It’s a small world we live in, but this small world certainly has a lot of people… a lot who are smart, and even more who are dumber than dumb. The worst people, to me, are the ones who feel entitled to whatever they get or want.

I had a pretty sour end to the last company I was employed at. To this day, I only actively keep in touch and spend time with one person from there. Everyone else… I truly could care less about. But when I left, only a very small handful of people reached out to me to be cordial. Outside of those people, I really could care less. So it was amusing to me when one of the people who totally ignored me when I left sent me a message that started with “Hi friend!”, then asking me how I like my current company because she’s considering applying (she’s still at said last shitty company), and would appreciate a referral.

Wow. Really?

I deleted it and will not respond, but if I did, this is what I would have said: “If you think you are going to get any favors from me when you never reached out to me and ignored me upon my departure, you can keep dreaming, you entitled loser.”

What goes around comes around. If you are kind to me, I will likely remember it forever and go out of my way for you. But if you aren’t…. you can expect absolutely nothing from me. Ever.

My friend, a former colleague and his friend, and I went to Flushing today for a food crawl in hopes of discovering new and interesting foods. The one thing that hasn’t changed in New York for me is the constant discovery of new, interesting dishes across the different regions of China represented in Flushing. It feels like every single time I go back to Flushing, as I am going into basement food stalls or the new and shiny food malls of New World Food Court or New York Food Court (as it’s generically called along Roosevelt Avenue), I’m discovering yet another region or city’s cuisine I’ve never heard of, but is just as delicious or more delicious than the dishes I have been acquainted with. Today, the three of us visited six different spots to grab food, and all were delicious. I got to have my beloved Happy Lemon salted cheese green tea with lychee jelly and introduced it to both of them.. and they loved it, even despite the initial skepticism of “salted cheese with tea — what?!” I realized the best way to sell this concept: “If you like salted caramel, then you will like salted cheese with tea.” This ended up working, and one of them was tempted to get a second drink. I even found a stall that served very similar fish and chive dumplings to Shandong Mama in Melbourne, so I will definitely be going back there. But the most surprising thing we ate today was Luo si fen, which is a pork bone and river snail soup with mixian (Yunnan) style slippery rice noodles, beef, pickled bamboo, and vegetables. The broth was sour, salty, hot and numbing like the Sichuanese peppercorns. It was kind of addictive. Even though we kept scooping through the soup to find snails, there were none. I read later that in this soup, the snails actually don’t get served; they’re merely there to “flavor” the broth. But if you think about it… do snails really have any real flavor on their own..? Regardless of that, it was definitely a highlight of the food crawl today.

Being in Flushing today and eating all the super cheap, delicious food reminded me yet again of how much I love this neighborhood and really should spend more time discovering new things there. There’s always a delicious, cheap find around the corner there. When you think of all the expensive and “just okay” meals in Manhattan, it’s really such a small price to pay to trek out to Flushing and have such a good experience there every single time.

I originally started my Friday thinking it would be a catch-up day: I could log all my meetings of the week, have a few external meetings, two internal, and pretty much be done for the day by 4:30 and try to leave early to cook the planned butter chickpeas (the vegan version of “butter chicken”) in my Instant Pot tonight. Unfortunately, that did not happen, as more meetings appeared on my calendar, more tasks I forgot to take care of had to be dealt with, and then, the worst part of the day: my Gmail just failed.

I was working on an important email in “draft” form for about an hour, and I had promised someone internally I would get this back to her by end of day today. By around 2pm, I was pretty much finished with it and still had it in draft form, but I wanted to read it over before finally hitting “Send.” Well, 5pm comes by, and when I check my draft folder… the email is in its original state it was in this morning, as in, all it had was the title and two questions I needed to answer in the body.

I almost had a melt down. I stared at my draft folder in disbelief. I hit “Refresh” probably about 10 times to no avail. It wouldn’t update. For a good minute, all I could think was… “Oh my god. Fucking hell.”

And this was all because of a bug with a Gmail plug-in I need to use for work, an issue that is still pending and far from being resolved.

I ended up leaving at 7. This week seriously could not have been more full of angst, and it certainly ended with even more angst.

Our new chief revenue officer is in town visiting from San Francisco, so he invited us all to happy hour at a nearby spot after work.

What is frustrating when members of our executive team come out to New York is that the same types of congregations tend to happen: people on the “leadership” team tend to all gather around each other, sharing inside jokes and discussions around matters that the rest of us not only are not aware of but are never looped into, so if we tried to insert ourselves, we’d have no idea what the heck we are listening to and whether we even should be standing there. Then, there’s pretty much everyone else. And everyone else tries to make small talk with the leaders who are visiting, but it really just remains that: temporary small talk until they get uncomfortable or bored or both, and then the conversation ends, resulting in their moving on to the more familiar (and lower level) people in the office who they can have comfortable, everyday conversation with. Sameness attracts sameness, and sameness breeds sameness… unless someone at the top actually makes a thoughtful effort to counter it. And, well, that is clearly not happening.

I dislike this. The whole point of having a leader host a happy hour is so that he can get to know the remote employees better, but this rarely is the case. It ends up just being another event where everyone spends time with who is familiar or of a similar level or position, and the company ends up paying for all our drinks because it’s a social work event. This really needs to change.