Slashdot Mirror
A Look at Silicon Valley Cafeterias
boycottthecaf writes "The San Jose Mercury News has a story on the cafeterias of Silicon Valley companies, and how they are used to keep workers on site during lunch. Google, of course, has the cafeteria everyone envies."
That place surely is heaven! I'm loadin' up my mule and moving my family there.
By Nicole C. Wong
Mercury News
For many Silicon Valley employees, there's a pecking order to valley companies. And it has nothing to do with sales or size.
It's all about the food.
For years, Silicon Valley companies have invested in their cafeterias to cut the time workers spend foraging off-campus for food, boost camaraderie and keep the troops happy, or at least well-fueled. Now some cafes are such hot spots that discerning diners from other companies are clamoring to eat there.
``Apple's the best,'' said Joseph Ruff, a programmer at Mountain View start-up TellMe Networks. ``The egg burritos, they make them nice and spicy. Network Appliance -- that had a pretty good salad bar, but it was smaller than Apple's.''
Want navrattan korma with raita, chutney and naan? $5.29 at Cisco Systems. Need something to drink? Sun Microsystems stocks 20 flavors of Odwalla juices alone. Feeling guilty? Yahoo boasts sustainably harvested seafood and antibiotic-free chicken.
Marc Marelich, eBay's general manager of food services, often sees outsiders slipping in to eat at the new cafe. And no wonder -- they can get ahi tuna salad tossed on the spot, spicy Tunisian chili with lamb and beef, or Yucatan fish tacos with pico de gallo.
At San Jose semiconductor maker Atmel, which a few years ago decided not to construct its own cafe, employees have found a prized alternative to brown-bagging it. Sales reps, engineers and even the chief financial officer cross the street to eat at BEA Systems' Tuxedo Junction Cafe. One Atmel engineer dines there so often -- three or four times a week -- that a cashier mistakenly gives him the 10 percent discount for BEA employees.
John Lawn, editor in chief of Food Management magazine, said Silicon Valley's corporate cafe scene serves some of the best food in the country. ``You'll find a cafe that's as nice as any commercial restaurant in Chicago or San Francisco, maybe better,'' he said.
Of course, you'll also find some that are worse.
Amy Flores, spokeswoman for Agilent Technologies, offered this opinion of Agilent's cafe: ``All I know is it's sometimes good, and it's sometimes bad.''
And last year, Intel decided that too many employees were avoiding lunch at the company's dining hall, which facilities planning manager Mike Dowd described as ``battleship gray'' with menu offerings ``maybe a notch above hospital and school cafeterias.''
So the cafe splashed its ceiling with paint the color of nacho cheese and revamped the menu to include inari and ebi sushi. It also lowered prices.
Now, Dowd said, ``We have more employees who are willing to have their friends come over to our house to eat, rather than go to theirs.''
Google, by far, has become Silicon Valley's most sizzling lunch site -- as elusive as French Laundry, the Wine Country restaurant where would-be patrons must call two months in advance to get a seat. Ruff, the 39-year-old TellMe programmer, has been begging a college buddy who works at Google to bring him as a lunch guest for the past year.
Google employees must make online reservations 24 hours in advance to bring visitors to the cafe. And they are limited to two guests each month, since all the lunches and dinners are free.
Google's executive chef, Charlie Ayers, cooked for members of the Grateful Dead in the early '90s. He orchestrates a 100-plus staff and announces the day's eating options only an hour before lunch. ``That's how we keep them on campus -- have that element of surprise,'' he said.
It seems to work. On an average day, 85 percent of Googlers eat at the cafe, compared with 50 percent at other valley companies.
Eric Case, a 25-year-old blogger product specialist at Google, finds that all of a sudden, his friends want to dine with him. ``They'll e-mail, `Hey, do you want to have lunch sometime next week?' What that means is, `Can I eat at Google?' ''
Broadcom counts on a
kokroaches@mailinator.com
kokkr0
Username and password so you odn't have to give over your DNA
I think whoever submits a story that requires registration to read, should also provide their username and password so we all can read the story.
wtf, one have to fill the registration form before reading the story.
http://askaralikhan.blogspot.com/
me1@privacy.net
password1
Thank you bugmenot
TechSutra
I need a big lunch, so I don't want to go into the cafeteria and order four lunches and four 20 ounce bottles of Mountain Dew. I prefer to go to my local Wal-Mart and pick up two of those two litre bottles of Mountain Dew, pick up some coffee at the BR Dunkin' Donuts inside Wal-Mart, and two dozen of jelly filled doughnuts. Then I get a bag of cocoa puffs, and head to Burger King to get my cheeseburger. Problem is by the time I get back to the cafeteria with all my food to sit down and eat with my laptop, lunch is usually over. :(
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
Story: http://www.networkmirror.com/f48ThG_X4VrVJ79J/www. mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/11531501.htm
follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/moeffju
Do eBay employees have to place bids for their meals?
