in all those carousels in all the top closet shelves of all of our relatives and friends, and burning those seldom-seen pictures onto DVD’s for them. He’s been so busy with giving and grading zillions of calculus exams that he didn’t have a chance to hook up the scanner, but this weekend, he finally got a few minutes to himself and couldn’t WAIT to get started scanning slides with his new toy.

When he put the HP software cd in his dvd drive and closed the drawer, all hell broke loose with his computer. That HP cd tore into his hard drive like a bolt of lightning and destroyed every single thing he had stored in his computer: grades, tests, quizzes, pictures, music, files of all kinds, the sound cards and drivers, all his World of Warcraft stuff. . . . you name it, the HP cd destroyed it.

He bought the HP scanner at a large electronics store over a hundred miles away, so it’s not that easy for us to get back up there any time soon, especially with midterms a’loomin’ on the horizon, but the receipt is good for fifteen days, and next Sunday is the fifteenth day.

Will Fry’s Electronics honor the receipt and either replace the scanner or give us our money back? Are they an honorable store that values a good customer? Or are they one of those skeezy stores that makes its customers jump through all kinds of hoops for their money, and if forced by law to honor a receipt then requires a restocking fee or some other such insult? I’ll let you all know.

If we’re treated well, I’ll post it here. If we’re treated poorly, I’ll post that, too, and I’ll include the store’s address and the name of the employee who waits on us, and the name of the shift manager, too, for either circumstance.

I’m sure all the blogging world is waiting with held breath to find out if Fry’s Electronics is worth going to. We’re been good customers there, but it only takes one bad experience to turn a good customer into a customer who is looking for some other store to spend money in.

My husband is also completely down – the negative kind – on all HP products now.

I posts the good, and I posts the bad. I just tells it like it is.

(Grammatically speaking, it’s “as it is,” but this whole post was written with a surfeit of improperly used prepositions and verbs that I misused on purpose, so who cares?)

Mamacita, Scheiss Weekly

Over on the Education Wonks (one of the best education blogs on the internet, by the way) there is a post about the students who tried to pay for their $2.00 school lunches with pennies, and got detention for it. The principal and superintendent apparently considered it disrespectful to pay with pennies, and stated that it held up the lunch line and showed no consideration to the aides who took the money at the register. Etc.

People seem to be of all different opinions on the matter: some are upholding the administration because pennies are apparently evil, some are saying the punishment for these students should have been even more severe, some are even stating that pennies are not legal tender. Other people are supporting the students, and saying that pennies are as much legal tender as dollars, and that the school was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Ordinarily, I tend to support the school when a rule is blatantly broken, but honestly? Where is there a rule or law that says people can’t use pennies to pay for something? There are people who hate pennies, sure, but me? I like pennies. They’re cute, and they help people learn to count, which is apparently a skill the lunch ladies at this particular school haven’t learned to do yet. At least, not very quickly.

I support these students for many reasons, only a few of which are the legalities of the matter, what constitutes legal tender, and how much their attitude might have had to do with this brouhaha, but there are two main reasons I’m on the kids’ side this time.

One is the legal tender issue. Pennies are money. The reasons for using pennies are irrelevant, and any ‘attitude’ is also irrelevant. The customer tried to make a purchase, using legal tender. It’s not like the kids were trying to steal the food. These kids paid with real money, and a bunch of adults who couldn’t count quickly got their panties in a wad over it.

The point of the students’ “Penny Protest,” the brevity of lunch “hour,” is also irrelevant. Pennies are money. Things can be purchased with money. Therefore, things can be purchased with pennies. If it is true that this slowed the lunch line to the point that the kids in the back of the line had to inhale their lunch or go without, then the kids are probably right: there wasn’t enough time to eat a relaxed and healthy lunch. I can vouch for that; lunch back in the middle school was about fifteen minutes, and then the kids, finished or not, were herded onto the playground so the janitors could start cleaning, lest they earn an extra hour’s pay.

The main reason I side with the students on this issue goes deeper than mere legalities, however.

When my children were small, we were so poor that if they got milk or lunch at school, it was usually paid for with a baggie full of pennies. Those pennies weren’t easy to accumulate, either; I searched under couch cushions and in the bottoms of old purses and in the pockets of all the coats, and everywhere I could think of, to get enough to pay for milk or the occasional school lunch. Yes, we qualified for free lunch, even though I was teaching full-time at the school (that’s a sad commentary in and of itself, isn’t it!) but as long as we could make do somehow, we made do without the charity. I know that the lunch ladies were mightily ticked off at the baggies of pennies, but they also knew that I worked there and would have made my opinion of their opinion known to one and all. After all, pennies were legal tender. I knew it, and they knew it.

If my beautiful children had ever been singled out and ridiculed or PUNISHED for paying for something with actual, legal money, just because a lunch lady didn’t want to have to count coins, they would have been devastated, and I would have been so angry I might still be in prison even now for the damage I would have done.

Sure, maybe these kids the other day were smart-alecks wanting to make a scene, but what difference does it make? Money is money. I loathe “attitude” as much as you do, maybe even more, but this is about MONEY.

