'Bred Crumbs

09:07 PM This week's Saturday-night Safeway oddity: in the middle of the long aisle at the head of all the cash registers, a small boy was playing with plungers. He would stand two of them up a few feet apart, and swing a third trying to knock both the others down in one stroke.

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10:25 PM So according to the proprietor of the surfing school that misquoted me on its website, the change of my words was made by her designer without her knowledge. And since I again am happy to promote the Maui Surfing School, and since the way the proprietor quickly remedied the problem was to remove my letter chunk from the site, here's my entire original letter to Andrea Thomas, as I actually wrote it on July 19, 1999. Warning: there is much gushing.


Andrea,

Wanted to write and tell you what a wonderful experience I had with your surfing school.

I made my first-ever visit to Maui late last month and had a fantastic time. After reading about your school in the Rainbow Handbook and two other travel guides, I decided to take the plunge, and the two friends I was traveling with joined me. We signed up for a lesson on our last day there. None of us had surfed before, and we had qualms. But it worked; we surfed successfully, more than once. It was exhausting, but it was a blast – a great finish to the vacation.

My friends and I especially want to commend our instructor, Ron. He was friendly, kind, helpful, patient, wise, knowledgeable, funny, and incredibly supportive. He humbly denied it – we did all the work, he said – but Ron made all the difference in turning us, at least for a day, into surfers.

I’ve already started spreading the word to Maui-bound friends to give your surfing school a call. Thanks again for making it the wonderful service it is.

Aloha,
Tim Bland

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01:23 AM [Update note: Since I posted this Crumb, the problem described in the first item has been quickly and apologetically corrected. I'll share the details of the correction in a later Crumb; meanwhile, I've toned down the vitriol on this one.]

In Maui way back in '99, the Hozmans and I took a lesson from the Maui Surfing School, and it was such a satisfying experience that I actually wrote the school a letter of praise. A few months later, while doing an ego search on Google, I discovered that my letter was being run nearly in its entirety on the school's Web page. I was a little surprised, given that I'd never been asked whether my letter could be published, but I didn't mind.

A while later, the school redesigned the site, cut down my letter, and added other quotes from satisfied customers. Tonight, hitting Google again to see whether this site is registering yet, I decided to check the surfing school's page again. I found another surprise, this one unacceptable.

My original letter had saluted not just the school but our instructor, an easygoing prototypical surfer guy named Ron. The chunk of my letter now running on the school's website contains most of my praise for Ron -- except that each mention of "Ron" now instead says "Andrea," and each "he" has become a "she."

Andrea is the owner of the school. I've never met her, much less learned surfing from her personally.

So, the school is getting another letter from me, this one not so kind.

·  ·  ·

Tonight, I had one of those scary urban moments where you're making a late-night stop at the grocery store, and while you're going to the checkout lane you find that a man at the front of the store is getting very angry. He is in the face of the security guard saying things like "my problem is you" and repeating his petty complaint (something about three dollars and a leash) incessantly, getting louder with each iteration. So you linger at the back of the store even though you've grabbed everything you set out to buy, hoping the angry man will run out of energy and leave soon, and that he'll turn out not to be one of those people who has guns in his truck and has taken his moral code from American action movies.

It ended OK.

While hanging at the back of the store, I learned from the cover of Rolling Stone that


This news struck me at first as disturbing, but then I realized, hey, it beats Dubya being in charge.

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