...are an excellent indicator, in my experience, of the success of a company. For instance, I used to work at Nortel (Nortel.ca), one of Canada's premier hihg-tech companies during the bubble.
During the bubble, the cafeteria was practically giving away food. Actually, they were doing precisely that -- many days during the week your lunch would be paid for. One could also go down at any time and pick up soda fountain drinks for free. This, like so many things (like the free massage parlor) were not to last...
As Nortel's profits declined, so did the number of different food stalls in the cafeteria. Similarly, I couldn't even go down to pick up a glass of soda water -- the company stopped giving it away. In fact, the ice water cooler was likewise turned off. The breakrooms were stripped of their free coffee and tea (and hot chocolate, *sigh*). And their water coolers were removed. And then the styrofoam cups (and their subsequent paper brethern faced a similar fate). Then they got rid of the plates and plastic forks and spoons. Finally, when the free sugar sachets left, so did I.
I guess I can finally say I am what I ate -- unemployed.
Silicon Valley sucks for lunch. Seriously, it takes about 90 minutes to fight through noontime trafficjams and get to a deli for a sandwitch and then back to work. The glories of these cafaterias are just a testament to what a stinking suburban anal shithole the whole place is. Yaaah, you get a free/cheap lunch, but you also get the pleasure of staying in your cube for 9 hours straight. Say hey for wage slavery.
Friendly reminder from the moderators...
Dear user,
Please refrain from using degrogatory comments about, in response to, or dealing with any issue with the word 'Google'. All things Google == are things that are good. If you persist, we will deal with this in a nopt so friendly way -- we will make you look things up in Ask Jeeves.
Yours Truly
The Googl^H^H^H^H^HSlashdot Team.
Unfortunately the phone had fallen out of the door pocket and ended up outside the door.
He drove about 10km with the phone attached to the charger cord bouncing around on the pavement. Yes it was a rainy day too. When he finally arrived and discovered it, it was still working!
The backside of it looked like somebody had put a disc grinder to it, but the damn thing still worked. I still have it, because it was one of those old-school phone where you can just short out two terminals to put it in test mode, which lets you listen to any arbitrary AMPS cell channel you want.
Who cares if their working me 14 hours a day without overtime and I haven't seen my family in 3 months. With perks like a nice cafeteria, it's all worth it.
Sad thing is that most people probably have to use that cafeteria for breakfast, lunch and dinner since may comapnies that provide such things also mandate a 50 hr work week minimum. Don't know about anybody else, but I'd trade those benefits anyday for good pay and a chance to be out after 7 1/2 to 8 hrs.
Many of these companies have more than 20+ building distributed across the Bay Area. It's only the main campus which has the large cafeteria and maybe other luxuries like a fitness centre (SGI's main building was across the road from the cinema multiplex).
If you're not working at the main building, then you end up with at least a 20 minute freeway drive to the nearest restaurant. For anywhere upmarket, you need to book at least a day in advance, as there are usually queues outside by lunchtime (Palo Alto). If you're lucky there might be a Mexican restaurant with outside tables, or a Chinese takeaway, but all the tables are quickly taken. And the specials would be snapped up within quarter of an hour of cooking.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Tell me about it, I have a thought provoking story still pending from last friday. What annoys me most is there is no way of contacting the higher powers in order to find out what is going on. All the links posted go anywhere but their email address.
Jonathanjk.com
Sounds like some people are a little too bitter about losing those perqs that the mere mention of them or the reasons for their existence and subsequent removal sends them into a flagging tizzy.
Sheesh... Get a grip, people.
keeps those nerds from gettin restless come spring time.
Anyone know what that stuff is that's floating in the curry?
