Ballard Bullshit

Then we chatted, privately. After that, as I walked the four blocks to my flat, I concluded there really was just one word to describe this incredible man: Authentic.

"Pink gave the best performance of the entire evening!" Mr. Goodman exclaimed, (commenting on the Grammys show that aired January 31st.) Well, any QFC store manager who extols the talent of an edgy millennial performer without mentioning tits and ass has got my vote. Furthermore, this guy thinks Johnny Depp is a top-notch actor. . . as do I. So I asked him if he'd seen Depp's movie "Blow" (as in cocaine). He hadn't, but he'd order it. These comments were monumental to me, as in, even the President has a Blackberry, internet access at his oval desk, and wi fi in 'Limo 1.' I mean, have we finally escaped, even minimally, stone-age thinking from ninety year-old senile senators (as in Strom Thurmond), or can we even laugh at disgraced senator Ted Stevens' remarks (aged 86), describing the web as "just a bunch of tubes and wires" ? Does anybody under forty-five even know what a vacuum tube is?

Mr. Goodman begged off my first attempt to interview him. A slight red flag. Had he read my 'best of Ballard Bullshit' spots? Was he slightly afraid? Had corporate infection taught him to avoid a hard-core journalist? Or was he just plain slippery. . .

. . .how 'bout none of the above? He did honor my second thrust for the interview (on February 3rd), yes, for a whole hour and a half.

I finessed my way into his psyche, and as you loyal readers know, tried to wrench anything insidious or contradictory from him. Not to be.This man is solid, and I mean to his core.

We talked of his grandfather who came from Norway, via Minnesota, to Ballard. We talked about his three children, the oldest who is at Western State majoring in International Business. Ol' Bob put three years in at the UW, but left to pursue business.

Mr. Goodman is fifty, and those Scandinavian values, old school that is, guide his every waking second. Oh yes, he attends the necessary corporate meetings, where they discuss strategies. I told him I didn't dislike upper management meetings, it's just that 'strategies' reminds me of Pavlov's dogs, or herds of sheep, where people become streams of molasses. His assiduous response: "Well that may be true, but the 'new' QFC gives the branch manager quite a bit of flexibility. So my belief that the customer should have a good experience, every time they come in my store, can still be my goal."

"And does corporate allow you the freedom to exercise your options?" I asked.

"Oh yes, they now encourage it. In fact, at those meetings, they want to hear my ideas for some changes, and they let me act on that."

Go figure.

And just a bit of store trivia here: that Starbucks you see in the southwest corner? Well, this QFC is a licensee of Starbucks. That means that those baristas are employees of QFC, and officially they are in the bakery department. So they can't be tipped. Nope. Would you tip the deli personnel? The checker? Well of course not. "They are paid six dollars more per hour than their peers." Mr. Goodman was proud of that.

I talked with the very relaxed man some more. I brought up what I perceived as either problems, or endemic floor anomalies, or just plain mistakes. I talked to him about 'choke points,' which designers just don't anticipate. I talked about 'floor islands' which just don't work. I even talked to him about little metal glitches which can injure a checker. He listened, and more importantly, agreed with every one of my observations. Not because he was being compliant, he was just being real. In more common terms, not once did he react with a Corporate defensive posture, not once. He had every opportunity to pull a sanguine, if not arrogant, response, but didn't exercise that option.

Security. Hmmm, how good is it? Well, as we were looking at a fairly good screen resolution from store cameras on his master monitor, one thing was certain. The printouts were archaic and basically '90's quality. Oh yes, there are lots of cameras, with more to come, but the system was cave-mannish. I mean, isn't this 2010? My Kodak 10 megapixel takes better vids than this embarrassment. Who is peddling these monolithic systems? Oh well, whatever, so I asked him about the 'hands-on', i.e., when you actually catch someone stealing.

"I just won't let anyone restrain a thief," he offered. "The safety of my employees comes first."

