Cole

Hi, how are you guys? It's so good to see you.

I am on a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean right now.

I'm on a research ship. What? This is so cool. A research ship. Oh my God.

We're like really far away from everything. We are 1500 miles from Hawaii. Southeast. Basically right on the equator.

We're all physical oceanographers, so we study currents and internal waves and mixing in the ocean. On this trip, there's something called tropical instability waves at the equator. If you Google image it, you can see these swirly features right at the equator. Do you want to know how they work?

At the equator, there's currents that are going in different directions. So right at the equator in the Pacific, you've got water that's moving westward, so towards Indonesia. But then right north of it, and then also below it, like deep, the water is going the opposite direction towards South America. But also right at the equator, you get this thing called upwelling.

where there's like cold water that comes to the surface. So now imagine you've got a jet of cold water going one way and warm water on the sides. And so it creates this sheer and it makes all these cool big eddy features. And we're basically interested in what that does to the ocean and mixing and the climate. Wow. Does El Nino come from there? It's kind of everywhere.

But yeah, you often hear about the equatorial Pacific and these features show up during La Nina Yucca. years more than we happen to be in a La Nina year. Your life is so cool.

Sometimes I freak out a little. On this particular cruise, I had to get an emergency route canal the day before. So I was a little freaked out that something would get infected and we're six days from land. Oh, God.

I hated that sentence. Generally, I have the utmost confidence in the crew and everyone knows what they're doing.

About a month. We left on Election Day, November 5th. We'll be back December 8th.

I will be having Thanksgiving at sea.

Okay, so this Thanksgiving was back in 2007. I'm a senior in college at UC Santa Barbara.

Living in Isla Vista, exactly. Yeah, baby. It's the day before Thanksgiving, so ordinarily I'd be driving up to my parents' house in the Bay Area. like a five-hour drive, but I had a physics lab in the afternoon.

That's rude.

It was so rude. I was like, okay, I'll just wake up super early the next morning, get on the road at 5 a.m. It was kind of weird because the whole town is shut down. Isla Vista is a college town, right? So everybody is gone for Thanksgiving. The 24-hour burrito place is closed. But I was like, whatever, this is great. It's been a long...

quarter I'm exhausted it'll be so nice to like have an early night so I packed my car ahead of time I set the coffee maker I set my alarm clock on my flip phone and stuck it outside my bedroom just in the hallway so I'd have to get up and get going the next morning we'll switch perspectives to my parents point of view my dad wakes up at 6 or 6 30 and hasn't heard from me yet but he's like

whatever. She just either didn't text or she's still sleeping because he knows that it can take me like a minute to wake up. It takes me a while to become a human in the morning. Very recently, I'd say in the last year or two, he's finally learned that he shouldn't approach me before I metabolize some coffee in the morning because he's just setting himself up for rejection.

But once I've had my coffee, And I like sat for a while. Then you can come in and you'll get a nice reciprocated hug. It'll be great. My mom wakes up at eight and she's like, did you hear from Nick? Is she on the road? And he's like, no, I haven't heard from her. And she's like, what? She was supposed to start driving three hours ago. That's kind of weird. It's Thanksgiving.

She was excited to come start cooking. And she starts calling me and I don't answer. And she... texts and I don't answer. And then she's like freaking out because she was not really happy with the fact that I was going to be totally alone the night before. She was a little freaked out that it was going to be this ghost town.

And she starts tracking down some of my housemates phone numbers to see if she can get in touch with me. And through talking to them, they find out that one of my next door neighbors stayed in town the night before too. So give her a call and And she comes over and knocks on my door to see if I'm there and doesn't hear anything. So now my mom's really freaking out.

Your car was still there, I assume. Car was parked in the back. Oh. She decides to call campus police. And she's like, I know it's way too soon to be putting out a missing persons report, but I'm just wondering. And I think because they're campus police and I live a block from campus and there's nothing happening on campus, they agreed to go check on me. And-

They start asking my mom all these questions like, what kind of car does she drive? Has she been depressed or just like not really herself lately? Has she started seeing anybody new? Anything out of the ordinary. And my mom's just coming up with all these scenarios in her head, like what happened? So they come over and start pounding on the door. Nothing. Start like shouting my name. Nothing.

