Follies

Concierge Follies: On conference trips, we've generally had good luck following the recommendations of the hotel concierge. This time, not so much. The first time we asked her for advice, we were looking for a place to get "a light snack." She directed us to a place two blocks away. The food was tasty, yes, but not exactly light -- as a case in point, one of my friends ordered their specialty, a cheeseburger with a fried egg on top.

We decided to give the concierge another try that evening, and this time instead of "light", we specifically mentioned that we'd like a place that had salads. She started to draw a dot on the map - yep, sending us back to the same "anything but light" place. "No, no," we said, "we went there for lunch. Is there anywhere else you could recommend?" She looked at us in disbelief. "Well, but then you'd have to go the other direction!" The other direction? You mean, the direction that doesn't take us under a trashy overpass that the police have staked out? The direction that would take us toward Beale Street, Peabody Place, and essentially all the other dining and nightlife that downtown Memphis has to offer? Yes, I can't imagine why we'd want to go THAT direction.

We wondered just how much of a kickback she got from the two-blocks-away place. :)

Exit Row Follies: On the flight into Memphis, Northwest had managed to seat absolutely everyone who should not have been in an exit row in the exit row. The fun began when the flight attendant noticed that one of the women sitting in that row had a very heavily bandaged hand. The woman insisted that she would be fine opening the door in an emergency, citing the extreme motivation that a plane crash would provide. The flight attendant was in the midst of convincing her that the FAA might not see it that way, when she realized that the girl sitting next to the woman was her daughter. "How old are you?" Eleven. Well, that settled it, since you have to be fifteen to be in an exit row.

But the fun didn't end there. Across the aisle, there was a young man who had some kind of mental disability. It wasn't immediately obvious, but it became clear when he he thought he had lost his ID. He started to panic, and was frantically going through all of his things. He was also sitting in the window seat instead of his assigned aisle seat, and when the person next to him called a flight attendant to help figure out the situation, he showed her a boarding pass for some other flight. He didn't understand what she meant when she asked him for another boarding pass, and he clearly was having trouble with the other questions she asked of him as well. Finally, with the help of the kind woman sitting next to him, his ID turned up (had been in his coat pocket all along) and he was reseated to a different row.

Recommendation Letter Follies: Your claim that you remember a student well loses some credibility when you then get that student's gender wrong throughout the letter.

Also, your claim that a particular student isn't lazy and grade-grubbing like all the other students at your institution may say a bit more about you than about the student you're recommending.