Daily Archives: November 10, 2014

Food and drink

Starbucks Justice

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This story is about my beef with Starbucks.

When I lived in Chicago I became addicted to Starbucks (SB), it’s damn good coffee (or used to be).  I couldn’t live without it and drank it continuously.  In graduate school I would start my day with a Grande from the local SB near the train station by my place.  Then once I got into downtown Chicago I would pick up another at one of three locations.  If the SB in Northwestern station was crowded I’d walk on to the next and then to the next.  I had a path mapped out and rarely were all three crowded in a row.

At some point SB introduces their Venti size drinks.  My drink of choice was a Grande Americano with an extra shot.  The folks at the Northwestern station were nice.  The Grande came with 3 shots and since shots always came in pairs they would have to throw one away.  So the barista would almost always ask, do you want the extra shot for free?  After a while they knew me and wouldn’t charge for the extra.

The Venti Americano comes with 4 shots and by some quirk of American idioticy it’s cheaper!  By about 20-30 cents.  I am not opposed to paying for what I order, the guys at NW SB didn’t have to give free shots but I’m grateful.  At another SB on my route I would order a 4 shot Grande Americano (4sGA) and the manager would always charge me for a Venti (VA).  She even told me that the pricing was senseless and many folks complained about the Americano and other drinks.

This trend continued for several years.  Fast forward to Madison NJ.  At the SB there I gave my order 4sGA and asked politely, “Can you charge me for a Venti”.  This is where things got stupid.  For some reason the guys behind the counter thought I was trying to steal from them.  I explained the pricing difference and they defended the price by saying “The price is not just for the espresso, it’s also for the paper in the cup and the water.”  To which I slowly replied “Ok, but you’re not charging me more for a larger cup and more water, you’re charging me less.  If anything you’re stealing from me when I order a 4sGA instead of a VA, based on your logic.”  It took a while and the store owner was even involved in the math, I was lucky he was there that day.  They all felt a little embarrassed (not my intent) and at the end of the day the owner was thankful to me for pointing it out, offered me a free drink that day, and said just ask for the Venti in a Grande cup whenever you come in and we’ll know what you mean.

Now you might be thinking what’s the big deal just order the Venti and be done with it.  It’s not as easy as that if you know anything about coffee and flavor.  4 shots of espresso in a 16 oz cup (Grande) is just the right amount of espresso to water ratio for it to taste like espresso, you even get the coffee cream on top like on a real cup of espresso.  4 shots in a 20 oz cup (Venti) is watered down and tastes like drip coffee.  I’ve tried every possible approach to make life easier.  I’ve asked for a Venti Americano hold the water.  Whenever I do this I am accused in public of trying to steal from SB.  What exactly am I stealing if I am not taking something and paying!  Most places are not that hostile, but the one in Madison NJ got very hostile time and time again.  In Alexandria Virginia I brought up this price anomaly to a young man behind the counter and he was so impressed he said “Congratulations, way to stick it to that man.  They can’t do the math and why should you have to pay more for less, Awesome!”

On one fateful morning on my way to work I stopped at the Madison SB.  I had been ordering Venti Americano in a Grande cup for a couple years there but this morning the lady behind the counter became extremely agitated and began yelling at me.  She said that her floor manager always overhears me ordering a Venti in a Grande cup and that if try to do that again they should call the police on me for stealing.  She says this at the top of her lungs in front of a line of about 6 people, all professionals in suits.  It was embarrassing and I think an open and shut case of defamation of character.  I explained to her that I was not stealing and even did the math for her.  She was so confused by arithmetic she looked like she was about to have a seizure.  She said no, no you’re trying to confuse me to make me think my boss is wrong.  The other people in line started doing the math too and one or two of them even said, “Wait he’s right, your prices are screwed up.”  I told her that even the store owner, who at the time I knew by name, told me to order it this way so when I talk to him your manager and you may be reprimanded for this.  I was deeply incensed and shaken by the public display of hostility on her part, there are better ways to handle this.  I also pointed out to her that if her floor manager kept overhearing me order the drink this way and thought it was wrong why didn’t she say something then.  I chewed out the lady behind the counter and she deserved it big time.