And eventually, I open the living room window. I live on the second floor. They have to like go over the rail and open the window and they come in and find my bedroom. And this is where I reenter the story because I just woke up to two cops standing in my doorway.

Are you Nicole? Oh my God. My initial reaction is the house is on fire. And I look over and I see that it's 9.30 in the morning and I'm just like, shit.

One and a half hours. Whoa. And I just immediately know as they're saying, your mom's really worried about you. Aww. I'm just like... Yeah, I bet. I specifically remember this feeling of trying to be respectful and fit up because these guys have gone out of their way to wake me up, which is not part of their job description, I don't think.

But I was like wearing this shirt that I knew just totally fell and exposed me. me. So I was just like, I can't get up. So I'm just lying there like, thank you. I'm so sorry. And they just kind of like shuffle out and I go and pick up my phone and there are 37 missed calls and texts. And so I immediately call my mom and she tells me this whole story.

And at first I'm like, my phone like must not have been on, but then I'm like, no, but that doesn't explain the banging and yelling of my name. I just, I'm a really excellent sleeper.

It wasn't going off. No, I think it was one of those things where it just goes off for a minute and then you're on your own.

It was a flippy. I think so. It was 2007 technology.

I make that as well.

That's why my phone's always on military time. Oh, yeah. Oh, to prevent that.

Yeah, and I'm so anxious the whole time. Yeah, I made it for Thanksgiving, but I felt so bad because I was like, I was supposed to help hook, not just like roll in.

My mom did say when I called her on the road, I was like, Mom, they looked really mad. And she's like, well, they probably thought you were on drugs. Like, nobody can do that. But no, they know me anyway. I've never consumed any drugs in my life. I was really good at sleeping. Did you have a flu shot the day before?

I'm thinking that it was like, you know, when you're at the end of the semester and you're like in finals week and you're just pushing through, pushing through. And then the second your last final ends and you're so excited to go on break, you just get sick.

Yeah.

I'm definitely morning. My brain kind of stops working at some point in the evening. And like, it doesn't make sense for me to push on. I'd rather wake up at 3 a.m.

oh your poor mother thanksgiving she had four hours of thinking you were well no scary no she only had an hour they woke up at 9 30 that's a long hour and a half she was clearly mad but you can't really be mad at somebody for being unconscious so there's like nothing to really do about you just gotta be mad at your husband at that point that's the time to turn it transfer

Thank you so much. That's really kind.

There's three cooks on board that keep us very happy every day. And I'm sure they'll have something special for Thanksgiving.

There's none on the boat. None on U.S. research vessels. I worked on a British vessel a couple of years ago, and you were allowed two units per day, which were like the equivalent of like a three or four percent beer, probably.

Yeah, you too.

How you guys doing?

Yeah, I can hear you guys. Can you hear me?

All right. I was really worried about the sound quality, so hopefully it's all right. I am in my closet here.

I'm through four doors. I can go in a different room here.

Because it was dynamite in there. My wife is getting ready for work here.

Yep. This story may or may not involve some other spotty cell service areas. Okay, great. Are you from Billings? No. So I'm originally from Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.

Ready for Cole?

Hello. Can you guys hear me?

Okay. I love that.

I am in Las Vegas, born and raised. Oh, wonderful. Okay. So you have a bad proposal story and we're dying to hear it. It is a pretty wild story. So buckle up for this one. I'll set the scene a little bit. My girlfriend and I, we had been together since high school. So we were high school sweethearts. We were going to the University of Utah for college. And we were in our junior slash senior year.

We're kind of that new norm of five-year senior. We were living together and full intention of getting married and everything like that. Just still wanted to finish out school. And we unexpectedly got pregnant. Okay, congratulations. A little bit early. Still wanted kids. And I was so close to getting my degree. And I loved the University of Utah.