"Want navrattan korma with raita, chutney and naan? $5.29 at Cisco Systems."
Wouldn't you supply your employees with free food? My cousin works for a Vancouver game company and they can just request whatever they want to be stocked in the fridge for free (on their company intranet forum). Also he works quite the number of hours (then again, doesn't any video game employee?) and I see the free food, huge tvs & couches, X-Boxes, pool tables etc as really a necessity because the employees stay there for so long.
So do you want to work at a company because it has a fantastic cafe? Well I'm sure you do but it also says something about the number of hours you'll be spending at that work. I guess I shouldn't be bashing this because it is great but I also wouldn't want to be making $10 / hour if you calculated how much I *really* worked at my company.
"``There are people here all hours of the night,'' said Tom Porter, senior director of corporate services. ``This gives them a chance to see their kids before they go to bed.''"
Funny, I read this is "This gives them a chance to see their kids before they go to bed [so that they can get back to their slave labour for their 2nd shift of the their 7 day / 120 hour week.]
Saying that, there was free food at Nortel. Every second friday they had a TGIF which was all you can eat finger foods (wings, etc), beer, drinks, cookies, ice cream.... Man, I used to love those. We also had alot of working lunches or kick off parties with food.
Maybe you were in another country but up in Ottawa, Canada I worked in 5 different buildings in 4 years and visited quite a few of the others.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
even nerds have to eat, and many nerds in the IT world dreams about working in silicon valley. therefor its nice to know where to apply for work and get the kind of food you like ;)
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Adult male consumes about 2000 kilocalories a day. So you are saying that person could eat more than 1500 huge burgers and not gain weight? Sorry sir, but i think you are either misinformed or a liar. Maybe you work for Hardee's spreading your lies: "oh you could eat like thousand of these and still lose weight!". Have you no decency?
Where they dine on the souls of that they've sucked out of the employees, feast on the marrow of the bones that they've been worked down to, and maybe a baby or two that's wondered out of the daycare center.
GET IN MAH BELLY
Bacardi + slashdot = negative karma.
Apparently, you need invites to go their cafeteria.
And whatever happened to the good ol' days of bringing in your own lunch? I do that at the small place I'm at, and my time and money spent is minimal.
Gleepy the Hen. More intelligent than the average hen.
Now tell me your life isn't better for knowing that.
But the food is still in beta, and has been for some time. Would you trust it?
Google Talk id 159
Here you can find a sample of the google menu: http://googlemenus.blogspot.com/
My friends that work in the financial district in san francisco have a pretty nice perk at their office. It is a huge hassle to go out for lunch there, so everyday around 10:30 someone goes around and takes orders for lunch, comes back around noonish with everyones food, the company pays for it and there are no real restrictions on whats ordered. They do a different restraunt/take out place everyday so it doesnt get boring. My buddy went from eating rice with mini hotdogs to seared ahi salads.
your lunchbreaks are long enough for you to actually leave your desks???
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
What is interesting about cafeterias is how much they vary from site to site. The selection is much better in the bay area than the same company's cafeterias in other techie locations (e.g. RTP, Richardson, Boston, DC, Ottawa, etc).
Prices are generally better in the Bay Area locations too.
Anyone who has spent much time in and around San Jose understands why so much attention is paid to the cafeterias, there just aren't that many places to go out, those places are generally mobbed at lunch and getting there and back in a reasonable amount of time is tough. Either companies invest in cafeterias or they risk loosing a sizeable portion of their workforce for a couple hours a day.
For example, the Cisco campus stretches for miles down Tasman Drive yet only a couple of very small places and a lone Carls Jr. can be found there. There is a concentration of quick casual and fast food restaurants at McCarthy Ranch but they are filled. The InNOut Burger's drive through often snakes through the parking lot.
Of course since your government servants are underpaid, the cafeteria get financial support, your tax dollars in action!
Well, the alternative is that you could move yourself and your family to India, and work the same gruelling hours (or, poor, you, 50 hours a week!) for 1/10 as much as you make now. If there's any such thing as karma in this universe, you'll lose your job to an Indian soon.
Apparantly, the article didn't show the Microsoft meals because they had too many bugs.
> Google: "hamburger+cheese+bacon+ketchup-mayo" fries "large orange drink"
> Did you mean: "tofu+veggies" "mineral water"
No thanks, I'll keep my medium pay scale job (about $54K) with 8 hour work days over high pay (she makes just over $67K there) with 12+ hour work days with in-house company perks anytime....
