• All posts tagged with "nyc"
ם Andrew Cuomo Says…
Posted on June 23, 2008 at 12:18 am
From the Office of the New York State Attorney General, with regards to my ordeal this morning:
In emergencies, tenants may make necessary repairs and deduct reasonable repair costs from the rent. For example, when a landlord has been notified that a door lock is broken and willfully neglects to repair it, the tenant may hire a locksmith and deduct the cost from the rent. Tenants should keep receipts for such repairs.
—From the New York Tenant’s Rights Guide.
ם Highway Robbery
Posted on June 22, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Sunday morning. Needed to buy groceries for the week. Strapped on bag, grabbed bike. Tried to leave apartment. Door won’t open. Lock jammed.
Call super. No answer. Call building manager. No answer. Call landlord. No answer. Call landlord’s emergency number. No answer. Leave voicemail. Call locksmith. Finally, an answer.
Locksmith comes. $55 just to show up.
Locksmith drills out my lock. $285.
Locksmith replaces my lock. $400.
Locksmith does… something else? Something locksmithy? $95.
Ah, plus tax. $69.
$904 later, I still don’t have any groceries. Hmph.
I thought about trying to express this in words, and realized a picture would be far more effective.
At 23rd St. and 6th Ave.
That is all.
A guy with a gigantic Foghorn Leghorn chest tattoo.
It’s the New Year. (Yeah, yeah, I’m 3 weeks late. So sue me.)
But this isn’t a post about resolutions for 2008. It’s a retrospective on my 2007 resolution.
I’ve always done fairly well academically, but during college I hadn’t ever had a perfect straight-A semester. Since I was going to graduate a semester early, 2007 perfectly contained the last two semesters of my college career, so I made my resolution on December 31st, 2006, that in 2007 I’d get a 4.0 one of those semesters.
Summer of 2007 rolled around, and I came close. Two A’s, two A–’s. 3.85 GPA. Close, but no cigar.
I was down to the wire with only one semester left. But I stuck the landing. Booyah.
2007 Resolution: Completed.
(2008 doesn’t have a traditional resolution, per se. It’s more of a curious project. More on that later.)
ם A Powerful Penny
Posted on December 6, 2007 at 11:45 pm
Speaking of the hardware store, I had a profound experience while shopping at the Ace Hardware on West 3rd St. (between 6th Ave and MacDougal).
I had to buy some machine screws and some washers (but not too many of either), and they sell loose ones individually for a few cents a piece. My total was a high-rolling $2.76. I gave the cashier three singles, and she handed me back my receipt and a quarter.
Now, you don’t have to be a math whiz to know that’s not quite right. But, you also don’t have to be an economic mastermind to see what happened: instead of making things a little bit more inconvenient for both of us by giving me the six-coin, two-dimes-and-four-pennies combo, she spotted me the penny and slid me a Mr. Washington (the silver kind, not the paper kind).
No big deal, right? Not quite. It actually made me feel pretty good. I appreciated it. And you know what? I’m going to go back. They’re my hardware store now, and I’m their loyal customer. And if someone else needs to go to the hardware store, well, I’m probably going to give them directions to my friendly neighborhood Ace.
Loyal customers matter. A box of Kleenex only costs a couple of dollars, and no one buys more than a few boxes a year. But to the company, a loyal Kleenex customer is worth about $994 over the course of his or her tissue-buying life. While that’s not a huge amount of money to a corporation like Kimberly-Clark (Kleenex’s parent company), over a broad customer base, that’s the money that keeps Kleenex alive.
As a company, how much would you be willing to pay for that loyalty? Econ 101 tells us Kleenex should be willing to pay anywhere up to $994 for that loyalty. Ace Hardware got my loyalty for a penny.
That’s a very powerful penny.
ם Things I Saw Today…
Posted on November 19, 2007 at 9:04 pm
So I was walking home through the park, when suddenly I get passed by a nun (in complete stereotypical nun attire) sprinting at full tilt.
After I got home, I realized I forgot to stop at the hardware store, so I went back out, only to get passed again right outside of my building by the selfsame nun still running full speed.
ם Things I Saw Today…
Posted on November 17, 2007 at 3:20 am
A crazy guy getting into a fight with a fire hydrant. It was a physical fight, not a verbal one.
ם Halloween
Posted on October 31, 2007 at 6:01 pm
A fun game to play on Halloween in New York City: “Halloween or Crazy?”
Gameplay is simple. See that guy wearing a top hat and pretending to smoke a pipe? Is that because it’s Halloween, or because he’s crazy? How about the man wearing a hat covered in feathers and walking around with fistfulls of still more feathers? Halloween… or crazy?
Answers (I think): Guy 1—Halloween. Guy 2—Crazy.
Hours of entertainment guaranteed. Happy Halloween!
ם Geek Points
Posted on September 23, 2007 at 4:38 pm
- I went to the doctor and she gave me an inhaler.
- I went to a screening of a documentary about a typeface. (By the way, it was fantastic.)
- I became the President of the NYU Math Club.
geekpoints++; (Oh God, that didn’t help.)
