IKEA Monkey

We’re always hearing complaints about robotic customer service reps who refuse to deviate from a script — this is especially true in chat support, where CSRs sometimes have an entire library of go-to cut-and-paste replies at the ready. So it’s refreshing when we come across a story about a CSR who is willing to shake things up by using a bit of humor while also doing his job.

Over on Reddit, someone has posted the transcript of a chat between a Netflix customer and a rep named Michael, or as he refers to himself “Captain Mike of the good ship Netflix.”

What makes the conversation even more refreshing is that the customer plays along, referring to himself as Lt. Norman. You can read the whole thing below, but here is one choice exchange from the conversation, which involved a Parks and Recreation episode that was getting stuck and repeating the same few seconds (video evidence from yet another Netflix customer):

Customer: at 5 minutes of operation… the visual creates a temporal loop, and nearly 3 seconds of footage repeats over and over again. Our ship seems to be immune to the effect, as our lives are not actually repeating over and over.

Cap’n Mike: Oh, no LT I told you no watching Netflix while we sail through the [Bermuda] Triangle.

Customer: Dammit, I’m an engineer, not a navigator

In the Reddit comments, a user claiming to be Lt. Norman says he truly enjoyed the chat and that “even more interaction would have been awesomer. I think he didn’t expect me to take him up on the ‘invitation’ to be silly.”

And that’s exactly what makes this case such a pleasant change of pace — the CSR kept things light from the very beginning, but didn’t do anything to push the customer away or get him offline as quickly as possible, even though there was not much Mike could have done beyond reporting it to the tech team to investigate.

Sadly, a number of people in the Reddit comments express the sentiment that most companies would fire or at least reprimand a CSR who tried to bring a bit of levity to the proceedings.

There are obviously situations where joking around might be a big risk — most people contacting an insurance companies would probably not no what to make of being greeted in this way. But companies make the mistake of confusing “businesslike” and “scripted.”

Customer service work should be a true craft, in which the best CSRs are constantly adjusting their responses to the individual customer’s personality and the needs of each case. If CSRs are not allow to occasionally demonstrate they are human, how can they all be expected to treat customers like human beings?

Here’s the full version of the Netflix transcript:

Lost in the debate about having it all, wanting it real bad, reaching for the brass ring and living a life mired in the anxiety of striver-driven perfection that comes with it are all the women who just don't give a fuck. True, we are not that loud and not that pissed. Sure, we care about stuff, but only up to a point one might describe as a low simmer of concern that never quite bubbles over.

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A New Jersey judge has rejected the state's appeal to halt a previous ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, meaning that gay couples will be able to wed as early as October 21.

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No relationship is entirely devoid of secrets; I once went out with a guy for 6 months without him knowing where I lived (I forget why I did this; I was 24 and now that I think of it, the whole thing may have been an experiment? I don't know). But whoever said all's fair in love and war has obviously never attempted to establish a relationship with a person who told a Big, Weird Lie to garner sympathy, loyalty, or some undetermined similar perk. We want to hear all about the time it happened to you.

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Bang Bang Pie Shop is hosting an apple pie baking contest later this month for anyone wanting to show off their apple pie baking chops. [ more › ]

The kratom tree, perhaps the answer to Thailand's meth epidemic. (Photo via)

You know what khat is, right? Well kratom is like that: a mild, leaf-shaped stimulant that gives you a barely noticeable buzz if you chew it for long enough. Both stimulants have also attracted the ire of politicians—while Home Secretary Theresa May has promised to ban khat from Britain soon, kratom has been outlawed in Thailand for the past 70 years. But recently the Thai Minister for Justice, Pradit Sintavanarong, announced that he wants the kratom leaf removed from the country's illicit drugs list. He claims it could help wean addicts off harder stimulants, like methamphetamine.

Meth has been a big deal in Thailand for the last decade or so. It's most commonly taken in a concoction known as yaba—a blend of meth and caffeine which comes in pill form that the Nazis invented to keep their soldiers marching for days. Today, the authorities estimate that nearly one in every 60 Thai citizens is a methamphetamine user. Last year, shocking new reports claimed that nearly 7,000 children—kids aged from as young as seven up to 17—had been rehabilitated for meth use within the first half of 2012 alone, while this year it emerged that yaba producers are trying to sell the drug to kids over Facebook. So now might not be a bad time to consider some new ways to tackle all that.

