Mark’s Bloomin’ Journal

I have just stepped off the Lufthansa flight from Venice to Portland via Frankfurt after fifeteen days of peddling a bike in, over, down, around and damn near under the Dolomites…as fast as was possible. I certainely spent many a day there feeling washed up, wrung out and in having been hung out to dry.

In my mind I am mostly still in Italy, wending my way from one tiny alpine village to another, listening to a myriad church bells marking the passage of time, drinking in the sights and smells of meadows now choked with the autumn crocus and noting the cracks in limestone walls sprouting tiny cyclamen. People appear industrious and gainfully employed in these pastoral settings. Much too busy to be petty.

Awaiting me at home is a mountainous pile of mostly junk mail and unread newspapers. Better it all should be tossed into the recycling bin. In the doing so I catch an article on the front page of the WSJ dated 9/18 and begin to read further. Perhaps it is because I have just spent fifeteen days washing my cycling kit every night and hanging it out to dry from various hotel windows and balconies from Castelfranco to Cles to Cortina d’Ampezzo and many another lovely village, that my attention is captured.

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In this case, with this woman, it was length that was the issue. Lack of it to be quite pointed. Same old story, right ! Lack of length on my end of things was accompanied by an abusive harangue with more than a touch of entitlement from the shorted party. Poor wee thing, laboring under the impression that a verbal assault leads to improved performance. A cheap victory maybe, but that is all.

This phone call that almost queered an other wise good day had an interesting provenance, stemming from a generously discounted bunch of Casa Blaca Lilies some weeks ago. In the many changes we make on a daily basis to the dynamic pages on Flowerbud it had escaped all our attentions that the estimation of size for Casa Blanca was in fact an image dating back to inception and therefore had not, or rather could not keep up…with updates. It also harkened back to the days that we shipped a far longer box than can be afforded on FedEx these days thus leading to a longer stem at times. One should note here that overly long stems have a propensity to droop, especially on large budded varieties such as Casa Blanca.

In this time and space we inhabit as a company the oversight left me wide open to those that would take advantage. As it turns out there was just the one in what must have been years (It is fully rectified now) but was she ever sour at being “shorted” the all important couple of inches. Naturally you understand that the missing inches automatically led to a host of other nit picking complaints ranging from dirt to small buds at the stem ends. However it was plain to deduce that the flowers had been enjoyed regardless. Nothing like kicking the dog when he’s down.

Customer service at Flowerbud had already been dealt a tongue lashing from My Lady Frustrated and I was caught flat footed when the call came to roost with me, one normally equiped with reasonable coping skills. Faced with such vitriol and cheap skate virtues I came up short…again, when faced at the very climax of the discussion with my scofflaw self, violating the trades description act, false advertising and all other manner of sordid and nefarious activities stemming from running Flowerbud.

The end result ,to my chagrin was that with tail semi tucked between legs and a refund instituted I could not wait to get off the phone to try and reclaim some of the day by talking to someone more pleasant. It doesn’t even take the fingers of one hand to count my losses to people that are little more than cheats. This one got me though and got to me at the same time. I still am thinking of what better to do when faced with missing inches … as a refund merely satisfies the one party.

My kind of a day, being the last day of the month, on the cusp of Mother’s Day and the May issue of Good Housekeeping giving us a much appreciated accolade. It is to be found on page 130, in a section titled “The Goods”. The long and the short of it being that GHRI tested four big name delivery services with the help of consumer panelists and Mille Fiori Flowers in NYC. Purchasing bouquets as similar as possible and within the same price point the article concludes with the following;

Bottom Line: The only service we recommend is Flowerbud.com. Its bouquets arrived in good condition and lasted for seven days.

Short, sweet and to the point. I love it, while at the same time thinking I might give my eye teeth to know the identity of the three also rans. Remember, my mission is that you do not have to find out!

Well well well, despite the much vaunted ability to withstand the assaults of a multitude of perverse minded geeks and hackers it looks like one of the worlds most vaunted fruits may have finally succumbed to a 21st century scourge. Strange timing as around these parts of the pacific northwest our orchards are only just through with blossoming and as the blossoms give way to leaves and fruit set the quality of the end results are as yet unknown and far away. Not so with a crop from the last few years, even in storage and disbursment the results have been juicy and the purchasers duly sated. However as we dig deeper into that barrel it becomes obvious that the apple has indeed been infected by worm (s). Tough at first …to identify this bad bug… and apply an insecticide of the correct efficacy, as it seems to have come from within the fruit itself.

The worm has a big time name… Steve Jobs, if former CFO Fred Anderson’s revelations are indeed held to be true. Apparently the already super wealthy and super arrogant can’t keep themselves from boring further into a fruit’s juicy accounting to further enrich themselves, possibly at the expense of those who would then make financial judgments from books that would be considered “cooked”. (more…)

Anchors aweigh? Forget that nonsense, Scuppered more likely!

Now we know why Her Majesty’s Royal Navy is being dismantled by that supreme man for all seasons, Tony Blair…It appears to be staffed and led by those who would trade in the stiff upper lip, the name, rank and serial number retort of a military force that lives by real military mojo. For what you ask? For a Persian goody bag, (as if these warriors were scrounging starlets at an oscar party) for hand shakes, photo ops, waves, feel good stories and presumably a steady supply of smokes for the head scarved woman in the party… from none other than President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Is THIS the Royal Navy of Her Britannic Majesty? The one that in some form or other knocked the caulking out of the Spanish Armada? The one that ruled the waves, pushed out the corners of empire and thus education and enlightenment to more than a few? Is THIS the Royal Navy that sailed to the Falkland Islands under the iron fist and oft maligned leadership of ex Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher? Is THIS the Royal Navy that showed up at Trafalger under Admiral Horatio Nelson? Is THIS the Royal Navy that Sir Winston Churchill called upon in those most dire days when it was an imperative to sink the German battleships and Uboats…of not that long ago? Apparently not. (more…)