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I’m not anti-bike at all. It warms my heart that my condo building has fiercer competition for bike berths than for parking spaces. It ticks me off, too, because it means that we can’t actually have bikes right now. I think my rhetorical ire was raised by the one tweet I saw in the aftermath of the incident itself yesterday:

burgerville drivethru policy is for safety of employees. b/c women on bikes carrying gallon of honey, one less minivan stickers are SUSPECT

My first thought? Of course it’s a policy. (Turns out it isn’t, but it is most places.) But it was just one piece of information in the tweetstream, and I can understand the use of Twitter to blow off aggravation at poor or misinformed service. It was when I saw a tweet today about KGW covering the story that I went and checked the Cafe Mama blog post. And that was when I went off all half-cocked. From Sarah’s post:

And here is why this is more important than a few minutes of shame for a cash-poor woman on a cute family bike: It is unethical and senseless. It is profiling. There is no law, statute or ethical standard prohibiting discriminating against customers on the basis of their mode of transportation (and discrimination it is, due to the common practice of having extended hours of operation at a drive-through window; besides the incredulity of only allowing customers in possession of an engine the privilege of convenience). There should be.

It is not unethical, nor senseless.

The reasons are sad and business-y, but they are reasons. Business guests are afforded substantial rights to sue for personal injury, even if they are somewhere they shouldn’t actually be. Many standards exist across the country, but oftentimes even doing something completely idiotic can still get you some money (on the theory that the business in question, while not responsible for your decision to engage in tomfoolery, nonetheless supplied the conditions required to allow you to stand on your head on a window ledge while balancing a bucket and mop on your feet). Insurers expect their clients to get sued, and they charge them accordingly. They also expect to wriggle out of at least 20% of their obligations on the basis that the client violated the terms of the policy. Whether it’s a health/life policy, liability, or what have you, the insurer is always going to investigate the circumstances and behavior of the policy holder to see if they can avoid paying. So you put policies in place. Turns out Burgerville doesn’t have a policy, but you’ll notice that the public statement from the company included a sentence about “looking into bike-thru lanes.” Because they know a risk when they see one.

There is also the crime issue, which is what twanged as insincere in the tweet from Sarah that I linked above. Yes, there’s probably some concern that you expose workers to assault when you allow people to get physically close to the window. I can’t imagine anyone getting up to much in a car, unless it’s an SUV and you’re willing to hang halfway out the window to get into the till. The point is that late-night service to folks has its perils.

It is neither profiling nor discrimination

Calling it profiling and/or discriminatory assumes a great deal, but the biggest assumptions are that bikers are a protected class, and that there is no policy rationale that outweighs the discriminatory effect. These are powerful words rhetorically, but the lawyer in me rankles at their use over an incident involving a bike in a drive through. Bicycle transportation is not a right. You can’t ride skateboards in the mall parking lot, and you can’t ride bikes through the drive through. You’re not on public property, so you don’t get the protection of the free association clause or anything like that. You are submitting yourself to the terms of service.

Try walking into a bank or credit union with a hat and sunglasses on. Odds are extremely good that someone will ask you to remove them. If you’re a chemo patient, or bald and vain, you’re incrementally more likely to wear a hat. Maybe you just had your pupils dilated at your eye appointment, or are light sensitive, or you’re just too cool for school. The bank’s employees do not care – they want a good look at your face, on the off chance you’re here to rob them. They are not profiling. They are not discriminating against a protected class.

My argument is that the bike in the drive through is analogous. They have a valid concern that it’s a lot easier to engage physically if you’re not in a car. They have liability concerns. Businesses can do whatever they want (within reason and statute) to deter crime. That includes actual invasions of privacy, like video surveillance, or ostentatious displays of authority, like big burly guards that follow you through a store if you look shady. You can claim that that’s profiling, but all the company’s actually guilty of is bad customer service. It’s stupid to guard against risk in a way that makes people feel suspected.

And that’s what this is about.