It was really important for me to get my degree there. And then we were going to move back home. It's where all of our family is. She really wanted her mom to be there when we had our first son. I was kind of naive when I graduated. And I don't know if it was a little bit of arrogance or just being naive of like, yeah, I'm going to move back home. I'm going to get a job. It's going to be easy.

They're going to see University of Utah. It's a pretty decent business school. And I moved back home and I just could not find a job. What year was this? This was 2018. I had made a promise to my girlfriend. I was like, all right. by the end of the year, we are going to get engaged. But once again, this was with that naive intention of I'll have an entry-level job. I'll be able to start saving.

Work.

I'm going to be living with her mom. We'll have the opportunity to save up some of those funds. And then I got a recruiting job at a Bed Bath & Beyond e-commerce center. Oh, okay. And all I had to do was recruit people to work there for the holiday season. And as long as you didn't murder people, you got a job that was only supposed to be there from October to December.

And I had done a well enough job that they were like, okay, we'll keep you until March. And it was approaching the end of the year. I still had this pressure to get this dang ring. And I'm working all this overtime and busting my tail with all the pressure there so that I can meet this goal.

I am not. I'm actually a chemical engineer, but I do work at a refinery.

Now it's like a goal for myself instead of this wonderful woman and mother of your first child that you've been with since you were 15. This is also for her. It was like this personal stretch for me to get to the finish line.

About a week before all of this happens, the job after telling me I was going to be there till March, they were like, we're not going to be able to do this. We're so sorry you've crushed it, but they just aren't going to let us keep you here unless you want to go work on the warehouse floor. And I was like, I don't think I'm prepared for that. I am super low. This year has gone really rough.

And I call my mom, we go to this Marie calendars. That's across from a jeweler. She's like, I'll help you with the financing of this ring. You made a promise. We love her and we know you love her. So we'll help you out. And I'm like, cool. Part of me still doesn't feel right. I'm still just doing this to meet a goal because I want to be able to have the elaborate dinner in that moment.

That's right. I load them up with the lead and all the other heavy things. Okay, great.

And I get to share all of my heart. And now it's kind of turned into... Let's get this ring. You're going to do an impromptu proposal and just be like, trust me, we're going to have a good life. I love you to death. Let me finish this promise. We pick out the ring and next week they're like, come back. We'll have all the pieces together. We'll put the finishing touches.

We go in the morning, we finish it out. And they're like, all right, come at 445. Store is going to be closing and we'll get you set up. The piece I've left out so far is this jeweler was in a terrible part of town. My mom wasn't going to come this time, so it was just going to be me. And I show up and there was another couple there.

I'm just waiting in their lobby until they're ready to call me up. Once I go up, showing me the ring, it looks amazing. All that fear and kind of extra stuff I was worried about went away. Because now at the end of the day, I do get to marry my best friend, mother of my child. It's amazing. And then... Out of nowhere, I would say the length of this is maybe 40 feet or so. Two robbers walk in.

The bulk of it is in Billings, Montana. I've lived here for about four years now. I was proposing to my girlfriend at the time, just to give a little bit of backstory. Met on New Year's Eve, very high school musical. We like to kind of think that we're a Every New Year's Eve after we kind of celebrate our anniversary, we both like to ski.

Both in ski masks and it's guns raised. Everybody get the fuck on the ground. Don't move. One guy jumps over the display and starts heading towards the back. There's two owners that are up at the front. One's kind of dealing with the billing and closing out for the day and the other's with me. And the other thief is heading towards us.

My hands are up now looking back like there's no fucking way this is happening.

Oh, I think it was more than that. It was like, is this fucking it? He then directs me to go behind the counter now. And all I could think of in the moment to respond was like, please don't kill me. I have a family. And then he's like, I get down on the ground. And everybody thinks this is a weird part when I tell the story. But he was like, this will all be over soon.

And it kind of made me feel relieved.

I think I'd be closer to you, Dax. Him responding in general gave me a little bit of just weird comfort because what he does next is then zip tie my hands. Oh, wow. These are like pros. Yes, we find that out later. As I'm down there, genuine near death thoughts. Am I going to ever get to see my son again? I'm seriously not going to get to marry my girlfriend.