However, not everyone is going to support the legalization of kratom. While generally its ban has been vigourously enforced, over the past few years Thai youths have found a new way to get fucked on kratom. They've started getting turned up on something they call 4x100—a cocktail of kratom, cola, and cough syrup that is like a Thai version of sizzurp. Since then, police interest in the plant has increased, with authorities setting up sting operations in a bid to catch traffickers and raiding jungles for the plant.

Of course, where there's a drug epidemic, there's a moralizing media ready to expound on the various ways in which it's aiding the death of civil society. And that's exactly what the Thai media did.

The country's humid south is the perfect environment for the kratom plant to flourish. Unfortunately, it has also been plagued by a violent Islamist insurgency for over a decade, and local newspapers began trying to find ways to link these two things together. Some media outlets have declared that the insurgency was being funded by kratom trafficking. Militants were downing mugs of 4x100 before shooting Buddhist monks and bombing coffee shops in a bid to turn southern Thailand into the world's newest Islamic state, like Indochinese berserkers.

A meth-pipe. (Photo via)

Pascal Tanguay, a representative for the NGO Harm Reduction International, told me that the possibility of insurgents getting all riled up on 4x100 before murdering people was unlikely. "The media here has done a very good job of associating kratom with these insurgencies, but there isn’t any real evidence of it happening," he said. "The people I talked to in the south—both religious leaders and drug users—all said the same thing: If you want to be an insurgent, you have to be off drugs. They have a very strict recruitment policy and they never allow people in who are on drugs, because they feel that it distracts them from the ultimate goal: Their revolution."

Although the reports are likely to be fabricated, the idea of making the illegal element of this supposed jihad juice available over the counter isn't likely to go down well with everyone. But trusting their media implicitly is far more likely to cause them more day-to-day damage than any AK-wielding, lean-sipping Islamist camped out somewhere in the Narathiwat jungles.

Pascal explained how the media's demonization of kratom has allowed police to encroach on Thai citizens' privacy: "The police like associating kratom with terror because then they can use anti-terror legislation to search people," he told me. "I've heard of them acquiring a warrant to search a house just because there's a kratom tree in the garden."

In fact, Pascal claims, the leaf can actually have its own specific health benefits: "It is very useful for controlling diabetes," he told me. "I met a lot of people in the south who had diabetes and weren't using any insulin. They were regulating their sugar and insulin purely with kratom leaves and kratom tea."

The exact benefits of kratom have been hard to gauge as the leaves that researchers are able to get hold of have usually dried out and lost any of the alkaloids necessary for experimentation. Pascal told me, "I met a PhD student in the south who said that he can’t finish his thesis, because in order to do so he would have to become a criminal to get hold of kratom leaves. The ones he gets to use just aren’t good enough. The government doesn’t give a shit about it at the moment and just puts money in the hands of criminal gangs by banning it. Hopefully that will change soon."
   
The leaf was originally banned to keep drug money in the hands of the government. "Kratom was only banned in Thailand because, at the time, the government was still involved in the opium trade and it was a big source of income," Pascal explained. "They didn’t want addicts using kratom to get off opium, so they banned it to protect their revenue."  

Baggies of dried kratom leaf – the form the plant comes in when bought in the West. (Photo via)

Though the leaf has history as an effective rehabilitation aid, proving the positive qualities of illegal drugs hasn't always been a surefire way of convincing ministers to decriminalize them. It appears Sintavanarong may currently be running up against the same kind of problems that western scientists touting the useful medicinal qualities of drugs like ecstasy and LSD have encountered. At the time of writing, the justice minister is still waiting to hear from the narcotics control committee on whether they will remove kratom from the restricted drugs list.  

There were efforts to decriminalize the drug in both 2004 and 2009, but according to Boonchai Somboonsuk—the Thai FDA chief—those cases are now void in light of the many changes and developments since 2009. And by "changes and developments," I assume he meant an increase in the meth consumption already ravaging a great deal of the Thai population, all of whom are in desperate need of something to help combat their addictions.

