When I had to start creating slideshows — an often necessary evil of online content —I tried to make them as engaging and pretty as possible. This one — my first — remains my favorite.
Read more at Bundle
When I had to start creating slideshows — an often necessary evil of online content —I tried to make them as engaging and pretty as possible. This one — my first — remains my favorite.
Read more at Bundle
“The debt occurred over several years, and includes a few periods when I was living off the cards because I was in between jobs. Perhaps $1,000 of the debt was spent on plane tickets to visit my parents on the East Coast, my job on the East Coast, or my friends on the East Coast. But mostly there are just lots of small purchases — a pattern of living beyond my means.”
Read more at Get Rich Slowly
“I avoid watching television commercials at all costs. I fast forward through them, mute them, read Twitter updates during them. Because if I am channel surfing and come across an infomercial, I stop.”
Read more at CNN Money
I did a series of Q&As for The Awl. People I talked to included a corporate comedian, a mass-media renaissance man, a commercial children’s book writer, a gossipmonger, a successful Yukon-based magazine publisher, an internet celebrity, and a US foreign service officer in Libya.
Read them all at The Awl
“You did what you could during the Virginia summer days to either sit by a pool or on a beach or avoid being outside altogether, and at night you reclined on the porch or in the yard and let whatever small breezes the night could strum up wash over you, cooling your sweat.”
Read more at at The Awl
THE EASY ONES
The easy ones are a favorite of the flower shop girl, for obvious reasons: they are easy. They accept and acknowledge that the flower girl will create something much more beautiful than they will, and that the flower girl is best left alone to do this. They know what they want to spend, and sometimes they have a color or a single flower they want to incorporate. They relay this information simply and quickly and then leave the flower girl to her own devices. Leave is the opporative word here. They go away. They get a coffee, they do some shopping; they do not hover. For their ease and simplicity, they are often rewarded with an extra bloom or two. When they pick up their arrangements, they are vocally impressed. Sometimes they offer extra monetary thanks, though this is not required.
THE ONES THAT ASK FOR FILLER
The ones that ask for filler can overlap with most any other type of flower shop customer. They get their name from the fact that: they ask for filler. Or: greens. Oftentimes they put a bouquet on the flower shop desk and, offhand, request, whatever filler you can give me. Or: whatever greens you can spare. The flower girl’s mind always jumps to images of bowls of collards, but focus: this is not what they mean. All flowers - leaves, blooms, grasses - are sold by the stem. The flower girl would be happy to add some laurel leaves or branches of eucalyptus to your lovely bouquet. That will be $1.50. Well nevermind then, is the most common response.
THE DAISY ONES
The daisy ones so earn their name for their love of: daisies. Gerbera daisies, gerbers, or gerbs to be precise. Now there’s nothing wrong with the gerbera daisy; they can be quite cute. The tiny white ones are especially darling, so much so that people often “want to eat them.” (Note: do not eat them.) Ask a child to draw a flower, and he will draw a gerbera daisy: a circular center with a single layer of uniform petals surrouding it. To be honest with you: gerbera daisies are boring, snooze. Why use gerbera daisies when you could use: frittelaria, stock, columbine, peonies, delphinium, et cetera. There are so many beautiful, interesting flowers; the gerbera daisy is not one of them.
The daisy customers not only like gerbera daisies, they love them. They say: “I LOVE these.” Or: “These are my absolute FAVORITE.” Many men gravitate towards gerbera daisies if they are picking out flowers for a loved one. They will scan an entire rack of perfect blooms, and out of all of them, point to the gerberas and say: “These are really, really beautiful, let us use some of these.”
Times when a gerbera daisy is an appropriate flower: when purchasing flowers for children; when purchasing flowers for someone whose favorite flower really is the gerbera daisy (this cannot be fought).
If a customer is purchasing one flower, they often choose a gerbera daisy. Might I suggest, next time, which purchasing one flower, not choosing a gerbera daisy. Instead: almost anything else.
THE CLUELESS ONES
The clueless ones are often men, though women can also be clueless in the flower shop. The thing that makes the clueless ones clueless is that they say: I am clueless. If the flower girl asks the clueless one what he would like to spend, he says: uh, how much should i spend? Some flower girls will see dollar signs and say, a million bucks! Though others will say, well, it depends on what you want, if you want something truly simple, a few dollars will do, more of a statement requires more money. Some clueless ones will say, okay, let’s do thirty, forty, whatever you need, while some say, oh, um, I was thinking more like ten.
They then can go in two directions. Some clueless ones, having admitted their cluelessness and been explained the gist of how to purchase flowers, are then happy to let the flower girl work her magic. These clueless ones are always blown away by whatever is produced, whether it’s a single lily wrapped in paper or an extravagant vased arrangement. They offer great praise, and for this the flower girl can forgive them anything.
The second direction the clueless might go is to decide to put together their own bouquet. The clueless bouquet is generally a mix of the brightest colors without regard for texture, contrast, balance. These bold mixes are presented with a proud smile, or perhaps a faux “I don’t know what i’m doing, you’re the expert” caveat. The flower girl does what she can when arranging the stems, and sometimes will secretly add in some leaves to fill things out, but these bouquets are the ones that got away. Sometimes the flower girl will forget to affix her shop’s sticker to these bouquets, though this is proably just an oversight.
THE INCREDULOUS NOVICES
The incredulous novices are new to the flower shop experience, and aren’t really buying it. Maybe they never had cause to buy flowers before, or maybe they only did so with grocery store grab-and-goes. They are very insecure about “how this works,” and often ask: “How does this work?”
(How it works: there are buckets of flowers sold by the stem or by the bunch. Either the customer can pull from the buckets and create a bouquet for herself, which the flower girl will then total and wrap, or the customer can tell the flower girl what she is looking for, and the flower girl will put together the bouquet, and then total and wrap it.)
Incredulous novices almost always balk at the prices. “Does this mean $2 a stem?” is the common response to a bucket of blooms with a sign that says: $2/stem. The flower girl must be patient with this novice, and remind herself that maybe there was a time when she, too, thought it silly that a rose could be $3 when her mother’s garden had so many there for the taking.
Incredulous novices often leave with small bouquets or single blooms, or revisit the premade bunch section for their floral needs.
THE TOUCHY-FEELY ONES
The touchy-feely ones like to touch. They like to touch everything. Often older women, they spend a very long time searching for the perfect bloom. Each bucket of blooms gets the once over, and one lucky stem from each bucket is selected for close scrutiny, and of course, a pat down. Sometimes a bloom is kept in hand and then put together with another bloom and held up for some double-team scrutiny. Each are then put back in their respective buckets. The most common touchy-feely purchase is a perfect single stem of stock, a medium-height stem covered with thick-petaled, lightly-scented blooms in purple, pink, or white. The second most common: nothing at all.