Like, I'm not going to get any of this. And then a tad bit of how is this my fucking luck? We're going to make you lose your job. And then let's do this to you. Strong arm robbery. Let's throw that on. From the back. Long time jeweler for them. He was like a Venezuelan war vet. He is peeking around the corner with a gun. Now you got to consider a shootout. And consider I did.

Because... They see him after he's poked his head out a couple of times. And that is when the shooting starts. No, there is a shootout.

And it is a tight enclosure. There's a reason they have you wear headphones when you are at a gun range or anything, because it is loud. This whole ordeal feels like 30 minutes. I've seen the video because I had to go to court for it, all this stuff. I mean, it plays out over like four and a half minutes. And so the shootout might have been 10 seconds or so, and then it just stops.

And then I feel somebody tugging at my back. And I turn around and it's one of the robbers. He isn't saying anything. And I'm thinking he's trying to maybe mug me and leave. Oh, I'm thinking he's going to use you as a shield. He's got to get you up. I think he was trying to prop himself up because all his motor functions are going at this point because he got shot several times.

And he's on top of my legs. So I'm also trapped. And so I'm looking back and I'm going, what do you want? And then his gun discharges in me. No.

What? And so he shoots me on accident.

Right in my side. And I actually shared some pictures. I sent them over.

So we'll go up to the mountains and make a whole weekend out of it. Flash forward to March of 2021. And I'm thinking about proposing. I buy the ring, but I'm planning the proposal and I want to get engaged New Year's Eve. The whole plan is we're going to go to Park City. We're going to ski. We're going to have beautiful time in the mountains. It's going to be a gorgeous proposal. Get engaged.

Did it exit? At least some shrapnel did.

Nope. And everyone that I work with now in a medical background and my friends that are in medical background, they're like, do you know just how lucky you are that he was not off by a couple centimeters? And I was like, probably don't want to play that. What if game? That's what kind of messes me up a little bit. But yeah, so he shoots me. It's the full spectrum of panic, fear, potential shock.

I have like one shoe on at this point. My wallet and my phone are like sprayed across the room and I could like see all the blood off my phone.

And I tried to stand up and I was like... Just no possible way. And so I inch over to this cabinet to kind of like prop myself up and I'm just holding the wound. It felt like time had stopped. I mean, I'm looking straight ahead and there's a dead guy that I had to crawl out from under.

The dust kind of settles. I'm focused now looking down at the wound the whole time holding it. I tried to like slowly pick my sweatshirt off of my skin. And I mean, it's like sobbing. Yeah. It's stuck. It hurts. I've been seeing these videos lately, you know, like people doing the grip machine. And they're squeezing as hard as they could.

It feels like somebody is doing a grip machine on that spot. And the burning is insane. That's why on the pictures you can see it's, like, black. That's a burn. Then the police come in. They had to, like, cut all my clothes off in the store on the gurney. And I'm butt naked in a jewelry now. Oh, my God.

Oh. Exactly. And so now I'm on the way to the hospital. My uncle was a firefighter. My dad's a firefighter. And so I'm cracking jokes about the city fire department versus county fire department. They're probably thinking like, this guy is insane. He's potentially going to die. And they're jabbing me with the IVs and everything. And the ambulance is moving. And so I'm in the hospital now.

They're like, all right, we're going to take you up for a CT scan. They were looking and they said, okay, so where you got shot, it would be way riskier for us to do surgery to remove shrapnel than it would be to just let it be pushed out of your body over time. Right. It was not critical now. And so that kind of brought me some comfort. And then my girlfriend shows up and it was like, Surprise.

That's very sweet. She was like, I was looking at your phone location because you just stormed out of the house. You didn't say anything. You just said, love you. Bye. What am I going to say? Hey, on the way to get something really nice for you. She's like, I was looking at your location and then it just stopped at the hospital. My mother-in-law thought I got like in a bad road rage accident.

And so I was like, maybe I need to work on my anger because of this.

And then the jeweler got shot a couple of times, too. The guy that was shooting the gun? Yep. He shot and got shot. And then the robber died from his shots. And then the other robber took off.