And what if the next customer in line behind the smart alecks was just a little poor kid whose mommy didn’t have anything but pennies to send to school for milk or lunch? Would that child be punished, too?

It reminds me of the Stupidest Principal in the Universe – the one who used to take his teeth out and put them in his back pocket, and then sit on them and bite himself on the ass and scream – who made a rule that there would be no ripped jeans in his building, and the first kid he jumped on was a poor kid wearing his only pair of much-worn jeans that were so old that both knees were sticking through the whitened denim. He suspended that boy, who cried for an hour in the office while waiting for his bewildered mother to beg a ride from a neighbor so she could get him in the middle of the day. Neither of them knew they had rights, but we teachers did, and we descended on that principal like piranha on a cow’s hind leg and to this day I hope we made him feel like the loser he honestly was.

When the administration makes up a rule on the spur of the moment and tries to enforce it even though it’s a stupid rule and everybody knows it’s stupid except the administrator who thought it up, and then all hell breaks loose and the sentient universe comes down hard on the administrator, and the administration is honestly amazed, who’s the idiot?

Why YES, I do use words like “stupid” and “idiot” when I’m speaking of certain adults. You know, like people who didn’t know pennies were real money?

Then again, as I sincerely doubt that anybody has EVER offered these adults a penny for their thoughts, maybe they really didn’t know what pennies were. Ya think?

Oops. These people don’t THINK, either.

But I do. And I think this administration really dropped the ball, and it was a heavy, heavy bowling ball, right on their tender little toes. And I hope it hurts.

Get ’em, parents!

Mamacita, Scheiss Weekly

The other night we went to Grecco’s, home of the best pizza in the universe. We took Hub’s mother with us, because we always do, and each of us ordered our “usuals.”

The staff at Grecco’s knows us so well, all we have to do is walk in and they say, “The usual?” and we say “Yup,*” and then we sit down in OUR BOOTH and wait a few minutes and, like magic, our food appears and it’s always superb.

This night, we had a new waitress, and we had to actually order from the menu in front of her because she’s not used to the place and the fact that almost everybody who goes there is a “regular” and has “the usual.” She’ll learn. She was a sweet girl; she’s just new.

To continue this fascinating saga, we sat there and waited, and waited, and waited, and then two of our three got their food and ate their food and finished their food and the third of the three was still waiting, and, well, we started to wonder what was wrong back there in the kitchen with my “usual.”

When she finally brought it to our table, it was the wrong pizza. Sometimes, when it’s the wrong pizza, it’s still okay, but not this time. She apologized, another server came out and apologized; everybody apologized. We were not in a hurry and this kind of thing happens, and it really wasn’t a big deal to us, but it was to the restaurant.

They comped our entire order.

See, big chain restaurants have a lot to learn from the small, family-owned restaurants who genuinely care about their customers because they KNOW them. The “regulars” at the big places have their “usuals,” too, but who can remember that when corporate policy rules made by old rich guys in bad suits a thousand miles away have to be followed? The employees at big chains might know their customers, but often their hands are tied by this same corporate policy.
At Grecco’s, the owner is usually back in the kitchen, helping. At most of the big chains, the owner doesn’t know that beef comes from cows. At Grecco’s, we’re known by name. At a big chain, we’re known by a number.

Last December, my Other Sister took us all to dinner in a big fancy expensive restaurant, and our waiter spilled a pitcher of ice water, cubes and all, down my back. It was two days before the lining of my coat was dry. We got nothing from the restaurant, not even a little discount. I’d tell you the name of the restaurant but I’m not that petty.

Grecco’s accidentally brings us the wrong pizza, and felt so bad they comped everyone at the table’s dinner.

Which of these two restaurants has the best “corporate policy?”

When you come to visit me, I’ll take you to Grecco’s. It’s tiny and oddly-shaped and weird, but the servers are the greatest and the food is divine.

Miguel, I would have taken you there but you left too soon! (Let’s all go to Miguel’s blog and tell him to update! His posts are so beautiful, and he’s not updated since last fall!)

So, Grecco’s, where I get deep-dish Sicilian pizza made from scratch, we’ll keep coming back, and coming back, because you understand far more than just how to make out-of-this-world Italian food of all kinds. You also understand that customers look upon a favorite restaurant as a friend who understands their tastes and remembers them, as well as remembering their names and where they like to sit, and that those customers also know YOUR names, and how old your kids are, etc.

At the big places, I’m ticket #479, fat chick with a soaked, freezing back, we hope she doesn’t sue but otherwise no big deal; at Grecco’s, I’m Jane and my usual is deep-dish Sicilian pizza with extra sauce and a diet coke with innumerable free refills. Our servers also know what Hub and my MIL always order there.

I understand that if a restaurant is HUGE and doesn’t treat their staff well so they quit all the time and rightly so has a big turnover in staff, it’s more difficult to know the customers, but it should still be a goal.

Grecco’s does it, and I have a feeling that even if his restaurant was large, he’d still hire the kind of staff that remembers their customers’ names and what they’ll probably order for dinner.

Hurry on over. You’ll love this place. Pee before you go; they don’t have a public restroom.

* People around here say “Yup.” Sorry.

Mamacita, Scheiss Weekly