Later I emailed the SB company about this.  Their response was more hostile than the lady behind the counter.  They defended the position that they can change what they want even if it doesn’t make sense (to which I agree) and that according to the account from the Madison store I was hostile, abusive and threatening to the clerk at SB.  True I chewed her out for accusing me falsely of stealing and threatening to call the police but I was not abusive or threatening to her.  More slander on the part of SB, anything to make them look good.

I have to say I didn’t drink SB for years after that, and for the most part I still don’t.  They have let their coffee go to shit anyway.  I prefer Pete’s Coffee (found in most grocery stores) or even Trader Joes or Whole Foods 365 coffee.  Those last two brands are very good and very cheap compared to high end coffee.

In my experience the only SB that copped a hostile attitude was the one in Madison NJ.  However I have to say SB corporate headquarters was not justified in their position to me.  I wish I had asked some of those bystanders for their phone numbers.  I think a few of them would have been glad to act as witnesses.

copyright 2014 David R Bergman

Music

Open Mic at Cisco’s

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Wherever I live or visit I try to find open mics or jam sessions at local clubs, Jazz or Blues if possible.  When I moved to Southfield MI I asked around at work and as it turned out the custodian there had a brother who played guitar and frequented a place called Cisco’s.  Eventually, one night, a friend took me there.  This is the story of my experience at Cisco’s.

Andy was a student worker at the university where I taught physics.  I didn’t have a car and he drove me around once in a while.  We went to Cisco’s for their weekly open mic and I have to say I was quite nervous.  It had been a couple years since I played out.  The leader of the house band, their bassist, comes over and sits with us for a couple minutes just to feel us out.  We’ll call him, Him, me, Me and Andy, Andy.  I remember the conversation pretty well but the quotes are me paraphrasing to the best of my recollection.

We had informal introductions and I told him I was from Chicago.

Him: “So, you guys want to jam tonight, what do you want to play.”

Me: “Anything really but mostly I’d like to play blues or jazz”

Him: “Well tell me, what do you mean “blues”, is there a particular song you want to do?”

Andy:  “Well, I know the British blues.”

Me: “I couldn’t name a particular song, I don’t play by the book note for note.  To me the blues is a pattern, the same pattern fast or slow, major or minor.  I know the 12 and 8 bar blues patterns pretty well so just give me a key and I’ll be fine.”

Him:  “Well what style of blues do want to play, Chicago style, Delta blues, …”

Me: “To tell you the truth I’d like to do Jazz, maybe All Blues, Footprints, Freddie the Freeloader, …”

Him: “Oh, I hear you.  I’d love to play some of that but just look around at these people.  They drive trucks and hunt deer.  They don’t want to hear that crap, it’s crap to them, they want to hear stuff off the radio, maybe we’ll play some Zeppelin if we’re lucky.”

Me: “That’s Ok, I just want to play.”

Him: “Well, Ok.  We’ll see, maybe just maybe at the end of the night we can squeeze you in for a song.  As you can see we got a lot of people lined up with their axes.”

So at this point Andy and I settle in to our booth thinking it’ll be a long night.  Mr. Bass gets up to the mic and the house band starts vamping as he addresses the audience.

Him: “Ladies and gentlemen welcome to Cisco’s Tuesday night open jam session.  We got a lot of regulars here tonight and were gonna have some fun!  But before we start we have a very special treat for you tonight, a blues man all the way from Chicago here as a special guest!  At least he says he can play the blues, but you all know what I say about folks from Chicago… (pause)… They’re a bunch of Fucking liars.”

Soooo, now the butterflies in my stomach are condors on steroids.  I get my guitar out as soon as I can and walk up.

