Tahoe and Revenge?

This past weekend Rose and I went up to Tahoe with our grx small group, Immersion. The trip was mostly uneventful except for two things: a clever plot on Saturday night that demanded payback and the weather Sunday morning on our way back to the Bay Area.

First, the weather.

I checked the weather report for this weekend on Friday before we left and it said that there would be a little snow Saturday night through Sunday morning. Sounded perfect, snow overnight and fresh powder during the day. Turns out that instead of a few inches of fresh, we got dumped on! Here are a few shots Rose took from the car while we were driving Sunday morning.

So turns out that we got outta there just in time. After we got past the summit on 50 eastbound, they closed the freeway for avalanche control. We decided to hightail it outta there and it took us about 8 hours to get home. Today, we heard that it took some people 12 hours to get back yesterday, so it looks like we were actually lucky

Ok, now for the more interesting part: revenge?

On our first night up at Tahoe, Friday, we had two rooms. One for guys and one for the ladies. Since we had 6 guys, the guys room was larger – a two story unit with a bed on the top floor and a couch on the first floor. Huy, Eddie and I slept on the first floor and Alan, Jimmy, and Hugh slept on the top floor. The next morning, Alan and Jimmy complained of not getting a good night’s sleep, but didn’t really say why. We figured it was an uncomfortable mattress or something.

Then on Saturday night, Alan, Jimmy, and Hugh tried to drive home after the day up at Kirkwood. By the time they started to head out, the storm was already coming in, so they turned back around and stayed another night at Tahoe. At this point, we only had one hotel room (we checked out of the other room) and I figured we could probably all jam up in there for a night. However, Jimmy and Alan insisted on getting another hotel room. We figured they just didn’t want to cram 9 people in a standard small hotel room.

They found a room at a motel down the street and got ready to move over there. Now comes the clever part, they left Hugh behind in our room, and said they’d come pick him up in the morning. Odd, we thought, but whatever.

As most people can probably guess by now, Hugh is an awfully suspicious character in the story. Turns out, Hugh has a serious case of sleep apnea, and it was exceptionally loud. He was choking and coughing all night, basically preventing everyone but me from sleeping (I’m always passed out cold). Rose is a very light sleeper so she ended up getting basically no sleep all night!

Well, needless to say, this was a deliberate act of war. So that night after we got back, after Alan had gone to bed, we took my old foam mattress and did this:

Then we added these:

And lastly, here’s the scene this morning:

Bwahahaha! Watch out Jimmy, you’re next!

Plaxo Chinese New Year eCards

A shameless plug for my company I know, but I checked out the Chinese New Years eCards that we have over at Plaxo eCards and knew I had to send this one out to my parents:

A familiar saying from my childhood

(for those who don’t know, the older generation usually gives the younger generation “red envelopes” at Chinese New Year filled with money. This exact saying is usually used as a joke though since it’s a little rude to yell “give me my red envelopes!” to people like your grandparents.)

Oh, we also support Chinese text in our eCards too!

Q Cup in cupertino village needs some help in the customer service department

Normally I don’t like to rant too much… (oh wait, I do). Anyways, we had just finished dinner at Korea Tofu House and we decided to get a little bit of desert. So we walked around Cupertino Village and decided to hit up Q-Cup. If you just clicked through to the yelp link, you’ll notice that it got 1 out of 5 stars, and this review isn’t going to help them out any either…

We head inside and I order a pineapple bubble milk tea (yeah, I know it already sounds kind of nasty, but I like pineapple so I wasn’t thinking about that too much). When the order comes out, I taste it and it’s pretty bad. Rose has some and she doesn’t like it either. I tried some more and then I barfed a little bit in my mouth (just kidding). Long and short of it is, it’s the worst bubble tea we’ve ever had – maybe the worst bubble tea in the world says Rose.

No big deal we think, we’ll just ask for a replacement regular bubble milk tea. I walk up to the counter and politely ask if I can exchange the bubble tea for another flavor. The girl at the counter seems puzzled and asks some old guy about it and he says no. This was pretty puzzling since 1. the bubble tea costs them almost nothing and 2. customer satisfaction is usually pretty important to a business like this when there’s a perfectly good alternative just around the corner.

I ask again nicely, but no dice. When I tell Rose what happened, she gets pretty mad and proceeds to ask again for me. This time, the old guy runs to the back and mixes a little sample of the same flavor for her to taste to see if it’s still bad. Of course, it tastes exactly the same (we suspect it was the artificial pineapple flavor).

Then, he gives her a bunch of junk about how the bubble tea cup and plastic seal costs a lot of money so they’d be taking a huge financial hit if they gave us a replacement bubble tea. That’s completely ridiculous! Then he offers this case study:

“If you go to any restaurant, order some food, pay for it, and then tell them you don’t like the food, will they give you a refund or make you another dish? No! They’ll lose money! That’s how business works!”

Umm… yeah. That’s for the business tips, where’d you get your MBA again? He forgot the part where customers don’t come back and he doesn’t make money period.

The worst part is, eventually they actually gave us a replacement milk tea (they forgot the bubbles) and it tasted horrible too. Moral of the story: don’t go to Q-Cup.

Epilogue: we came home after this whole ordeal and looked online. According to wikipedia, Q-Cup is an illegal franchise?

Sweet Web 2.0 videos (Plaxo included)

A bunch of people here at the office have been shooting a “superbowl” ad over the past few days and they’ve just been uploaded to YouTube. HEre’s ours (I think it’s hilarious, but then again, I’m probably biased):

Check out all of the videos over there. Meebo, RockYou, Technorati, and other companies have submitted videos too.