Once when I was cycling, a car overtook, and threw a phone out the window, no idea why... It shattered across the road and they kept driving, so I picked it up, put is backtogether, and got about 5 UKP of free calls on it. Too bad I never bothered paying 15 for a charger for it.
Apple's cafeteria is, in fact, really really nice.
They have sushi, pizza, delicious salads, and lots of other incredibly yummy stuff. Ive and a bunch of other apple brass eat there all the time.
If you really were in the Bay Area, you would know that it t'ain't nearly as bad as it used to be. There's no traffic anymore, most of the buildings have "For Lease" signs on 'em, and the restaurants are hurting, even during lunchtime. But it's slowly getting better...
BTW, not everyone who lurks Slashdot is a Software geek, meaning why is Slashdot so software-centric?? (case in point: I work in Semiconductors, mmkay?)
I work for a software company in Michigan. We get free pop and cappuccino's (sp? I don't drink those). On Friday's, they used to take everyone out to lunch (company was about 30 people or less). Now that we have 90+ employees, there are just too many people to take out, so they bring food in (my favorite is either Olive Garden day or Gourmet Chinese day).
The office that my company rents is located in a nice building with a nice cafeteria that aims to please everybody from earth loving hippies to guys that eat meatballs for dessert. However, whenever I have a chance I either bring my own lunch and eat it at my desk OR go somewhere far away from the office.
I have one hour for lunch. My office is the LAST fucking place on earth where I would want to spend it. Okay, I can think of worse places, but you get the point. I work with a number of certain people every day. I meet the same faces and talk about the same old things. Why not get out? I tend to overpay for my lunch because I like a nice Japanese restaurant two blocks away from my office. So what? I get to relax and forget about the job. Hell, I'd argue that having lunch away from the office makes me more productive because I come back with a fresh state of mind.
I don't know about anyone else but I'm so damaged from the bust if I ever bite into a free bagel I think "How much did this bagel cost? Shouldn't we be lean and mean? Why are they spending money on this crap?" It's like a bad flashback would happen and I would remember at my former company the CEO standing in front of us saying all of these positive things about profitability and being numero uno while we ate our free food. We had free free sodas as well. There were even free tampons in the ladies bathroom. When it all started to end all of a sudden there was no more free lunch day, no more free sodas, or feminine products. It's laughable, but I think any company that spends such an amount on a perk seems foolish and this again is my damaged self feeling this after so long you would think I could once again bite a free bagel and not feel the pinch of foreboding. But I do.
Lane Myer: I have great fear of tools. I once made a birdhouse in woodshop and the fair housing committee condemned it.
As someone recently started working at an IT company (but not in the Valley), I found the article/discussions very interesting.
anal shithole
-1, Redundant?
``Apple's the best,'' said Joseph Ruff, a programmer at Mountain View start-up TellMe Networks. ``The egg burritos, they make them nice and spicy. Network Appliance -- that had a pretty good salad bar, but it was smaller than Apple's.''
This submission works for Google and Apple fanboys. Great two-for-one!
Standing on the shoulders of giants.
http://www.bugmenot.com/
The solution for all your registration needs...
Helloooooo!
This story is so 1990's.
Must be a slow day at the Merky.
I'm not in the Valley anymore but has traffic
gotten that bad?
Even at its worst it was still possible to go a fair
distance ( 1st & SC in SJ from Mouton Vieux ) for
lunch in a reasonable time.
An great gym, a caf almost as good as Google's, onsite dental, carwash blahblah. But to repeat, Yahoo has an great gym Googlers may only fantasize about if I understand correctly.
"Despite what slave labor critics may claim, I never found it to be anything but a major perk of working there."
The only people who toss around words like "slave labour", or "civil rights", or any other other "exaggerations" are people who never lived those circumstances, but feel it'll somehow give them street creed to invoke it left and right. It's like swearing every other word, trying to impress people.
Those who either have actually lived "slave labour" or "civil rights", or lost a loved one through such a process, simply shake their heads at the naitivity of those who toss such phrases around (desensitizing people in the process. a society were practically every act is now "slave labour" or a "civil right"). And hope and pray they never know what real slavery, and the attending civil rights are.
