I am fairly relaxed and confident about tipping in restaurants, apart from occasional practical wibbles about not having the right change. But there's a whole penumbra of other similar circumstances in which I have a vague idea that tipping might be expected but I'm not sure, and I worry about getting it wrong. Is it normal to tip all these people and I've been offending them if I don't? Or is it just for exceptional service? Or is it not customary at all except overseas? Please help unconfuse me.

Poll #1477011
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 15

In the UK it is generally customary to tip...

Tags: polls, society, tipping

In two of the last three films we saw, people got up as soon as their alarm clocks went off. I know films aren't noted for realism in many respects, but I wondered how widespread this was. So, a poll:

Poll #1442004
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 13

What do you do when your alarm goes off?

(I wondered whether to phrase it as "wake up" or "get up". I mean "become fully conscious so that you could get up if you felt like it", I think. Sitting up in bed and reading counts.)

I don't like wasting an hour of each day snoozing, but I'm not sure what to do about it.

A few months ago I got a SleepTracker, which is a watch with an accelerometer-thingy in it, so it can tell when you move in your sleep. It reckons movement corresponds to the shallowest points in your sleep cycle, or "almost-awake moments". So you give it a window, like 8:00-8:30, and it beeps to wake you up at the first "almost-awake moment" in that window, on the grounds that waking from that should be easier. It worked well for a month or so - it would wake me and I'd feel fully awake. But now it's no better than a normal alarm clock. I sleepily silence it and fall back to sleep. I suspect its success owed as much to the placebo effect, and the slightly-increased cognitive load of silencing an unfamiliar device, as to sleep cycles.

So I think novelty helps. If I had lots of alarm clocks, and a different random one went off each morning, that might work, at least for a while. Waking up for something outside the normal routine is also easier - not just fun things like holidays, but also annoying things like answering the door to cold-callers or having to break up cat-fights in the landing.

Communication also helps. A silly idea that occurred to me this morning is that if I had a Chumby like simont has (or I could just do it on my PDA) I could write an alarm that could only be silenced using a piece of information derived from a passphrase I have and a passphrase Alex has, so we'd have to wake up enough to talk to each other. (Obviously we wouldn't use that alarm if one of us was away.) Although you can have a conversation while semi-conscious and fall back to sleep and forget about it, that's probably less likely if the conversation topic is something real like how do we shut this blasted thing up?

I've also heard about someone who locked his alarm clock in a trunk and put the key in a bucket of icy water. Never tried that one yet, but to gain an extra hour in each day it might be worth it...

Tags: alarms, life, polls, sleep
Current Mood: sleepy

You are cooking dinner for friends, in a fairly casual trays-on-laps-in-front-of-TV context, rather than a formal dinner-party context.

Poll #1295975 Roast dinner
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 15

Is a roast dinner "elaborate"?

(For clarity, I think of a roast dinner as including a roast joint of meat, roast potatoes, at least two kinds of vegetables, and gravy.)

EDIT: By "elaborate" I meant effort for the host, rather than showiness for the guests.

Tags: polls, roast dinner

I've been wearing a poppy in the run-up to Remembrance Day. No one else among my friends and work colleagues seems to be.

You get articles in the Guardian saying that poppies are bad because they glorify war, and we should choose not to wear one, or perhaps wear a white poppy for peace. I don't really get this. The Poppy Appeal uses slogans like "Because the war to end all wars didn't" - isn't that an expression of sadness and regret, and determination that it won't happen again? And "Lest we forget", which I think is either more of the same, or gratitude, but not glorification.

When I was a kid the poppies used to say "Haig Fund" on them. I gather Haig is thought by many to be a nasty piece of work who sacrificed lots of his men's lives unnecessarily, so I can understand people not wanting to wear anything with his name on; but now the inscription is the much more innocuous "Poppy Appeal".

I guess, for of a lot of my friends, it might just be a case of not having noticed it's Poppy Day soon, rather than any kind of deliberate statement. But I'm curious. So, a poll:

Poll #1293597 Poppies
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 24

Have you got a poppy?

Which of these things do you think the poppy says? (not "Which of these do you agree with")

Tags: polls, poppies, war

Which of these things do you think are rude? Assume the context is when you're visiting family.

Tags: mum, polls, rudeness, society
Current Mood: curious