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I think the counter girl at the cafe downstairs hates my guts. She is very polite to me, chipper even. But I know she secretly wants me to tip her.

I love to tip. I remember my days waiting tables and how much the tips do matter. A tip, however, has to have worth beyond its monetary value. They have to earn it.

Sorry, counter girl. Taking my order, then my money and occasionally walking two feet to the glass case to get me a muffin doesn’t warrant a tip.

What makes it worse, she isn’t very good at even those things.

The cafe puts your name on your tickets for food pick-up. For a week or more, she called me Chuck. No explanation.

When I do order a muffin, every time so far, she forgets to get it in the time between taking my order and taking my money. A few times she started to go do other stuff, noticed that I had not moved and realized that she needed to get my shit.

The best, though, was the day I ordered a muffin and she went to the back after taking my money. I was thinking, stupidly, “mmmm fresh muffins!” She returns about 2 minutes later, looks strangely at me and places on the counter the just-retrieved tip jar. She then got me my muffin.

I will set up a special email address and forward any messages I have to have local copies of, using Thunderbird to suck them down.

I will uninstall Thunderbird as soon as I can. Another one of my favorite applications, Evernote, now supports auto-import from a POP account. Now, any email message worth saving locally will go straight into Evernote for archiving. If I forward messages with image attachments, Evernote will even perform OCR on the image and make any text searchable.