No, really, I want to pay you more money...!

Riddle me this, world…and once you’ve riddled me the answer I need you to let me know if I’m way off base in my thinking.  And then, yes, I will turn this into a cycling post, but I just need to get something off my chest about something that happened last week.

My wife and I love Thai food.  And when I say we love Thai food, I mean it.  In fact if Hammer made Thai flavored products, specifically Panang Curry, I’d own cases.  But I digress – it’s not time to get to the cycling aspect of this post yet.  This is (right now) a post about a recent example regarding our favorite Thai restaurant and the deteriorating levels of service I think is becoming more prevalent in our society…

Bangkok Cuisine makes, literally, the best Panang Curry my wife and I have ever had.  Thai Ginger in Redmond Town Center is a close second, but we still love the one here the most.  A few weeks ago we bought a coupon book thru a fundraiser from our kid’s school.  To our surprise there were a few coupons in there from Bangkok Cuisine – score!  Each one was a buy one, get one half-off IF you buy two drinks. 

Now, here’s where things started to go south…we don’t typically drink soda, much lemonade, etc..  (As an aside, I used to drink 3 – 4 cans a day (my employer provides free soda –  yeah, that was when I started having to buy a whole new wardrobe to fit my ever-expanding waistline) but now we don’t.)   Not to mention the sodas are ridiculously priced - $2/drink.  So we had a brilliant idea – why don’t we purchase an appetizer instead of the two drinks.  Keep in mind that the appetizer costs $9, so we’d be paying $5 more for the switch. 

So here’s what we proposed to our server.  Let’s buy two Panang Currys and an appertizer, Crispy Golden Coconut Shrimp.  We lost her at the statement “we don’t want to purchase the drinks…”.  In an extremely abbreviated version of the conversation, here’s how it went:

Us “We’d like to buy an appetizer instead of the drinks”
Her “But you have to buy the drinks”
Us “We really don’t want to.  We’d rather pay you $5 more instead of buying the drinks”
Her “But you have to buy the drinks"

Us “No, really, we don’t want to.  We’d REALLY rather just pay you $5 more instead of buying the drinks that we won’t drink.”

Her (deep sigh of exasperation) “But you have to buy the drinks”

Us “So you don’t want our extra $5?”
Her “You have to buy the drinks”

It was at this point we asked to talk to the manager, thinking that he’d be empowered to make a decision that was really a very logical one.  Guess again…I won’t bore you with the details, but he went on to explain that he couldn’t do that because the kitchen staff would be confused, all the other customers would begin to take advantage of the situation and then he’d get in trouble.  But, and here was where I thought we’d be good, he said he’d take care of it for us, as a ONE TIME exception.  So we placed our order – two Panag Curries and one order of Crispy Golden Coconut Shrimp.  We thought it was all done.

As he was walking away we laughed quietly to ourselves about the absurdity of the situation, how it seemed to be such a big deal, etc..  Now, having taken Econ 110 3 different times at BYU, I understand that there’s probably a cost/margin play going on here, but can it really be more than the $5 we were trying to pay him for the appetizer?  Didn’t think so and so we waited for our food.

Ten minutes later the manager came back and said that he’d called the owner and that he wouldn’t be able to support our request and that we’d have to order the drinks – so we canceled the appetizer, ordered the drinks, and then left them untouched on our table in our own version of Occupy Bangkok Cuisine. 

Honestly, were we wrong in our thinking?  Was that an unreasonable request?  All I wanted to do was pay them $5 more and not have to order drinks...let me know in the comment section.

So all that leads to this – I love to shop in places that take care of their customers.  And my local bike shop, Sierra Cyclesmith, knows how to provide service.  Even before I joined the Kryki Sports/Audi cycling team (more on that in a different post), which is lucky enough to call Sierra Cyclesmith their team shop of choice, I was hooked on Sierra Cyclesmith.  Obviously Living in the Reno/Lake Tahoe area provides the local citizenry a virtually unlimited number of opportunities to bike and so there are, predictably, a large number of bike shops to serve the needs of our cycling population.  Honestly, some are bigger, some may have better locations, look nicer, but none of that really matters (it's just more overhead), because none, in my experience, serve me better than Leon and his staff at Sierra Cyclesmith.  I won’t shop anywhere else.