Him: “Let’s give a big hand for Dave!  But wait until we hear if he can play.”

They start a tune, nothing elaborate a two chord vamp like Feeling Alright.  I ask the keyboard player for a key and get the cold shoulder, I look at the bassist’s hands and he turns his back to me.  So fuck it, I noodle around for a second till I find a common note then my ear kicks in.  I don’t have perfect pitch (few do) and I’m self conscious about my relative pitch but right now I figure if I just throw out Van Halen’s Eruption the crowd will go wild.  I start jamming and make them eat it.  They play that game for two songs, then the bassist turns and says “You all right man, damn you can play.”  As much as I like the complement I still want to punch his face into the back of his head.

Then he says, stay for the rest of the set.  They call tunes and the keyboard player flashes a few charts my way.  We’re cool now.  At the end of the set, as I’m about to unplug, the bassist says “encore” and throws out the opening riff to So What by Miles Davis (Fast version).  And there you have it, we did So What followed by All Blues to end the set.  I picked up two guitar students that night too.

But what a way to get introduced.  I swear these things only happen to me.

copyright 2014 David R Bergman

Travel and living

Living in Southfield MI

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I moved to Southfield MI in August 1999 to start my first job right after finishing my PhD.  The position was Senior Lecturer of Physics at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield.  Southfield borders Detroit, you know that city with a reputation for 50$ detached single family homes.  I had never lived outside of the Chicago land area and had a lot of misconceptions about life in America that led to some very humorous anecdotes.

First off I found an apartment about a mile from the university, let’s say within a mile, on Civic Center Drive.  This road is parallel to the “mile” roads, 8 mile, 9 mile, etc and if memory serves me it was a half mile north of 10 mile.  So, it’s my first day of work and I walk outside and stand at the corner.  Why?  Because everyone knows that’s where the buses stop.  If you’re thinking that I should have known better because there was no bus sign then you’ve never lived in a real inner city.  Street signs are there for the pickin’.  They typically become garage and basement wall decorations, occasionally finding their way into a teenager’s bedroom.  So I stand there waiting impatiently.  They should be coming every 15 minutes right.  Finally I see some folks, mostly elderly, congregating on another corner so I walk on down figuring I got the wrong corner.  A small bus eventually comes but as I go to get on it the driver stops me and asks me if I’m going to the hospital.  No, I’m going to work, I say.  She responds this bus only picks up folks going to the hospital.  I inquire about other buses, she laughs “This is Detroit, you ain’t from around here honey, ain’t no buses”.  I walk to work, 1 mile.  Then home 1 mile.  For the next year I’m walking 2 miles a day 5 days a week, in all kinds of weather.  And that’s just the beginning.

My fist lesson, ain’t no buses anywhere around Detroit and the neighboring suburbs.  In between home and work there was one tiny strip mall with a convenient store, maybe attached to a gas station, I don’t remember.  The only food, Doritos, Slim Jims, Tiny Powdered Doughnuts.  Yum.  The suburbs around Detroit were built for driving, major roads are 1 mile apart and indicated by name, 11 mile, 12, mile, very creative.  Between each mile there are subdivisions with winding roads that turn and twist and after a few miles deposit you right where you started, like you just walked through some kind of portal into another dimension, spooky.  I finally found a Target, Barnes And Nobel, and a Farmer Jacks (their chain grocery store), each on a different “mile” road and each about a mile either East or West of my place.  There is no public transportation and the roads are not designed for pedestrian traffic!  That’s another story altogether.  So I eventually map out safe walking routes to all these places, 2.5 to 5 miles is the typical distance I walk to get to any of these places.  If I’m going to BnN that’s a day trip, I pack a backpack and plan to sit in the cafe and eat there.  But I gotta eat something other than Doritos on the evenings and weekends so every 2 to 4 weeks, on a weekend day, I hike to Farmer Jack with a large backpack.  I shop for a few weeks worth of food and hike back home with 20-50 lbs of food on my back.  Along the way I have to walk on the shoulder of a major road that goes over an expressway.  I become a local site, “That Guy That Walks on the Overpass”, you gotta see him.  I had people offering me rides (not a safe option anywhere but especially near Detroit) and once in winter in the middle of a snow storm someone stopped on the overpass to take a picture, you know, of “That Guy That Walks in the Overpass”.  Who does that?  After a year I got a body like an Olympic track and field star.  Skin on muscle and resting rate of 32bpm.  Blood pressure of 100/55.  31 inch waist, smaller than I was in high school.  Cholesterol of about, let me think, 300.  It turns out that the closest place to work to get food was a Wendy’s.  I loved Wendy’s and twice a day almost every day I’d get a triple bacon cheese burger, biggie fries (maybe two) and a biggie chocolate frosty, then Doritos and doughnuts for dinner.