Oh, boy. Wow. And did they ever find the other robber? They did. And it was wild because I ended up having to testify. But I had never seen that guy's face. I could point out the other guy's eyes, at least from his mask. So I'm up there. I have to recant my story. Then just say, I don't know this guy, though. But they had planned this for weeks. They were jailmates in Florida.

Fast forward to April. We now are moving houses. I don't want her to find the ring as we're packing up all the boxes. I actually send it to Pennsylvania to my parents' house. I'm young, so I just kind of pop it in a little manila envelope and let USPS kind of do its thing. Oh, wow.

They had been pinging their phones and saw that there was like a thousand texts and calls over the past couple of weeks. I think that couple that was in the store earlier, they thought was probably the last customer instead of me. And so when that couple left, they're thinking, okay, we're good. Let's get in here.

I think overall, I'm just glad I'm alive. People thought I would be angry and bitter towards the robbers. And honestly, I'm not. Maybe they were in a circumstance that made them feel like they had to do that. That's unfortunate. People say, did it give you this newfound look on life? I think probably yes, but it didn't give me like, why did he shoot and why did he do this? I made it out alive.

It's a Crazy story. But I didn't have as much anger towards him for that because I don't know what I would do in that situation. I was not one of those people that now that this happened to me, I'm going to go get a gun. I was like, I'm still not going to even get close to that. I'm good.

Maybe that's also why when he told me this will all be over soon, that's why they zip-tied me and just were trying to do a smash and grab. And then it turned into a shootout. Yeah, fuck, dude. That is wild.

Did they get the ring? The robbers didn't. It was a botched robbery. Okay.

My ring stayed intact. No issues with it. It doesn't give you PTSD when you see it on her fingers. No, everybody makes the joke it's like a blood diamond. I would actually get mad if she wasn't wearing it because it was like, do you know what I had to go through?

So at first they weren't, but I think it's because they didn't know the extent of what happened. And then everything as it came out, they were like, We got it. Yeah, that's nice.

Well, yeah, there's shootouts across the way. I would have shuttered it as well. We were married five years ago, and then we added another child as well, so... So there is a happy ending to this.

Love that.

I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. I'm good now because it's six years removed. But that first year, you look in the mirror every day and it's just right there. And the scar kind of used to be gross because it would keloid. It's way better now. And then nightmares, any nightmares? Not really nightmares, but I would be like overcome with emotion sometimes.

I remember one time we were just eating dinner and I just start bawling. I actually work on the same street about a mile away from where it happened. And so for the first four and a half years that I drove to work, I would take a different location so that I didn't have to drive past it all the time because I obviously had to go to therapy for it. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. It's a real left turn. I'll give a shout out to my wife. She definitely wants to come in. Please. Yeah. Bring her in. Hi.

Yes. Wow. So, yeah, she was the biggest armchair fan. Everything that she brought up, she was like, oh, I heard this on armchair. Yeah. And then she finally made me listen when we go on our road trips and she would play the fart armchair anonymous. That one's hilarious. And then she was like, if a proposal prompt ever comes up, you have to tell it.

I'll tell you what, it made it there no problem. Oh, that was a red herring. But now fast forward to October, November, we've kind of decided to make it a big trip. I suggested it because I wanted to have our friends and family there. And that way it could kind of be a big celebration after the proposal.

And so it came up and I didn't know, but I was just like, I'm going to say this and let's see. Wow. Well, it's a slam dunk.

All right. Well, lovely meeting you guys.

Thanks so much, guys. This is awesome. Take care. All righty. Bye-bye.

The issue is that all my friends and family could go and we're on board and none of her friends and family could go at all. I have all these group chats going with my friends and she gets really sad. So I start thinking, well, She's going to be real sad if I propose and none of her friends and family are around. This is when I kind of start wanting to audible here.

The issue now is that I don't have the ring.

