Amy Alkon, local activist and the Advice Goddess columnist, gives talk regarding her new book Unf*ckology at the Grove 11 March.
Food truck is shown parked in red, in residential neighborhood.
By Amy Alkon, syndicated columnist and Venetian
Laws against food trucks selling in residential neighborhoods apparently don’t apply to the Kogi truck! Here they are on the corner in our neighborhood near Abbot Kinney this afternoon, parked in the red. No, it’s no longer our neighborhood — it’s a giant cafeteria and disco.
Disco? Yes, I’m talking about The Brig, blasting its music with the whole front of the bar open and waking the neighborhood the other morning at 1:30 am. What, close the front of the bar so only the people inside hear the music–and it isn’t audible in people’s pillows? Why, they might make slightly less profit that way! Can’t have that happen!
There are some wonderful businesses here–Urban Escape, Abbot’s Pizza, Abbot’s Habbit, and the smoke shop are among them. These are businesses run by people who act like neighbors instead of running roughshod over we who live around here (with noise, trash, etc.) in order to make more money.
By Amy Alcon
This Fedex Dropoff box at the Staples at 1501 Lincoln Blvd (at Palms) is NOT picked up nightly as it is supposed to be. And Fedex apparently has no process to vet whether boxes are actually picked up. Disgusting betrayal, considering they advertise themselves for their supposed reliability.
I put a package in there Wednesday afternoon at 3pm (for the 5pm cutoff) — a package that absolutely had to be delivered in Salt Lake City Thursday morning.
It was still sitting in there — with what looks like a week of packages — when I drove to Staples to check at 8am when they opened on Thursday.
All those people — most of them probably our neighbors — who trustingly left packages in that box for Fedex overnight, had them just left there, maybe for days.
For anyone whose package was left there, the customer service person is Samantha Hobbs, and you have to ask for her at the Bristol CAT (some sort of customer service acronym). Tell her Amy Alkon gave you her number and your package was in that same box. 1-800-622-1147 is the special number to call. You will get somebody else on the line and will need to be transferred to her. (Explain that she is a special customer service person and she was helping your neighbor, whose package also was not picked up.)
Problem Resolved
It’s been taken care of. But I had to spend a whole bunch more money to get my packets made in Salt Lake City and to hire a courier to take them where they needed to go. Fedex told me they’d reimburse me for the cost of sending the package — which I told them to just drop off back at my house, since they couldn’t get it to Salt Lake City in time. (The packets in it are now useless since I had the whole order remade in Salt Lake City.) I’m trying to get them to reimburse me for at least my costs — though it would be nice if they threw in a little something for the six hours of stress and upset I experienced trying to figure this out in the morning and then trying to make things work.
What I did do, because the people at the Salt Lake City Staples store were so kind, smart, helpful, and speedy, was leave them a nice review on Yelp. As I write in “Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck,” if you’re a complainer when things are bad, you should also be a complimenter when things are good.