The United States's news headlines recently mentioned both meth and kratom, and scientists looking into opiate withdrawal drugs have been testing the leaf's use as a cheaper, natural alternative to more expensive synthetic medication like methadone. Unfortunately for those scientists—and any heroin addicts who don't want to be heroin addicts any more—kratom has already been called "America's next big drug scare" and plenty of media sources and legislators are fretting about it, putting it in danger of being criminalized and cutting off access to scientists currently studying the promising rehabilitation aid. In fact, the substance has been on the DEA's watchlist since 2004, it's already banned for minors in Louisiana and concerns are being raised by lawmakers in a number of other states.

Grant Smith, from the US Drug Policy Alliance told me, "The tendency of the government when a new drug comes out is just to ban it. They already banned 26 different compounds of synthetic drugs [legal highs] last year. That just lumps the responsibility on law enforcement and doesn’t help." Continuing, he said, “Drugs have always been a tender subject in the States. People panic about what they don’t understand, especially with something foreign, like kratom, coming from Asia. We would like to see things like this properly regulated by the government so producers can prove that they’re not harmful to people, but—at the moment—the DEA are just left to deal with it and they're already overstretched."

So while kratom may be saved by a progressive approach in Thailand, the War on Drugs might prevent research to help tackle meth addiction in the US. The key in both countries is to approach the potential for kratom as a rehabilitative drug with a degree of rational thought—ignoring the claims that it's making Islamists go nuts in Thai jungles—to help find a way to cure the meth epidemic blighting the two countries. Unfortunately, if the past is anything to go by, legislators' approach to drugs are normally anything but rational.    

Follow Jack on Twitter: @JBazzler

Read more about drugs:

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There’s guerrilla filmmaking, and then there’s Escape From Tomorrow, an apocalyptic DIY comedy shot without permission at the “happiest place on Earth.” First-time director Randy Moore smuggled cast, crew, and cameras into Disneyland and Disney World, emerging with an instant cult item about a schlubby everydude losing his mind on the last day of family vacation. At Sundance, the film was greeted as an unmissable event, in no small part because many assumed it would quickly disappear off the face of the planet, a victim of swift Mouse House litigation. Perhaps aware that all press is good press for a micro-budget indie with no-name actors, Disney has apparently opted instead to feign ignorance. As watching it no longer feels like getting away with something, the film can now be judged on its own modest merits—not as some ephemeral act of subversion, but as a sporadically amusing farce ...

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Stand-up comedians have long joked that some things, like the actual components of chicken nuggets, are better left mysterious.

Al Libi's wife watched men capture her husband and says allegations against him are false, reports CNNs Jomana Karadsheh.

Get into the Halloween spirit every morning with Skull Pancake Molds. Each set includes three different skulls — one side-view and two skulls with big eyes to fill with butter and syrup. Criss-cross some bacon and you’ll have a yummy skull and crossbones for breakfast.

[via Laughing Squid]

Hot Pockets made the daring move of pairing Snoop Dogg with Kate Upton in a video to promote their product because… well, because the people at Hot Pockets understand how the Internet works. This thing will have a million views by the end of the week, and not because of Snoop, or Bow Wow (he’s also in it), or the trippy animations (how high are those sheep?), or the spaceship powered by a single mixer beater, or the catchy parody of Biz Markie’s iconic “Just a Friend.”

Nope. Despite there being more absurd stuff in this video than can possibly be listed — and her not doing much of anything — Kate Upton is the headliner here, as is always the case in 2013. As long as she’s in it, nothing else in this video has to make a lick of sense (and it certainly doesn’t).

Plus, she got to hang out with the Ginger Prince himself, Harry!

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By Boar’s Head CEO Robert Martin

“Hmmm…I think it’s very interesting,” said one baby. “Oh you do not,” said another. (Via Gothamist.)