So now I have to call my parents because originally we were going to go home to Pennsylvania for Christmas. I was going to pick the ring up. I thought I had the perfect plan. So now I have to ask them to ship the ring back through the mail. So now they put it in another vanilla envelope.

ship the ring back through the mail i can't send it to my house because she might open it so i gotta send it to a friend's house now so i'm not even receiving this thing again the ring gets here unscathed usps whatever it is good job so now i adjust the plan a little bit because we live in montana beautiful state about an hour away there's like a nice mountain near us so i plan a little weekend and

that we're going to go to that mountain. So it's Friday morning of the engagement weekend. And I'm texting in this New Year's Eve group chat. And I sent a text that's like, hey, I'm going to get engaged this weekend. You guys happy for me or what? And the next thing I see pop up is Tess was removed from the group chat.

Oh, Jesus. One of my friends had added her to the group chat because she was so upset that she wasn't being included in these plans. And the next text I get is what the hell did you just do? And I look at my phone and I'm at work and I just scream, fuck. Oh, no. Everybody's dead silent. So I work kind of in a high risk business. So everybody thinks something really bad happened.

You could hear a pin drop because we've had really bad days. My boss comes over to me and he's like, what the hell just happened? And I kind of tell him and he says, go home. And I don't want to see you until Monday. Get your shit sorted out.

Yep. So I got about four hours until she gets home from work. I'm doing the whole nine. I'm getting flowers. I'm getting chocolates. I'm trying to set everything up at home. And then I remember she wants it recorded. So I go and I try and set up the camera. My video on my phone is not working. Oh, boy. Quick troubleshooting. Find the first number for a remote Apple support. Call it.

And they're just like, you know what? We can fix this problem. It's going to cost about $250. If you download the screen sharing app, we can really see what's going on here. So I download the screen sharing app. Then they say, we just need a wire transfer. So all you got to do is open up and log into your bank. Oh no.

So I go in, I got the screen sharing app. I open up my bank app and then it all hits me. I'm just like, I'm getting scammed right now.

I hang up on the guy, immediately he calls me back. He's like, what happened? I was like, oh yeah, you wanted 170, right? He goes, yeah, yeah, 170. I was like, you said 250 before, liar, hang up again.

So thankfully I avoid getting scammed.

If that's what he was trying to say, I powered through. Finally, she gets home. I proposed to her. It was good. And she kind of looks at me and she goes, I really appreciate it, but I really want to see how you were actually going to propose. So I get another chance of redemption. Saturday morning, early, we load the car up. It's December in Montana, but we're going hiking.

And so we get about 10 miles out of cell service. We're about a half mile from the trailhead. I can see the trailhead in the car and I hit a little snow drift. So the first one car kind of moves a little bit. And I see a second one coming up and I say, you know what? All I need is a little more gas. I'm driving my Honda Accord Crosstour. So I give it a little more gas.

We barely squeaked through the second snow drift, and then I see a third one coming up, and I think to myself, you know what? It worked less. A little more gas is all I need. I speed that thing up, and I beach the car on a two-foot snow drift. Totally immovable.

I think my friends would describe me as the smartest person they know with the absolute least amount of common sense.

So now we're beached in the Honda. It is 15 degrees out. I got about a quarter tank of gas. Usually prepping for the winter in Montana, I got my blankets, my snow shovel, my emergency kit, just in case. I have not done that this year because it was a mild winter. All I have is a snow scraper.

I tell my fiance, wait in the car. So I spend the next about three hours in small gloves because I wasn't planning on doing significant work with a snow scraper digging out the car.

I'm worried at this point now. Get the car unburied, four floor mats under the wheels. Get it out of this snow drift. Start driving back. And we are driving back in absolute silence. My fingers are numb. I'm bloody. And finally, she kind of looks over at me. She's like, you know what? One day this will be funny. But right now, aren't you glad that you screwed it up yesterday? Yeah.

and all i could just say was like oh boy oh wow oh yeah that's a rough start but can only go up from there that's a good silver lining we got married on december 29th just celebrated our first year of marriage congratulations you went through hell and high water or high snow to get there call you're a delight this gal as shitty as the proposal was is a lucky woman we got to

meet her we didn't even realize i did not tell her that i was gonna try and commandeer the closet and she comes in at like 140 and she's like what the hell are you doing i'm getting ready for work i gotta go it was very high stress at the beginning of this high stress feels like it might be status quo these are not really abnormal situations for me unfortunately oh this is great it's a delight meeting you thank you for telling us that story we're so sorry you went through all that

Great to meet you guys. And my college roommate, Matt, and his wife, Courtney, they got me into listening to the podcast and they are super up on the prompts and they sent it to me and they're just like, you gotta.

