Little Running Bear

Here are some real reviews on the internetz of my favourite Chinese dumpling restaurant in Melbourne.

My friend who got the dumplings went home feeling gross! I would not go back.
–ChiaraB

The place stinks, it needs a clean, the staff are rude who can’t be bothered giving good service and I felt angry that I even handed money over. I love in these places they say they don’t accept cards; these are cash only businesses because they don’t pay tax like everyone else does.
–Ckermeen

I like how this one started as a restaurant criticism but turned into a little rant of… what is that? It smells a bit like… indignant xenophobia.

The taste is good as well. But when you enter the premise it smell awful, smell very vinegar.
–Tjhia

Yeah, that could be all the vinegar. Personally, I’ve never noticed the smell. I’ve been in restaurants where all I could smell was toilet cleanser. I’ll take the smell of COOKING and INGREDIENTS over that any day.

The atmosphere there makes me expect that Jackie Chan will be thrown from the upstairs in a Chinese movie brawl.

–Daniel

Yes. This is the most accurate review so far. It was one of my first thoughts too. The balcony is perfectly designed for throwing someone off. That, to me, says “Authentic Chinese Food Here”.

The meals, nothing special and nothing which I couldn’t have gotten at Shanghai Dumpling House within a matter of 15 minutes. Unpleasant and and unsatisfactory.
–cindyc

Very strange indeed, they just lost our (rather lucrative) business. Very disappointed.
–Etak_tseug

I eat at Shanghai Village regularly. I’ve done so for the past 10 years. I personally don’t mind the way it smells or the hot-pink walls. I focus on the menu and the food.

When my friends and I go there for or dinner, we walk/roll away 40 minutes later unable to imagine anyone ever eating as much food as we did. Especially for what works out to be about ten bucks each. It’s extraordinary.

My major complaint is that they used to have these delicious red-bean sesame balls that were little, deep-fried mouthfuls of artery-clogging goodness but they have fallen off the menu.

Bring those back, SV, and you will have my heart, stomach and tongue forever.

There were these action figures when I was in grade 6. Called GI Joe, these were essentially military dolls with a hint of invented story behind them: nationally non-aligned villains; an endless supply of imagined weapons and vehicles.

Now they’ve made a film based on those action figures. The plot follows what you’d expect but just to spice it up a little, I’m going to program it in basic:
10 print 'exposition'
20 print 'explosions'
30 goto 10
Hit Break after about 110 minutes.

The thing is, though, with all those explosions and all that exposition there isn’t any time left for character development. Actually one character does have some kind of emotional journey but he’s a villain so it lasts about 5 minutes before he’s stripped of anything resembling humanity including clothes.

A while ago I asked my personal trainer (PT) if I should ask my friend to get in touch. We trained together a couple of times and my friend had very quickly fallen off the self-improvement wagon. PT told me not to. The theory being that if he wants to become fitter my friend will take the steps required and contact PT himself.

If there is any sense that PT is chasing my friend the dynamic of professional service provider and client shifts. No longer a professional relationship, PT is doing my friend a favour by checking up on him. The relationship is then dependant on a whole different set of emotions. Instead of my friend wanting to improve, and PT is in the improvement business, it becomes a game of guilt. My friend feels guilty because he hasn’t sought his own improvement and that becomes his soul motivation for turning up to training.

That scenario reminds me of dentists and mechanics. How often have we put off going to the dentist or the mechanic because we haven’t taken care of our teeth or cars in the way they told us to? How many times have you had your dentist tut-tut or actually scold you while in the chair. They might think they’re doing it in a friendly way and they’re definitely doing it with your best interests in mind, but that tiny action infantalises rather than empowering.

Guilt does not lead to responsibility. Responsibility comes from a desire for self-control and self-improvement. As such we can’t be responsible for other people. When they want the help they’ll seek it. If they are only doing damage to themselves there is nothing we can do to protect them.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because I find myself in a similar position. One of the things I do is help people improve their work/life balance and achieve their goals by helping them understand what’s important and then look at what tools they have at their disposal to help achieve those goals.

