
It was an unseasonably warm afternoon at 64°F. The local Dairy Queen was actually open for business and people were having ice cream outside in January. How bizarre! Not wishing to waste a fine afternoon, I went to White Plains for the Shortcut geocache. It's in a part of White Plains that's not so busy, by a walkway connecting the residential area to downtown White Plains. I'd been there some time during December but could not retrieve the cache because it was under ice. Today, obviously, there was no such problem.
I noticed that the Tappan Zee Bridge toll has gone up from $4 to $4.50. I don't know what the toll is yet if you use E-ZPass. No doubt some of the money will go towards adding yet more "Life is worth living" signs to the bridge. I noticed that there are now suicide hotline signs on the Nyack part of the highway even before entering the bridge! I'm sure that will get the jumpers to reconsider.
Second round of shopping A&P's triple-coupon week this evening. This time, I got $33.53 of groceries for $5.58! Some of the items were $0 after coupons. In particular, I got a free case of bottled water, which I'll give away if I don't use it all myself. The funny thing is most of the $5.58 was from 4 cans of soup, so I could've brought the total down to under $2 if I didn't get the soup. However, that would really be screwing with the supermarket and besides, I needed the split pea soup because it goes well with roti prata.
After yesterday evening's dinner at Quiznos, I followed the online survey invitation on the receipt and filled out a survey. I gave the restaurant an overall good rating but noted that the sammies and side salad were priced a tad high for the portion sizes. This morning, I got a phone call from Bill, the current Quiznos manager. I don't know what I was expecting to hear but I got a barrage of justifications for the pricing, a round of stonewalling whenever I said anything, and a lot of hiding behind Quiznos corporate policy in general. He also said that I was making a big deal about nothing, which even if true, is not the way to speak to a customer. The impression I got is he's someone who'll be impossible to speak to on anything, so henceforth, I'll not go to the Ramsey Quiznos. I suspect his attitude will be the same if the day comes when I have a real problem, so the toasted is not worth the trouble. I do appreciate that Bill took the time to call though. It's just unfortunate that we couldn't arrive at a meeting of the minds. I miss Victor, the previous Quiznos manager. He was someone with whom I could discuss just about anything.
Yesterday night, I also found out through a comment posted on this photo that the Patchogue LJS has been replaced by a Starbucks. I had no idea the LJS had gone away. I stopped going to that one 2 years ago because the staff had an argument with me. So I couldn't help feeling a bit of schadenfreude on hearing of that restaurant's demise. Of course, not knowing anything about the LJS-closing situation, I cannot say that poor customer service was the reason for their downfall but it couldn't hurt to be nicer, could it... Quiznos of Ramsey?