It’s always disappointing when a company we admire lets us down. Unfortunately, in service industries, it happens a lot. People are people. This person in particular got it wrong, and in so doing gave the impression that Burgerville as a chain was acting contrary to its values. That sucks for the customer and it sucks for Burgerville, particularly when the customer in question goes to Defcon 4.

Service is hard. Being of service is hard. I guess it just irked me that a service gaffe (not to mention immediate and thorough service recovery) has been blown this far out of proportion. Nonetheless, the place to have that fit is somewhere larger than 140 characters. Mea culpa.

I wanted the 3333rd to be something special, to whit, this. Yes, I know, it’s awesome.

No one is going to bang the drum louder for valuing content than the people who create it, but there’s a whole complex of reasons why writers don’t get paid magazine rates for blog posts, website copy, etc. Not to be too much of a Debbie Downer, but here (among other things) are the barriers I can come up with off the top of my head:

Content is free

The expectation, however unfair, is that information is free on the web. From community-based, public service models like Wikipedia (which we should applaud) to the neverending pile of nonsense from prnewswire-style services (which we should not applaud), there’s just a lot of stuff on the web. If I want to go read about something that happened, check into the blogosphere’s opinion on X, or otherwise learn about things, I can – and odds are good I will never even be asked to subscribe. Salon.com and NYT are two information services that are making an effort at a subscription model, but you have to have an incredibly potent brand to make that work. Or be a niche (I’m looking at you, Star City Games).

There have been many debates regarding the “get what you pay for” versus “guerilla marketing writ large” aspects of free content. People who, to whatever extent, are trying to build a brand that can support an ad model/tip jar/”hire me ’cause I’m smart” are firmly on the side of content being free. So why/how are you going to pay people if the enterprise is not in the black? Particularly if you’re not charging people to read the stuff?

Ad space is infinite

Magazines don’t actually make money on subscriptions either (hence the “super discount” insert card in every single magazine ever). They make money selling soap, or gadgets, or hearbreaking works of staggering genius. They want readership so they can price the ads higher, so they pretty much give the magazine away in terms of realizing a profit. In that sense, content is also (close to) free in magazines as well – at least to the extent that the sale price does not compensate the author of a given bit of content. It’s the ads.

In a magazine, ads cost a fixed amount and there are fixed number of places available to advertise. Limited real estate = much more responsive supply and demand cycle. You want Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter on a full page in People? Okey dokey – that will be a zillion dollars. On the web, ads may cost a fixed amount, but that amount is much smaller because the inventory is limitless – just slap up another page (article, blog post, camera review) et voila – ad space.

And what’s it worth? Who’s gonna see it? Is it a Person of Note writing? Will they care enough? Can you get CPM (probably not unless you’re awesome) or is there going to be some sort of conversion model? What sort of money are you getting off your RSS ads (if you’re doing that)? In short, will the advertising around a given chunk of content get you to $0.10/word or $25 total? If the answer is yes, please email me your next call for submissions.

There’s no precedent model for participatory media

This is a fancy way of saying that “blogging isn’t journalism” or “blogging isn’t academe.” There’s a “marketplace of ideas,” for sure, but we know more about the economies of entirely made up places than we do about the economics of “real world” online content. So the open question becomes: what’s it worth to you? Is a given post or series of posts worth as much or more, for example, than a “One Minute Manager” book? This is why webcomics have followed the old skool comic model of assembling chunks of strips into books – what once was free is now available in handy archive form. The sad truth for many blogs, however, is that no one’s going to buy the book about your blog unless you’re Wil Wheaton or summat. Which brings me to the next point:

“High School to NBA” happens once a year at best

Either you wrote a book and now have a companion web presence, or you became a superfamous webizen and now you get to write books and speak and whatnot. Both are extremely rare (at least at the traffic levels that I would describe as the “big leagues”). The long tail is a harsh mistress.