In work like this, I sometimes receive partial payment up-front. I put in a lot of introductory work and research to tailor sessions for particular clients and I’ve found that they aren’t always willing to put in their own work. If I don’t get some payment up-front I end up losing out on the deal.

The desire to chase clients, to encourage them to do their homework and contact me to organise a session is strong. It feels like bad customer service to just ignore them until they get in touch. After all, I’m holding onto their money.

Chasing them is not going to help them improve themselves. Efficient work practices and personal fitness are both about taking responsibility for one’s actions. There are penalties we face for not taking that responsibility: bad work/life balance; poor health; increased ongoing car costs; loss of teeth.

Providing a professional service is not doing someone a favour. It is maintaining a business relationship with remuneration for work. The money has been paid up to a point and the services should stop at that point. If there is more take than give in any direction, one party is being screwed and nobody wants to be in that situation.

Mess. I make a lot of it. It might be a simple thing like getting undressed before bed or opening mail in my home office, but somehow I end up with piles of metaphoric crap all over the place.

I used to, periodically, spend a couple of hours cleaning every few weeks, cursing my inability to keep things clean. This was particularly a problem in my home office where there wasn’t anything like the urgency of clothes in need of a laundry.

Receipts, DVDs, cords, paperclips, articles and mail grew in bacteria-like colonies across my desk, in my in-tray and on any surface that was not already so covered in detritus that they couldn’t take just a little more.

A large part of the problem was getting the time to do a major clean. Almost nothing feels better than taking a horrible mess and tidying it, organising it and finishing with a workspace that doesn’t require apologising to visitors. The transformation is tedious and not at all like the make-over montages we see in teen cinema. Nor is it like the instant-tidying clicking that Mary Poppins led us to believe was possible. It’s laborious and mind-numbing. So it’s more than just a time problem, it’s a motivation problem.

Who in their right mind would want to put themselves through that? Yet I did on an irregular basis.

One day recently I found myself with 10 minutes to spare. I started cleaning my office and found that I could actually make some progress. At the end of the 10 minutes I just left it where it lay. But I felt good. I made progress.

I realised that I often have 10 minutes at various times in the day that I used to waste with playing some game on my phone or performing vanity searches on various engines.

The next day I found myself with some time again and this time set a timer. 10 minutes. For 10 minutes and no more I’d file, sort and dispose. The alarm sounded and I walked away.

10 minutes is nothing in the course of a day. It’s a disciplined amount of time and it doesn’t vary. 10 consecutive minutes would sometimes be just before going to bed because it was the only time I had spare but delaying sleep by 10 minutes isn’t going to make much difference.

After 5 days my inbox was clear, there was no detritus on my large desk (I have a door on two filing cabinets) and I could actually start working on other areas like book shelves, filing draws, et cetera.

I am not the sort of person who puts things away as soon as they are used. I never have been and it’s unlikely I ever will be.

A simple restriction and predetermined end point was all I needed to maintain some kind of order in my home office. I extended the same rule to my bed room and it was amazing. 10 minute blocks over a series of days made such a huge impact that soon it was 10 minutes of maintenance or more efficient organisation.

I started to expand the idea of 10 minutes to other areas of my life. Finances, photo-tagging and any other mundane but somewhat necessary bit of organisation I required.

The process fell over. I stopped doing anything. The list of 10 minute things became too daunting. I found myself looking at it and thinking “Well, that’s 90 minutes I require to get all of that done.” Suddenly nothing gets done because I have the same problem of not knowing where to start.

I cut the list back to just keeping my personal areas tidy and organised.

It’s an exercise in discipline of the achievable. I’ll need to adapt that to other things that need to get done. Maybe those are once a week tasks. Maybe once a month. The trick is finding the balance between the time I’m willing to spend and how quickly the rubbish can pile up. It’s an ongoing process.