[Photograph: Masano Kawana]

Most of the dishes in Katie Chin's new cookbook, Everyday Thai Cooking, aren't terribly spicy. They have hints of heat running in the background, but most of them are geared towards the (relatively) puny American spice palate. Not so with her Crying Tiger Lamb, named for its ability to make even a tiger weep. This dish has no such restraint—it's not only fiery, but it's also got a strong hand with salty fish sauce, sour lime juice, and grassy cilantro. In other words: it is seriously awesome, and a true gift to lamb lovers.

Why I picked this recipe: It was hard to resist a dish with such an evocative name.

What worked: Everything here was spot on—the copious cilantro kept the richness of the lamb in check, and the super salty, spicy sauce perfectly complemented the gaminess of the meat. I could eat this every day.

What didn't: No problems at all.

Suggested tweaks: If you don't have a grill (or you've packed it away already), you can easily sear the lamb in a cast iron skillet on the stove. Just be sure to turn on your hood—the sugar in the marinade creates a lot of smoke! Traditionally, this dish is made with beef, so if you're not into lamb, you could make the same dish with ribeye or flank.

As always with our Cook the Book feature, we have five (5) copies of Everyday Thai Cooking to give away this week.

About the author: Kate Williams is a freelance writer and personal chef living in Berkeley, CA. She is a contributor to The Oxford American, KQED's Bay Area Bites, and Berkeleyside NOSH. Follow her @KateHWiliams.

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The communion wafer topping the burger and the symbology of that and the red wine reduction as the body and blood of Christ have some people upset that Kuma’s is being sacrilegious, as if serving someone 10 ounces of ground beef isn’t sinful enough. [ more › ]

Until this moment, eating in the car has been a complete and total disaster: Where do you put the food? Why is there no table? How is a reasonable person supposed to feel confident operating heavy machinery and munching without solutions to these problems?!? Luckily, KFC has found a way to quiet the masses clamoring to be free of all fetters whilst dining en vehicle: Snack containers that fit in your cup holder.

I know, your mind is totally and completely blown. KFC was expecting this, because heretofore the only things in cup holders were not pieces of chicken you could eat — more like change, your phone, a handful of pistachios you meant to eat later and then forgot about.

But now there’s a solution, and it seems KFC is expecting a food revolution. According to KFC’s infographic (via FoodBeast): 42% of Americans would be more likely to eat in their cars if the food container could fit in their cup holder. And what’s more, KFC knows who is probably doing the eating — for millennials ages 18-32, that could be 53% of people, if they had such a miraculous device in place.

Go Cups will come with one of five choices, paired with seasoned potato wedges for $2.49: Original Recipe Boneless chicken, a Chicken Little sandwich, two Extra Crispy Tenders, three Hot Wings or four Original Recipe Bites.

Everything is going to change. EVERYTHING. Either that, or you’ll keep eating fast food out of the bag it came in and wiping your hands on your pants. Whatever.

Yankee Candle is already over Halloween and is plugging a new Thanksgiving Dinner line which includes Cranberry Sauce, Sweet Potato Pie, and *drum(stick) roll* Turkey and Stuffing. You can dress them up like a pilgrim or a turkey pilgrim. I love turkey, stuffing, and candles so I went in for a whiff.

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The talented artist Doro dreamt up swaps for characters from Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin, Pocahontas, The Little Mermaid, and more. The princesses are quite dashing in their new roles. Plus, how much do we love the male Maleficent? The correct answer is as much as we love all versions of Maleficent. (Which is to say, very, very much.)

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We’re constantly being told that we are a jaded and cynical people who are unwilling to believe anything at face value and read signs of predatory marketing attempts in even the most innocent of gestures. But leave it to social media and one of the world’s largest fast food chains to show that some folks will be taken in by even the most blatant marketing gimmick.

In case you hadn’t heard, Burger King — a global, multibillion-dollar foodservice operation with nearly 60 years of history and a brand recognized by just about anyone — claimed on Wednesday that it was changing its name to “Fries King,” and even posted photo evidence of a one restaurant that had supposedly been updated, complete with new cups, a new sign, T-shirts and all the other things you might need to revise as the result of a name change.

It’s obviously a marketing stunt to promote a new french fry-ish product and is certainly not meant to be taken seriously. Name changes are not the kind of things that popular brands do on a whim, especially not when there are thousands of locations, almost all of them owned by franchisees who would want to have a say in whether the BK they have operated for years is suddenly an “FK.”

