Category Archives: Hold My Beer and Watch This

16 November 2016
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Bay City Rollers, Hold My Beer and Watch This

How to Steal a Laptop in Five Simple Steps

One day not too long ago I was sitting in front of a café helping out a consulting client of mine. I was performing coffee shop user acceptance testing, in which I pay people $10 to try an app. (Sidebar: I am amazed that so few entrepreneurs do this. I guess that they’re deathly afraid that people will tell them that their baby is ugly. But this is a topic for another day and another post.)

  1. I was typing away on my laptop when a man ran by at full speed and grabbed the computer by its screen. It took me a second or two to figure out what was happening—Is this a joke?—before I took off after the perpetrator. Yes, I left all my other stuff (2 phones and another computer) on the table.
  2. He was wearing a lemon yellow windbreaker. Pretty distinctive, right? Well, the location that I picked had lots of small streets, turns, and potential exit routes. I kept track of him through the first corner, but by the time I rounded the second, there was nobody matching that description. It was almost as if he had done this before, and he knew that I would fixate on his jacket…
    map
  3. He kept the laptop open, presumably so he wouldn’t have to deal with login passwords.
  4. I was sitting down, and he was running full speed. As we have already established, he does this for a living. The last time I ran anywhere was to make it to an ice cream parlor before it closed. Who do you think is going to win this race?
  5. When you encounter a street, you at least wait for a gap in traffic before you jaywalk, right? Not this guy. He’s going to jail if he gets caught, so he is motivated. My motivation is to protect my stu—wait a minute, I left most of my stuff back in front of the café. Maybe I should make sure that it’s OK. Huh: by not stealing all my stuff, the guy reduced my motivation to chase after him. When I returned, half a dozen people were guarding my things.

And that, my friends, is how you steal a laptop.

What I’ll Do Next Time

  • Turn on Find My Mac, or Find My Device on Windows 10 boxes. Unlike the similar services on your phone, these are not enabled by default. Do this now.
  • Backups. But you already know that.
  • Don’t call 911. I did, and not a single cop passed by in the seventy-five minutes I waited. (I get that more serious crimes take precedence, but the dispatcher implied that someone was coming, and that I should wait.) When I called back, the dispatcher suggested that I just go to the police station the next morning. Since I was only doing it to satisfy the demands of my employer’s insurance carrier, this was fine with me.
  • dogDraw attention to the crime: I should have yelled “Thief!” It’s crazy suspicious to be running through traffic with an open laptop, and people knew exactly what he was doing, but it only dawned on them
    a moment after he has passed them. They would have helped if I had shaken them out of their coma, but I was in a coma, too. That’s what this guy was relying upon. Like I said, he was good at his job.

Alternate strategy: negotiate with the thieves, and get them on camera.

P.S. This is what it takes to break the multi-year silence on my blog. Was it worth the wait?
P.P.S. And what do you think of my clickbait headline?

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13 August 2012
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Bay City Rollers, Hold My Beer and Watch This

How to Catch Runaway Dogs in San Francisco

Perhaps you suspect that the title of this blog post is a fake-out, and I’m going to launch into some wacky parable about startups or marketing or something. Well, you’d be wrong: it’s literally about catching dogs.

This city is one giant Heathcliff cartoon

Be prepared for some ridiculous nepotism on the part of Captain Kelly:

Since moving here six months ago, my wife and I have corralled three loose dogs. There’s a law about everything in San Francisco, so there must be a leash law; based on what I’ve witnessed, I suspect it’s illegal to use them.

Anyway, here’s your chance to learn from my mistakes.

Runaway Dog #1

Location: Ashbury Heights
Month: April
Breed: Don’t know. Don’t care. I’m not a dog person.
Details: We were heading home when a dog joined us on our stroll. No humans were in sight. At first we thought he was tailing us, but then he took the lead, so we followed him. He trotted past several streets before heading up some steps to a front door. My wife rang the bell. A woman answered, and my wife asked if this was her dog. “No, but I’m his walker! Hello Gordon! Did you come to visit? Is it time for our walkies? You’re such a good boy! Yes you are…”
Advice to prospective dog catchers: If a loose dog seems to know where he’s going, give him the benefit of the doubt.

Runaway Dog #2

Location: the Mission
Month: June
Breed: Don’t Know. Don’t care. I’m still not a dog person.
Details: A little pup sprinted into a cross street between Mission and Valencia. We stood in the road to stop traffic. The dog ran in circles as we made futile attempts to catch him. Eventually a preteen boy showed up, and the dog meekly followed him home.
Advice to prospective dog catchers: Some of your classier neighbors ‘walk’ their dogs by pushing them out the door and letting them crap in the street. Sometimes those dogs make a break for it. It’s tough to blame them.