We will work for free

This post is an example. Over at Extreme Arts & Sciences, I get “paid” to blog only to the extent that I get paid to maintain all of the webby stuff going on. We write about stuff we care about because we care about it. It’s not really expected that we’ll find a way to riches. The syndicated routes to such riches are so gross and inauthentic and MLM-laden that I just plain cannot endorse them. At all. I’d rather write when it matters to me, pursue projects, etc.

Gosh, I sound like a Portland Creative, don’t I? Gotta stop hanging around you people…

I think it only takes a quick gander at any of the effects in King Solomon’s Mines to fully understand and participate in the notion of reviewing absurdity. They are so intolerably bad that even if I had seen the movie as a kid I would have walked out pissed. Three years before a boy flew through the air with an alien in the basket of his bike. The least you could do is film the green screen effectively. And before you say that the effects are part of the overall camp: No. Camp has a script. Camp has, dare I say it, a plan in mind. This is just plain awful.

The chasm between the fireworks of expectation and the bitter truth of budgets, and story, and talent are what intrigue me. Just to throw some cross-cultural comparisons into the mix, the Danes are still on top in terms of overall happiness. Probably other factors are in play, but consistently psychologists have stated that the core of the Danish contentedness is that they just didn’t expect much in the first place. I worry about rising expectations all the time, and so must (one presumes) companies like Pixar, who to date have never failed to meet expectations, no matter how ridiculous.

But to openly flaunt badness, that’s just insane. It’s worse: it’s stupid. Surely someone realized what an utter stinkpile this film was? Because if they didn’t there’s no hope for humanity. The capacity to filter was utterly lacking. From the standpoint of aesthetics, it wasn’t the first time. Nor will it be the last…

That’s all. Not trying to be gloomy, just had to say. Bad. Movie.
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Now playing: Orbital – Forever
via FoxyTunes

I’ll have more to say when I can, you know, use my computer again.

The problem (and this is the enduring problem for young lawyers) is that while I am good at some things, I’m not battle-hardened in any specific and expensive way. I’m a newbie. I’m hecka talented, but that’s not enough to make me a good attorney for any schmoe who walks through the door. There are people I might be a good attorney for, but they live and work on the frontier. There is no stable law; the wind changes and all your little bits of paper fly up into the air. The big advances in thought are made by academics, who have both the time and the energy to try to frame the discourse about “how things oughta be.”

So naturally, as I was talking myself out of the notion of going solo this past week, I’ve had two very specific conversations about legal work. Paying legal work. Not “wahoo I can buy a vacation home” paying, but paying nonetheless. Enough to cover the costs of actively practicing law in 2009 (for me, these are fairly small – pretty much Quickbooks and bar dues). And more importantly, the jobs would simultaneously benefit the frontier population, the dreamers and creators and people with big ideas. My tribe.

So with due solemnity I am posting the question to the universe. If you’ve read this far you’re either a buddy or extremely bored. Either way, pony up some advice – how do I resolve the question of what to do?

It is so disgustingly easy to create collaborative workplace stuff that I’m a little put out. It makes almost no sense to jump up and down about firm management practices when you can monkeywrench around a bit and have the full suite of required tools in an afternoon (give or take an #afterhours, but really essentially instantly). So one of my favorite topics is now old, old, news.

Ah well. Gonna go create a conflicts search mode.

The format follows the name of the coffee shop – 3 readers/performers. We’re each going to have (roughly) 15-17 minutes of stage time. The theme is found poetics within boilerplate or legislative gobbledygook – so the idea is not merely to read the worst legal document you’ve ever had the pleasure of receiving (although that would be fine), but to mash up, surrealize further, or otherwise play with legal language in a fashion that begs to be spoken aloud.

I’d like to see two folks with musical or other talents, so that we don’t have a full hour of reading. Even at the best of times, that can be trying. And of course, if your shtick is not exactly what I’m describing (how could it be) but you feel that there are synergies, also feel free to leave a comment or @ me on Twitter or email me or whatever. Myself, I’m going to be working on an epic poem of sorts to read for my piece.

It would be good to see friends and tweeps take some open mic time as well, themed or no…