Speaking of which, just ponder for a moment all the potential jokes that could be made if the company did change its initials to FK.

And yet, in spite of this all, the Burger King Facebook page is chockablock with what appear to be actual complaints about the name change. Here is just a sampling…

I’m not so secretly hoping that these comments were actually planted by Burger King employees with the goal of getting a cynical jerk like me to write about their silly marketing ploy. It would mean I’ve been played for a sucker, but it would also restore a little bit of my faith in humankind.

In the new comedy A.C.O.D., uptight restaurateur Adam Scott is forced to foster an uneasy peace between his divorced parents, who despise each other so deeply that neither is willing to attend a wedding to which the other is invited. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Scott suffered through a nearly identical dilemma on a year-old episode of the NBC sitcom Parks And Recreation. Coincidental as the plot overlap may be, it underlines how perfectly equipped the actor is to play the beleaguered product of a broken marriage. (The movie’s title is an acronym for Adult Children Of Divorce, a vast group that includes this reviewer.) Like Parks paramour Ben Wyatt, the hero here only looks put-together; in his lifelong attempts to stay above the fray—and to be totally unlike his bickering folks—he’s learned to mask his deep anxieties with a veneer ...

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Here’s what’s up in the world of TV for Wednesday, October 2. All times are Eastern.

TOP PICK
Top Chef (Bravo, 10 p.m.): It’s rare that we can get you guys interested in coverage of reality shows, but here’s one of the few you seem to still like reading about. This season, Padma and company pack up the van to head to New Orleans—just like those wacky witches of American Horror Story, who will begin battling with these top chefs starting next week!—and in the first episode, the contestants are forced to make a terrifying choice: Should they cook with frog, turtle, or alligator? Sonia Saraiya, who lost her eye in an alligator-wrestling accident in 1917, insists they pick the gator, the gator!

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REGULAR COVERAGE
Arrow (The CW, 8 p.m.): All summer long, Alasdair Wilkins has feverishly anticipated the return of Arrow ...

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Pope Francis, using strong language to condemn a “Vatican-centric view” of the Roman Catholic Church, says that church leaders have too often been narcissists, “flattered and sickeningly excited by their courtiers.

In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Mia Farrow not-so-subtly admits her son Ronan‘s real father is Frank Sinatra and not Woody Allen who I like to imagine took the news well. “So, technically that would make him adopted, right? And he always had those blue eyes… Soon-Yi, pack your bags. You’re old news. *picks up phone* Hello, Ronan? It’s Woody. We should reconcile. Do you like Italian?”

Photos: Getty

The 2010 whooping cough outbreak in California — the worst in 50 years — may have been fueled, at least in part, by clusters of parents who refused to vaccinate their children, a new study suggests.

When you start a new job, it may be tempting to compare how things are done at your new gig to your old one, and if you think it will make life easier, by all means do so. However, constantly comparing your new job to your old one won't do you any favors, and may turn your new colleagues against you.

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Cher was divorced from Sonny Bono way back in 1975, and he passed away in 1998. But the singer and actress says she still feels like she's being punked by her ex-husband.In an "Ask Me Anything" session on Reddit.com, Cher was asked if she was afraid of ghosts. "I love ghosts," the singer posted.

Planes aren't the only things taking off at Chicago's O'Hare airport: Down at the end of a runway, a new bee farm is soaring. Big-name stores are slurping up all the honey it can produce. Even celebrity chef Rick Bayless now features the nectar in some of his restaurants.

The Salton Sea, California's largest lake by volume, exists entirely by accident. 

It was created in the early 1900s after a heavy rain caused the Colorado River to burst through the banks of an irrigation canal, sending millions of gallons of water into a previously dried out lake bed in the California desert. 

A screenshot from an early Salton Sea promotional film (via)

Initially, the new, giant, inland sea was a blessing. 

In the 50s and 60s, it was a booming tourist attraction. Marketed as a "miracle in the desert," it became Palm Springs but with beaches. It would regularly attract over half a million visitors annually.