Lesson number two, fit on the outside doesn’t equal fit on the inside, just like in the Lipitor commercials.  Well, I was young and after 3 months on a diet of fish, wild rice and steamed veggies my cholesterol was down to about 210.  It sounds bad but it wasn’t.  There are a lot of nice places in and around Detroit the problem is that they’re spread out so far from each other that you can’t enjoy them without a car.  I started to get into the habit of going to a car rental service that had a Rent a Wreck program on weekends, 10$ a day for three days.  Then I could start to enjoy things.  The second year I lived there I did get a hand me down car from my parents.  To accommodate the extreme distances the speed limits are quite high, the highest I’ve seen anywhere in America.  Adding on a reasonable buffer you could go close to 100mph on the major expressways.

So what was nice about Detroit and the surrounding areas?  A lot actually.  There are some real gems.  For those who like to shop the Somerset Collection in Troy is spectacular, like a small self-contained city, twin cities connected by an indoor overpass.  My wife and I went on the largest shopping spree of our lives there and we don’t even like shopping.  They had a J. Peterman store.  I thought they made that up for Seinfeld but it’s real.  On Woodward Ave in Berkley MI I found the Chinese Academy of Martial Arts.  I am a life long practitioner and student.  It’s a beautiful place offering Tai Chi and External Arts which were a mix of striking, grappling and throwing arts.  I was a student there for about 9 months.  There is a neighboring suburb called Royal Oak which is a little more like a city, with sidewalks with lots of shops and restaurants etc.  It was more walking friendly.

But by far the best place was Baker’s Keyboard Lounge.  This place is right on 8 mile road on the Detroit side.  It boasts of being the oldest Jazz club in America.  I have a few stories about this place.  On my first trip there I parked in the neighborhood, a few blocks away from the place, towards 7 mile.  It didn’t look too safe, row houses with bars on the windows and doors.  Some had the doors propped open, in the middle of winter, with lines of men standing around waiting to go in (at night).  You can use your imagination, I don’t think they were soup kitchens.  So I parked and walked to Baker’s.  They were having an open mic, and me without my guitar.  The food was excellent, southern home cooking.  For about 7$ at that time you could get three large deep-fried pork chops with 5 sides; sweet potato, collard greens, red beans and rice, etc.  They had a lot to choose from.  I listened to great music and met several musicians, exchanged contact info etc.  It was about 2am when I said I got to go.  One of my new friends asked if was parked in the lot, I wasn’t.  When I told them where I parked they proceeded to tell me my car might be gone or stripped.  They could have been pulling my leg but I don’t think so, they seemed genuinely concerned.  I got an escort to my car, big scary looking dude.  The car was there and everything was fine.  I went back several times and always used the lot.  On one trip to Baker’s it turns out that the entire woodwind and horn section of the Detroit Symphony was there for an open mic.  I got to hear an hour long version of C Jam Blues and every member of DS took a solo.  I can say it was great but the rhythm section was not enjoying it.  They got worked to the bone and never got any.  There were a few other great places, Cisco’s Blues Bar and Bird of Paradise in Ann Arbor.  I have a great story about Cisco’s but I’ll save that for another blog.  Last but not least there’s Windsor Canada.  Many folks working in the Detroit Metro area would cross the bridge and do lunch in Canada, I did a few time with people from LTU.