Then there is The California School of Culinary Arts. I barely have time to do any computer support with all the free grubbing I do.
I've never known the Mercury servers to be Slashdotted. This post isn't "informative" --it's just a pain.
I eat to live. In this day and age of corporate mongering by upper level execs (some exceptions noted: Xilinx among a few), I would voice agreement with Michael Rubin in the article: "I'd rather see the money in my paycheck."
I know there are ways to bypass registration, or one could just register, but that is a lot more painful than this post. Grandparent deserves the karma.
I have freaks! I did something right...
We need a new mod option:
- "Yet another whine about Slashdot content."
Seriously. Skip over the topics that don't look interesting to you. It's set up for just that. It's not like the title didn't warn you ("A Look At Silicon Valley Cafeterias"). I wasn't particularly interested in reading about the Serenity movie trailer I can't go to. Did I get on and whine? No, I skipped over it.
Personally I found it interesting, for a lot of reasons. E.g. the discussions of suburban traffic hell in Silicon Valley (another side of things, in case one is thinking of going there.) Also the whole issue about how what you eat matters to your state of mind / productivity (Google recruitment ads around here tout how 'fish is brain food' and picture a mouth-watering slab of salmon.).. Etc. etc.
Maybe your problem is that you are boring and not very interested in things? Spare us your whining, then. Go away.
to how bad it is everywhere else. Indeed:
Most companies are despotic tyrannies.
Most companies cheat their employees.
Most companies use their employees.
Most companies are irresponsible employers.
Most companies act unethically.
IMHO, employment sucks, no shares means you're a serf.
I've seen it time and time again; companies put the interests of the few at the top, ahead of everyone else's. Please, don't say it's their right. No one has the right to be abusive, evil, irresponsible, greedy or stupid.
Oh, and yes they are all stupid. It's stupid to believe that the bottom line, i.e. personal financial gain is more important than ethical behavior. Furthermore, it's simply monetary fundamentalism to believe that more money necessarily equates to a better life. In fact, too much money is like too much sugar. Just try living off of candy cane for a while and you'll soon see that eating the pure condensed essence of sweetness is hardly the way to satisfy a good appetite. In truth, America is simply rotting away from the decay of excess.
I've asked this before and I'll ask it again; if democracy is so grand, why aren't more companies democratic?
Words to men, as air to birds.
I work at the Starbucks headquarters in Seattle, and I just bring a single sandwhich to work with me every day for lunch. Suits me just fine. I'm done eating quick enough I can spend my lunch hour on more productive things, like fuseball or taking a nap.
What you say is true. You also forgot to mention that parking the car after your lunch-time commute can be an incredibly aggrivating experience. Nothing like driving around a parking lot in circles after being stuck in an office all morning to drive you mad. It frustrates me so much that I usually just go into work late (nobody complains when you show up if you stay until midnight once in a while) and then take a late lunch, after everything has died down. The problem with that though is sometimes the food isn't as good. But hey, at 2pm traffic isn't bad and parking is easy!
Geez, and I thought I had it good - I play golf at lunch, and have exactly a fourteen-minute commute home to my house in the sticks, with only one or two cars in front of me, ever. Free food in exchange for unaffordable housing, traffic, smog, earthquakes, and living right on top of your neighbor?! No wonder people like to work in the Valley.
1)First up, this perk is factored in during remuneration negotiations:"We might pay the same as Company xxx, but we give you a free lunch worth $10 x 200 = $2k tax free."
2) Next, theres the saved time. Instead of leaving for an hour to eat out, lunch only takes 15 minutes: 45 minutes of your time is probably worth more than $10.3) The time you do spend eating is probably spent brainstorming/discussing a business related problem anyway. Even if you're discussing personal stuff you'd probably have talked about this during working hours anyway.
Essentially you get a meal, the company gets 1 hour of your time + is seen as a "nice company" because they give a perk.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
How about a new Slashdot mod: Mindless Google Fanboy. It could apply to articles as well, so us sensible people could cut the crap and improve the average intelligence of slashdot content by removing the worthless Google-fawning.
Tomorrow's Story: "Google installs infra-red auto-flushing system in toilets. Aren't they great? I want to work there!"
Homemade chili con carne served on a bed of long grain spicy rice, carrot and pineapple salad and beer.
Last night was rare marbled ribeye steak, baked potatoes, deep fried okra and beer.
