DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

At 10 mph my commute should take me 8 hours, at which point I could just turn around and drive back home. But I’m not going even that fast: at my current velocity, my commute time approaches infinity. And even though I left home just an hour ago, the time it would take me to get back is infinite too.

I guess I could do like all the professional commuters around me and use my time sitting on the highway to check my voice mail. This would enable me to hear messages from people who couldn’t reach me on the phone because I was stuck in traffic.

Or I could use a dashboard-mounted notepad to jot down time-saving ideas, which could allow me to recover, over a week’s time, five or 10 of the 360 minutes I would be spending in the car today.

My rental car checklist got one item longer today. Used to be, so long as the car had a tank of gas, I thought I would be OK. Then I realized I actually had to request upholstered seats and interiors that didn’t reek of wet dogs or body odor.

This week’s car had a film on the inside of the windshield. I don’t mean “optical film,” like a UV filter or sun shade. I mean film in the more organic, pudding sense of the word. Driving into the sunrise caused the windshield to light up like the cap of the Luxor — yes, at that moment, my car’s windshield could have been seen from space.

Enterprise does a good job, generally speaking, of cleaning out the interiors of their fleet of cars. This meant I had no spare scrap of paper or tissue with which to wipe down the inside of the windshield. I ended up pulling over and using my sock.

This is the man responsible for the smiley face on your dinner check.

William Michael Lynn is an authority on tipping behavior. He has published a free PDF pamphlet describing 15 ways servers can manipulate a restaurant diner’s generousity (Scientifically Tested Techniques to Increase Your Tips, 588K PDF) — everything from addressing the diner by name to providing candy with the bill.

He advocates touching customers. The next time a waiter or waitress touches you, enjoy the warm and fuzzy feeling, because it will cost you between 22% and 42% more than whatever you’d have tipped otherwise.

Lynn advocates squatting: by increasing “postural congruence” and eye contact between server and diner, servers achieve greater rapport and likeability, and therefore maximize the tip amount. In one study, “the servers received approximately $1.00 more from each table that they squatted next to.” In another study, servers who put their heads all the way under the table received $500 more from some diners.

Drawing happy icons on the check brought big rewards too.

Drawing a “smiley face” increased the waitress’ tips by 5% of the pre-tax bill size! However, no comparable effect was observed for the waiter. He recieved [sic] an average tip of 21% when nothing was drawn on the check and received an average tip of only 18% when he drew a smiley face on the back of the check.

Peering deeply into the human psyche, Lynn speculates that “seeing smiley faces drawn on checks may simply make customers smile themselves and, thereby, improve their moods.”

Lynn has not yet published pending research on the effect of dotting lowercase i’s with tiny hearts.

Applying all 15 of the tricks in this Mega Tips guide should yield a massive 520% increase in tips. So, for example, on a dinner bill of $100, a typical tip would come to $15. After applying Lynn’s methodology for maximizing tipping behavior, the server could instead expect $93. Now that’s good money!

So you’ve decided to buy a plasma TV. You’ve even decided what model to buy. And you’ve decided to buy it online, because the model you want isn’t sold locally and even if it were, you’re allergic to the hair gel all the salespeople at the appliance store wear.

Where do you begin? At shopper.com, home of a thousand etailers you’ve never heard of. Thankfully, an arbitrary ratings system helps inform you whom to trust.

What do the stars mean? You have no idea! You’re not buying stars — you’re buying a television. You thought that was clear.

You watch the prices for a few days. Suddenly they drop $200. You are pleasantly surprised and suddenly motivated. You spring into action: you call the three stores with the lowest prices. The voice mail system for all three stores sounds the same. The accents are straight out of the Sopranos.

You check addresses. They’re all in Brooklyn. You have visions of buying a television in an alley behind a butcher shop from a guy named Joey. But hey, this is mail order. So long as there isn’t any blood on the packaging, you’d just as soon save the $200.

So you connect to a salesman. You wonder if he’s wearing hair gel. You think perhaps it’s a good thing videophones aren’t in common use.

You give Joey your credit card number and you wonder if he’ll be on the next plane to Greece. You think, if so, at least you’ll get a good journal story out of it. Besides, your credit card is insured against fraud… right?

You order the TV stand separately because you figure your wife will get tired of holding the thing vertical during the year’s 9th viewing of the Matrix, especially when you’ve just made popcorn. But you realize that Joey’s asking $200 more for the stand than the manufacturer does, and you go “Hmmmm…” You begin to get an idea of how the store can afford to beat every other vendor by $350.

So you call him on it. You tell him you can get the exact same stand, shipped, off of Ebay for less than retail. And you think, you’re sure glad you haven’t yet told him where you live.

Joey says, “I can match that.” You are again surprised.

You ask about shipping. You then realize that the same guy who calculated the markup on TV stands calculated the markup on shipping. You ask for another deal. And you get it, and you’re real surprised.

So you wait a week, and just about the time you’re wondering if Joey will send a postcard from Santorini, a big-assed delivery truck rumbles down the driveway and a guy whose name is probably Tony leans out and says “Hey! You order a TV?”

And you think, if you get any more surprised you’re going to have to shave off your eyebrows.

The best thing is, you got a journal story out of it anyway.

Our PV installer sent a 7-month followup analysis, comparing actual production and consumption to projected, month by month. It boils down to two interesting numbers:

PG&E account balance: $4.51 in credit
PG&E bills we didn’t have to pay: $470.57

As electricity rates continue to rise, the second number above will grow quickly. If rates were to stay the same, it would take us about 15 more years to pay for the PV system, but a more honest prediction (accounting for rate increases) puts the breakeven date at January, 2015 — 11 years from our launch date, assuming an average usage of $70/month (2004 equivalent) and 6% per year cost increase.

In fact, juggling these numbers is about as interesting as watching the interest accrue on my savings account. Here’s a number that I’d rather see:

lbs. of CO₂ saved, to date: = 5378

SF Chronicle photographer Darryl Bush captures the dire side-effects of Western medical malpractice in this stunning image: the patient’s head has grown to twice its normal size!

[Photo removed at the request of the photographer; see the original here.]