I love the attentiveness of the staff, the willingness to spend time teaching and guiding and informing folks on all the different aspects of cycling.  About 5 years ago, when I was thinking about buying my first road bike, I spent close to two hours in the shop talking with one of the employees about road bikes – not only did he show me different bikes, he walked me thru the different styles, levels of quality, let me ride some around the parking lot, and in general, did all that I asked of him.  And not once did I hear or see a deep sigh of exasperation.  I felt valued, plain and simple.

Leon – you’ve got a customer for life (or at least as long as I live in Reno…J).  Here’s a big thanks to you and your staff for taking care of Reno’s cycling community.  Bangkok Cuisine?  You’ve lost us.  We’ll find a different restaurant now.

It's really not her fault!

Hello, hello, is this thing on?  Um...Hello World.  Yeah, that phrase is a bit tired, and maybe even tainted by the guy who first made it famous in Sept. 1996.  Yeah I'm talking about Eldrick "Tiger" Woods, but still, as a first post documenting me, my weight loss, and my on again/off again love affair with cycling, I felt it appropriate to use - just don't associate me with the guy that got beat up by his golf-club swinging wife.  So, again I say, Hello World...!

So who am I?  I'm a father to some very active young boys and a husband to a very supportive wife.  Of course, the supportive wife is also partly the reason why I'm a clydesdale.  I say partly because I am really the only one to blame, especially since last night I was sitting on my tush watching a snoozer of a BCS championship game and had just eaten a BIG bowl of homemade clam chowder (the best I've ever had, hands down).  So, in no way am I blaming her (that's my marital protection disclaimer).  I love you, B, and your cooking too...

I'm also a busy professional in the technology industry with a job that often requires me to work long hours, holidays, and, in general, leaves me tired at the end of the day.  I love my job and the company I work for, however, it doesn't leave much time for cycling.  Nor does the family life.  Nor do my other extra-curricular activities.  At least up to this point they haven't!

So that's all going to change.  I sat down with myself over the past few months and had a long conversation with myself.  Of course I had to keep getting up to go work, or go to bed, or to eat, drink, and be merry, but what I determined from this long and often interrupted conversation with myself was the following:

1. I like to eat

2. I like to road bike

3. I like to be with my family

4. I like to mt. bike

5. I like read

6. I like bike

I know - many of us like the same things.  My problem, however, is that the actual order of the list looks more like this:

1. I like to spend time with my family

2. I like to eat

3. I like to read

4. I like to bike - Road or Mountain

Oh, and I can't forget sleeping.  My wife likes to joke that I can't stay awake past 9pm.  Of course, that's not entirely true b/c we watch a lot of movies that go way past 9pm, I just don't remember parts of the middle of those movies.

But staying up late and having to get up early don't really work for me all the time, despite that fact that for 6 years (from age 10 to age 16) I had an early morning paper route that required me to get up at 4:30am every day, regardless of rain, snow, or lack of sunshine...it used to work really well for me, back in college, but now, not so much.

So, back to the things I determined about myself - liking to spend time with my family and reading take up a lot of my cycling time.  Eating, combined with a lack of exercise, leads to an increase in the poundage hanging on my previously svelte frame.  Now, don't get me wrong - I still find time to cycle.  I just don't do it consistently which in reality doesn't do me much good, just like a dieter who diets twice a week won't really lose the fat they're trying to dump.

But, it just hit me - you, my few interested readers, may not know what a clydesdale is.  By now you may have read my blog theme and gained a bit of an understanding of what a clydesdale is.  This is a clydesdale

Yep, that's an actual clydesdale.  But the definition of a clydesdale in cycling is a bit different, but not to far off from that horse up above.  A cyldesdale in cycling is defined by his weight - over 200 lbs and stuffed into spandex, like this guy (note the belly poking thru in between his bibs and shirt, ewww...)

but definitely not this guy (Tour de France racer Michael Rasmussen - I find it scary that he appears to be in a hospital room)

But I digress.  Now that you know what a clydesdale is, you need to know that I am determined to not be a clydesdale anymore.  I used to be consistently 170lbs - for my 6'1 that was pretty skinny (photos to come later in my next post) - and I want to be there again, maybe not 170 but at least weigh less than 200.  I want to use this blog to document my determined movement away from clydesdale status as well as my re-dedication to cycling and my new experiences with racing.  As I get more and more familiar with blogging I'll be in putting a tracker on the side that tracks my weight loss.  For now, however, I will just state that I'm 228 and up 3 lbs from the beginning of the year...wrong way, Dave, wrong way...and I can't blame my wife, so it must be genetics!