Night before was homemade spagetti and meatballs, alvacado salad, garlic toast and beer.
My frig, stove, and BBQ grill are all less than 20 ft. from my puters.
Bet those hothouse flowers can't beat that.
Are Slashdotters not aware that Bugmenot Firefox extension has not been updated since Firefox 1.0 came out last year? The latest version is dated August, 2004. Heck, Bugmenot isn't even listed at addons.mozilla.org anymore! I hope somebody can get around to updating it sometime. It was a good service--I used it back in the 0.8x days.
i prefer open source cafeterias.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
There's no point in updating something if it does exactly what it's supposed to do.
Long hours and pool tables. Must be EA.
. . . their strategy was to offer muffins in the morning. Since 7/8 of the staff was Indian, that went over like cheeseburgers in a sacred temple.
wtf? What does being Indian having to do w/ liking muffins or not? Unless we're talking about some new, wacky veal muffins I've never heard about.
(note: I'm of Indian descent--the "Vik" in my nick is short for "Vikram")
I'd suggest you don't use Slashdot as your only news source, or you will suffer permanent brain damage.
I work right over near the Santa Clara Convention Center and I have absolutely no problem driving to any one of many many different eating establishments and getting lunch. I don't run into 90 minutes of traffic, either.
;)
Then again, San Francisco thinks that it's part of the "Silicon Valley" so who knows, maybe that's what you're referring to.
I find that the Silicon Valley has an amazing variety of cuisine, corporate cafeterias included.
My old roommate works right down the street from me, so we meet up in the middle and BBQ during lunch time.
So what if it's just a dirt lot under a Hwy 237 overpass? It's a great way to kill the lunch hour (or hour and a half..) and we grill up steaks or burgers or chicken.
The trick is to get to know what's nearby, so you have a stable of half-a-dozen places you know you can go without issue. Take some time during a few lunches to drive around more or less at random, noting what eateries there are around.
Beyond that, get your workplace used to you taking long lunches from day one. (I like to relax a bit, besides just eating.)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I work across from Intel's place in Santa Clara. The local Cafe charges $4.50 and up for a sandwitch, $1.50 up for soda, etc.
I was spending $60/week on food there until I got fed up. Now I eat a bananna in the morning and yogurt for lunch, and free water/soda/coffee.
$60/week -> $3120/year
My previous office was a block away from a group of half a dozen lunch-oriented restaurants; my current location has a Korean company's cafeteria (which is great, because they've usually got something Korean in addition to the sandwiches/salad/grill.) My location before that had a deli in the office park (good falafel, ok greasy Chinese.) Our downtown San Jose location is downtown, so lots of choices within three block walk. Our downtown San Francisco office has dozens of places within three blocks.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I don't know about the big companies but..
in the high school cafeterias in the Valley here
every single item tastes about the same
and the cheapest item are fries (large basket for 1 dollar), and about everything else cost more than 2 dollars, and would be questionable whether it would fill you up or not
even cup of noodles are more expensive than fries (the type you buy for 25 cents at safeway)
thankfully, theres a subway within 6 minute walk of our school
Granted, America is too materialistic, but you destroy your point, ironically, by "excess" (evil despotic tyrranies, employment sucks, ... etc.)
I would venture that everyone has some materiality, some more than others.
The problem with over-zealous critics is that they can be just as capable of evils when they burst on the scene in inflated self-righteousness. I'm not necessarily placing you in that category, but beg a little insight into human frailty - your own included.
My travel through other countries indeed revealed less materialistic values, but it seems there is a growing tendency to imitate (even if secretly) some of our ugly traits.
...but I would be happy to make her do the registration for me.
I have freaks! I did something right...
I looked at every menu posted there between April 25 and May 8. Not one had a meal I'd be really happy eating. None have a simple, sauce and spice-free entree, potatoes and some basic vegetables. I'd rather prepare something like that at home, bring it in and zap it than eat the screwed around with stuff on the menus. Or do the same with a slice or two of virgina ham, some cheese and a couple of slices of bread. Much more enjoyable.
Parent poster is a known anal retentive douchebag.
approach with caution. poster's capability to rationally argue is minimal, at best.
...but nothing beats Dreamworks, and in general the tech companies still don't beat the movie and TV studios.
The meme police, They live inside of my head