Fistful of Dollars
I read Hacker News on a daily basis; it has come to replace all other social news websites for me. The stories and comments are—not to sound cliched—just more insightful and intelligent than its predecessors Reddit and Digg. I don’t catch every good story, though. Only today, there was a story requesting submissions of what others considered their best stories of 2008.
There were some fantastic stories that I had missed. Before I get to my favorite missed story, I found it interesting how many of these stories were not related to the kind of hacking that I imagine the site was originally intended for. A few examples of great stories that weren’t:
- Porsche breaks the hedge funds
- Hedge Fund Manager: Good bye and F— You
- In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
- Inconspicuous Consumption
…to name a few. The one that really caught my eye was this: a story on how to get into the hottest restaurants in town. The article is brilliantly written, and closes off fantastically:
For as little as $100—that’s $25 each for a meal that would ultimately cost close to $375 per head—I had jumped what was rumored to be a 2,700-person waiting list and gotten into the hardest restaurant in the world that week. Also, I had shot the moon. And I had done it by following a set of rules so old-fashioned that my grandmother could have written them: Dress properly, act dignified, be polite, smile. And spend a little extra for good service—it will pay you back in droves.
Forget Frank Sinatra. Forget James Bond. For the rest of that day, for the time it took me to call everyone I know, for the three hours and 45 minutes it took me to eat my 11-course meal, I was the lights on the top of the Chrysler Building. I was the smile on the Statue of Liberty. I was New York.
I was money.
Forget the content, I love the writing. The Sinatra/Bond reference is a running theme in the essay, and I loved how he crafted it to a brilliant conclusion. But even the idea behind the essay is clever—the bribes were about what I would expect for the caliber of restaurants that he went to in New York, but it’s his admitted changes in demeanor that really struck me. I’ve bribed my way in front of crowds on a scale orders of magnitude smaller than what is described here, but the risk of doing it is something else. The last thing I want is to be that desperate guy who tried to sully the integrity of the bouncer/waiter/etc. of my favorite hangout to save twenty minutes.
Any interesting epic-fail-esque stories of restaurant bribery you have to share? Shoot me an email.