Yacht clubs sprang up on the shores, people flocked to fish and waterski, and stars like the Beach Boys and Sonny Bono would visit to drive speedboats and swim. 

Property was so in demand that real estate agents would fly people up in light aircraft and sell them property from the air without ever landing to view it. 

But it wouldn't last. 

The sea quickly became something of an ecological nightmare soup. The Salton Sea is surrounded by nearly half a million acres of agricultural land, and water from this land runs off into the sea, taking with it salt and fertilizers and pesticides. By the 70s, the water was becoming too hostile to sustain much of any kind of life, and the shoreline became littered with thousands and thousands of dead fish. 

The dead fish, combined with rotting algal blooms, made the water smell so bad that nobody wanted to go anywhere near it.

The Beach Boys left. Sonny Bono left. Everyone else left, and the Salton Sea fell into misery. 

I visited the Salton Sea last weekend to take a look at its current state. 

If you were just driving past on Highway 111, you could be forgiven for thinking it's still a nice place. The weather is pleasant, the beaches are white, and flocks of birds glide along the blue surface of the water. 

But, unfortunately, the Salton Sea is "a total Monet." As you climb out of your car and get close, it becomes a big old mess. 

The water is a murky brown—it only appears blue because it reflects the desert sky. The white beaches, it turns out, are white because they're made up of the pulverized bones of millions of dead fish. The birds probably aren't doing too well, either. Avian botulism is a persistent problem in the Salton Sea, killing off thousands of birds each year. 

And then the smell hits you. Holy fuck, the smell. It's like a fish market at the end of a long summer day. Only instead of keeping the fish on ice, this fish market keeps them on piles of diarrhea. 

The half of the town located on the dry side of the dike is doing slightly better. But "better," in this case, doesn't really amount to much.

It's still definitely the most apocalypse-y place I've ever seen in real life. 

Of the town that hasn't sunk into the ground, about a third of it is abandoned. 

It seems like people left in a hurry. Most of the abandoned houses still have the previous owner's possessions in them. 

Judging by the packaging on the food that's still in the cupboards, people bailed circa the early 90s. 

Given its proximity to Los Angeles and its aesthetically pleasant levels of urban decay, it should come as no surprise that urban explorers, Flickr users, and documentary makers have been flocking to Bombay Beach to take pictures of it. 

I stopped for lunch in the Ski Inn, the town's only bar, where I had a grilled cheese, fries, and salad. The grilled cheese tasted exactly like the fries, which tasted exactly like the salad. Literally every dish on my plate tasted exactly like accidentally swallowing bath water. 

As I was eating, some young documentary makers were filming the locals. "Do you mind if I get a shot of you smoking outside?" one of them asked a weather-beaten old local man. "The light is just really great out here."

Grief-documenters are so commonplace in Bombay Beach that, when I bought a bottle of water from the shop down the street, the owner, immediately recognizing me as an outsider, asked, "are you here making a documentary?"

Inexplicably, there are two stores in Bombay Beach. They both sell a pretty much identical range of things—groceries, house supplies, etc.—and are located just a few hundred feet apart. In a town with a population of under 300, I can't imagine either of them are doing too well. 

Directly opposite Bombay Beach, 50 miles by road on the west coast of the Salton Sea is the town of Salton City. It seems to be doing a bit better than Bombay Beach. There are some houses there that I would go as far as describing as "nice."

But, again, "better" doesn't really mean much out here. No matter how nice a house is here, it's still a nice house sitting on a beach made of death. 

Depressingly, things seem likely to only get worse for the Salton Sea. 

In March of last year, the California Supreme Court voted to uphold a 2003 water transfer deal in the area.

The deal, intended to reduce dependence on the Colorado River as a source of water, will take millions of gallons of water from the sea and give it to the suburbs.

Which might not sound like a terrible tragedy, given that the sea is maybe the bleakest body of water in the entire country. But taking away the water would expose the lake bed. Which, obviously, is covered in some pretty horrible stuff. According to the BBC, if the sea dries out (which seems pretty likely) it will unleash "clouds of toxic dust across Southern California." Taking a little bit of the Salton Sea to some four million people. 

So that's something to look forward to.

@JLCT

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