Another point is that people are very friendly in the Detroit suburbs.  I’m not used to strangers striking up a conversation.  I’m not saying I grew up in tough bad ass neighborhood but there was an edge to things, weirdos on the Clark St Bus (everyone on the North side knows about the freak show), street gangs, schizoids talking to walls, etc.  You typically didn’t walk up to a stranger and make small talk and officer friendly taught us never talk to strangers or get in a stranger’s car.  In my first week living in Southfield I was walking down CCD in the evening and came up to a middle-aged couple, 50 something in my opinion.  As we approached each other I noticed them looking at me, trying to make eye contact and smiling.  Am I in Pleasantville, I thought to myself.  The man looked at me and said “Hello, isn’t it a beautiful night outside?”  I looked around to see if there was someone behind me that he might be talking to.  I said “Do you know me?  I could be a mugger or something.”  He and his wife laughed and laughed and like the bus lady he said, “Son, you’re obviously not from around here, people are friendly here and talk to each other.  Have a nice evening.”  I guess I’m not very friendly, but I started softening up over the next few months.  My apartment was nice and the management very responsive.  I’m used to landlords cheating me out of things and having to fight to get new appliances, heat in the winter, faucets in the bathrooms etc.  Here if I put in work request things were fixed within an hour.  I could live with that.

All in all I have many fond memories of living there but I’m not into putting 200 miles a day on my car just to get to a couple of places.  What I had in MI I could walk to or get to by train in a big city.  There were a few other negatives about living near Detroit.  Drivers do not expect to see pedestrians, they NEVER look both ways when turning or yield right of way to pedestrians.  On one occasion I was lightly clipped by a car making a turn while I was running.  Every morning the news was shocking.  Five city blocks on fire in Detroit, 3rd month of no garbage pick up in Highland Park and Mayor’s office is a P.O. Box, Detroit declared a national emergency Clinton/Bush to send federal aid, Former police chief house raided and child porn ring unearthed.  These things happen everywhere but they seemed to happen 3 or 4 at a time, every day near Detroit.  A friend there once joked, “well, you’ve seen RoboCop, right?  That’s Detroit.”  The cost of living is very cheap and on a teacher’s salary I felt like I could have a good quality of life but at the end of the day I didn’t like everything being spread out, I don’t like cars and don’t really want to own one.  People there would drive to the end of the driveway to get their mail.  Too much.

One final anecdote to sum things up.  While I lived there my wife was doing a post doc in Ottawa Canada.  Every other weekend and on long vacations I would go up there.  I usually took a shuttle to the Detroit Metro airport (used to look like a slum but is very nice after the renovation).  On one such occasion my shuttle was late due to a major accident on an expressway.  I kept calling the company for status updates.  Eventually a man came to my door, apologizing profusely.  He picked up my bags and asked “When will David Bergman be here is he coming out?  Do you work for him?  I’m so excited to meet him and very sorry I’m late…”  He proceeded to tell me about the accident and how he drove up the expressway shoulder and through a fence to get here for David Bergman.  As we walked out of my front door and turned to the street I saw a van with about 6 people standing around with cameras.  Some flashed prematurely while others lowered their cameras and shouted “Where is he.  Where is David Bergman”.  I was freaking out a bit but I stood there and said “I’m David Bergman”.  They were quite deflated.  The man turned to me and said “You’re not the pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, are you a relative?”.  Nope, sorry to disappoint you.  That was my 15 minutes of accidental fame.

Last but not least, Ted Nugent is King there.  If you ever go there you’ll know precisely what I mean.

copyright 2014 David R Bergman