(And for you long-time readers, how can you kick this? The old QFC had a horrible incident: the night manager confronted a thief who had stolen a half-rack of beer. As the manager ran after the culprit into the parking lot, he was run over once, and then the assholes backed up and ran over him again. And the bitch of this whole story? When he called 911, the goddamn operator kept asking him where the store was, as in, what was the address on 24th street. There was no address on the outside of the building. The broken and mangled manager kept telling the lady it was the only QFC in Ballard, but she needed a street address, and this creepy operator problem was a major reason the thieves were not caught.)

So the "I won't let anyone restrain. . ." statement, and policy, is valid. But boy oh boy does that open the door for fast-footed thieves who want a few bottles of wine, and will never be caught. James, the wine steward, cannot be omnipresent.

Bob likes to fish (for salmon in Alaska), ski (at Stevens Pass), and golf. He is divorced but sees a lady for companionship. And even when he's not on the floor of his fiefdom, smiling, he's still smiling when he's looking you straight in the eyes. This man genuinely enjoys people. He's one of those mature guys who has been around the block a few times (even though he is not well-traveled), and throws any sort of bitterness or resentment right out the window. His personal surety pervades and precedes him. . .

So the next time you're in his, oops, our store, just say hi, and welcome him. He truly is one of us. And most importantly, he will listen, and then act on your valid input.

One can only believe his three children will carry his virtue forward. How rare that is.



This site is pretty much real-time. When you post, you get the satisfaction that damn, I've just contributed to a really happening site, and if I witnessed a SWAT team response, or a fatal accident, or a quilter, or a dog shitting, well then I am someone. I just got electronically published, and now I am important by God. And that's exactly what the insidious owners of this website want you to think.

There's even a little bit of rock-star mentality going on here. If you read the bios of the controlling yet clever owners, well Hell, you may think the God called capitalism has blessed this duo. You see, if you even touch their creation, you're kind of a groupie, and you don't mind. I mean come on, how many people do you know that are higher-ups at MSNBC? Well if you're bought out that cheaply, why don't you go have a six dollar drink over at Hazelwood, on Market Street, and you just might get to rub elbows with one of the co-owners, the bass player for Sound Garden--just call him Ben, although his arrogance might turn you off. Same thing over at myballard.com. Let me illustrate the scam.


I met Kate last July, when the "squat house" was being demolished, over on 56th street. Brash, supercilious. . .a female bully. There is no social consciousness in her world, merely a shell of ambiguity. She and her husband can justify anything, all under the guise of innocuous phrases such as "we care about the community", or "let's have everyone contribute." Bullshit. They are the greedy successors of the Yuppie kingdom--espousers of morality when all they care about is money and status, and if you play, you are feeding the Beast.

Why are they so deserving of my bile? Well read on.

Now follow this: websites have counters. They used to be primitive, i.e., they just recorded hits to your page. Then, schemers found out a way to phish individual addys and add them to your 'hits.' So instead of 100 hits a day, you could claim to have 1,000 hits a day. Well the rod of correction came in, and for a while things mellowed out to Truth. Ah but you can't hold down a good capitalist. So the term 'unique users,' or something similar, came to be the standard. This was supposed to guarantee the actual number of visitors were real people. And websites worldwide bought into this, and still does, but the counters remain corrupted. This is the core-point data for myballard.com to do one thing: use these false numbers to sell advertising. The numbers are still inflated by a term called 'importing.' My neighbor, a retired Microsoft guy, explained all of this to me.

Myballard.com has the balls to claim over 55,000 unique users. (According to apartment.com, the Ballard neighborhood has approximately 32,000 residents !) And even more incredulous, they claim to have over 600,000 page views per month! People actually believe these hyper-extended 'facts.' Not only do I have some ocean front property in Arizona to sell you, but I'd like you to invest in a monstrous refrigeration system, take it to Barrow, Alaska (where I've worked), and convince the Inuit that they cannot live without slurpies and Eskimo pies. You in?