Runaway Dog #3:

Bernadette hitches a ride home with the author

Location: Noe Valley
Month: August
Breed: Even I know this is a corgi.
Details: We saw this girl motoring through a busy intersection with no regard for her personal well-being. I bolted after her while my wife found the owner. (He was the guy yelling, “I’m sixty-nine years old. I can’t run fast!” Apparently the dog had just arrived in town a few hours before: she was a ‘retired’ breeder dog from Arkansas and had never been off the farm. Cars and traffic were totally foreign to her. Thus her total obliviousness to the rules of the road.) The entire chase was under 10 minutes, but may I remind you that San Francisco is hilly? Especially Noe Valley, where the streets have sidestairs, not sidewalks. Wrangling her was a team effort: at intersections, drivers would point which way the dog headed.
Advice to prospective dog catchers:

  • You are out of shape. Even a chubby little dog can outrun you. And you should really take off your fancy zip cardigan before you sprint up hills in San Francisco. It will get sweaty.
  • Don’t bother trying to tackle the dog. Instead, just push her to the ground and hold her there.
  • Keep your hands away from the dog’s mouth. She will bite.
  • After she’s bitten you, keep your hands away from her mouth. She will bite again.
  • For the love of God, KEEP YOUR HANDS AWAY FROM THE DOG’S MOUTH.
  • Remember that zip cardigan you were supposed to remove but didn’t? Yeah, she’s going to poop on it.
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27 June 2012
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Bay City Rollers, Hold My Beer and Watch This

Testing a Hypothesis: IKEA is like a Fancy Restaurant

As a new resident of San Francisco, I’m required to write about how hard it was to rent an apartment. Bloggers get competitive about this topic. I swear that some of them do SEO, and I’ve spotted one instance of plagiarism.

So here’s my advice: it’s not hard, and it doesn’t take a long time. Just lower your expectations, and be prepared to pay up. (Obligatory startup note: yes, money is tight. So is time.)

The real challenge: furnishing our place

Far more arduous was equipping our new home when all our worldly possessions were 3056 miles away. (We were selling our condo in Boston—more on that another day—and our realtor strongly suggested leaving it furnished. So my wife and I would be spending a couple of months in an unfurnished apartment, sans stuff.) Apparently this is not an uncommon problem for new arrivals; last weekend we had dinner with a couple facing the exact same issue. In case you find yourself in such a situation, feel free to learn from my mistakes.

The hypothesis: be a cheap bastard

In 2002 I helped paint a mural at a children’s hospital in Warsaw; there I met the funniest person I know. A few years later he and I were getting dinner in Chicago, and he detailed his foolproof method for choosing wine at a nice restaurant. His reasoning was ridiculously complex, and he’d obviously suffered some sort of psychotic break, but I’ll summarize it here:

I have embraced his logic wholeheartedly, and I apply it everywhere I go.

The experiment: buy the cheapest of everything at IKEA

We only needed the stuff to last a few months. What could go wrong?

The results: things go horribly, horribly wrong

  1. The cheapest salad bowl: $4
    • The first time I used it, it cracked from thermal shock.
    • If I had a time machine, I’d: get a set from Amazon.
  2. The cheapest cutting boards: 2 for $3
    • I used one once, and it added strips of brightly colored plastic to my dinner. It might look like a Fruit Roll-Up, and it might feel like a Fruit Roll-Up, but it does not taste like a Fruit Roll-Up.
    • If I had a time machine, I’d: head to Amazon again.

  3. IKEA spoons are Smurf-size. This is especially odd because Swedes are tall.

    The cheapest flatware: 16 piece set for $4
    • They’re finished as well as the keychain I made in junior high shop class; I scratched my lip on a metal burr. But they work.
    • If I had a time machine, I’d: buy two sets on the first trip. Plus an angle grinder.
  4. The cheapest can opener: $3
    • It doesn’t open cans so much as it repeatedly dents them until they cry out for a swift and merciful death. I rarely use it, which pisses off my cats.
    • If I had a time machine, I’d: bring my nice can opener with me from Boston.
  5. The cheapest sheets: $8
    • Itchy and ugly.
    • If I had a time machine, I’d: buy the 2nd cheapest set.
  6. The cheapest kitchen chairs: $14 apiece
    • Also functions as a desk chair. Surprisingly comfortable, probably because the plastic has a frightening amount of flex.
    • If I had a time machine, I’d: buy 2 more as spares for when these break.
  7. The cheapest desk: $8
    • The legs are $3 apiece (not included in the price above). Do yourself a favor and get them, even if you’re tempted to just stick the desktop on top of a big box.
    • If I had a time machine, I’d: buy the legs on the first trip.
  8. The cheapest kitchen knives: $4 for 3
    • Chopping root vegetables usually ends in a stalemate. It’s like the Korean War on my kitchen counter. But they haven’t broken.
    • If I had a time machine, I’d: very reluctantly buy them again.
  9. The cheapest lounge chair: $49
    • In under a month, it broke under the weight of my cat. (Yes, it was the chubby one.) I disassembled it, lashed it together with twine, and added a layer of bubble wrap for extra cushioning. It looks like Mickey Rourke’s face, but it’s holding together.
    • If I had a time machine, I’d: kill it with fire.

Conclusion: hypothesis is disproved

Buying stuff at IKEA is not like buying wine at a fancy restaurant. It’s not a bargain if you have to replace it after one use, so don’t be a cheap bastard: if you get stuff from IKEA, buy the second cheapest item.

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