Kate quit her job to devote all her energies to her scam. Imagine that. Here's the drill: claim quite astounding numbers of unique visits, and convince your clients it is real, then sell your ads. Now here's the rub: you have an entire community giving you news, for free, because you've convinced them that half of the population of India is reading your posts. And you suck the life-force out of all of your contributors, and you watch your bank account grow, because your advertisers believe your bullshit. But the contributors are happy, because you've fed their ego. They get nothing, you get everything. Get it? Even the great robber barons at the turn of the 20th century paid their slave-idiots a dollar a day.

Well what kind of money are we talking about? As follows: for a mere $150. per month, you get a postage stamp size ad, with an image and some text. That's $1,800. a year! Oh boy, that'll get those buyers to your shop. So just one hundred advertisers grosses the scammers a cool $180,000. a year, for doing what? And worse yet, they run four other neighborhood .coms: Phinney, Magnolia, Fremont, and Queen Anne. Keep spending on the ads you suckers. AND, they have now partnered with the Seattle Times.com.

Vampires.

But I think their website propaganda says it best:
"After all, you power this blog. Not us. We just moderate it."


So very simply, go fuck yourselves myballard.com, and take your false morality, and your vicious schemes and shove them right up your asses.

You are thieves. You are predatory.


The Chai House: Shit, this beloved dump is closed. Yes, there are many rumors, but we all know the real reason. Sure, it may have been loud-mouthed patrons, sure it may have been just a little bending of alcohol laws, sure it may have been just the angst of Ballard's underground. But you wanna know what really closed it? The new yuppie-moms with toddlers who moved into the nearby high rises. Yup, them. Playing a less significant role, the senior apartment building, not one block away, brought the police just too many times to the Chai House. What you may not know is this little tidbit: any place that serves alcohol is rated by the amount of times the police are called. If you exceed the profile, you will be notified by the state, or the City. And they'll crop you in a New York minute.

With the Chai House finished, a part of Ballard is forever gone. Jessica started that venue years ago, on Market Street. Evidently she sold it just in time to turn a profit. But she was smarter than most of us. She saw the coming wave of bullshit. Well let's put it this way. She loved younger men, and she found one who could satisfy her, and financially seal the deal. Nothing wrong with that. Good business, good lovin'.

So with this closure, any Mohican-haired talented musician, or corn-rowed Rasta, or sassy babe with full-sleeve tats, no longer have a place to vent. At least in Ballard that is. Fremont is closed, as is Greenwood. Mark my words, this talent pool will gravitate South, to Sodo, or Rainier. Oh yes it will. And Ballard will stink of high-end perfume, and then die. Probably around 2040, it will make a resurgence.

For now, our neighborhood has been compromised, and the very reason all of these moneyed prudes moved here, is the very reason this neighborhood has been sold, not to the highest bidder, no no, it has been prostituted to banality.


The Ballard Branch Library: Finally, a little bit of chutzpah by the new Librarian, and her name is Cass. Didn't you get sick of all of the transients making the grounds their new pig sty? Didn't you get sick of all the teen runaways constantly harassing you for smokes, or worse yet, finding out where you live and then robbing you? Didn't you get sick of certain patrons passing out inside the facility, and then pissing their pants? And if you're male, didn't you get sick of the guys in the bathroom using it as their personal bathing cubby, all bare-chested and scowling? Single handedly, Cass has almost put a STOP to all of that. "I look kind of neutral, but I hide my heavy-handedness," she told me. "I just didn't understand the inaction of your predecessors," I commented. The previous acting Branch Manager, Dave Valencia, ran that entire facility right into the sod. His pissy little gay agenda was far more important than being responsible and responsive to the Ballard neighborhood. So I wrote a blistering letter to the City Librarian about him, and demanded the letter be inserted into his personnel file. Oddly, he was transferred out (did my tirade have anything to do with it?. . .don't know), and then Cass took over. So when you go visit our new and revised library, do not hesitate, if you see bullshit, to tell Cass about it. She most definitely will take care of it. . .

I am am absolutely convinced that the tension that suffocated the Library patrons has been curtailed, and this breath, this mellow enforced code, has brought the Library full-circle back, back to enjoyment.