The Office of Labor and Management? Yeah.

What do they say? It's like a union is just two workers talking to each other. Yeah. And yeah, just to expand on that point a little bit, like the NLRB is quite understaffed and it will be more understaffed almost certainly as the, the Trump administration, you know, gets deeper into gutting the entirety of the government and,

It already takes months to years to get unfair labor practice filings resolved for the NLRB to do most things. So that is a core tenant of the IWW is actually taking action on the shop floor. Yeah. Like, that is the key aspect to unionism as a whole. And I think one of the great parts about the IWW is that it actually acknowledges that the power comes from the workers. It doesn't come from laws.

The laws only came because workers were pushing for things on the shop floor in the first place. So it's like, let's get back to the root of that.

Yeah. So right now, I mean, we're dealing with a lot of the same issues as we have been dealing with. The staffing issue is only continuing to be worse, right? One of the things that we were trying to get initially is schedules further out.

Right now, we get them two weeks out, more consistent scheduling, more scheduling, obviously better wages, better benefits, you know, all of these sort of things. And those are only continuing to get worse. And so we are continuing to try to think about tactics, strategies to counter that, right, to give us more power. So we're both doing direct actions and trying to push for a contract right now.

Now, one of the big difficulties is that Pete's has basically hired this law firm to do the contract negotiations on their behalf. Mm-hmm. And the law firm is basically stonewalling us. Like they are responding to the emails, but basically by just kicking the can down the road. Yep, yep, yep. And trying to not actually come to the bargaining table.

And so it's this very frustrating thing of like... How do we actually get them to come to the bargaining table? And that's definitely still something that we're wrestling with and that we're working on. Yeah, I don't know if you have any more to add to that, Dina.

Yeah, and I think in terms of countering that, one thing that I definitely want to call for from all of my fellow baristas out there is to organize your own shops, right? Like, that is the key thing. The more people that we have pushing for... better rights for workers in the workplace, whether that's through a contract or not, the more effective it's going to be.

And it's when we feel alone and isolated that their terror is most effective. It's when we're together that it is the least effective, that they are the So just keep pushing for it. I mean, I think that's one of the things that the Starbucks campaign has showed us.

They still don't have their first contract, sure, but they're so much closer now, like over, what is it, like almost three years down the road with over 500 shops organized than they were when those first shops organized in Buffalo. And that's due to that persistence and due to having more weight on our side. So please, organize. Do it. That's just my little call for that.

Absolutely. And honestly, one of the legitimate worries that we have about next steps in the evolution of what Pete's Coffee Shops are going to look like is the register folks being replaced with kiosks, you know, like self-service kiosks. I mean, that's something that we've seen happening.

You know, in a number of places from grocery stores to like McDonald's now and Dunkin' Donuts, they're even rolling out some like beta testing kiosk shops for Pete's in the Bay Area. And Pete's has introduced this new service deployment system within the shops, which basically pins the person on the register to the register where they're not allowed to do anything else.

They're not even allowed to turn around and get coffee for the people.

And, you know, the more that we do this and the more that we get yelled at by our managers for literally trying to help a customer and get them something because we're, you know, deployed to the register, the clearer it becomes that they're just trying to basically make that position obsolete so that they can shift it into a kiosk.

Yeah, it's just more corporate cost-cutting because if they're not bringing in any more revenue, they got to make that profit line go up somehow, right? And so, yeah, one of the big things that we're doing right now to try to push back against that is...

doing this sort of PR campaign to try to just bring more people into the organizing effort on the worker side of things and on the customer side of things, just making people more aware of what's actually going on here. And that, you know, we're not actually better than Starbucks. You know, we're not the better option. We're part of a massive conglomerate that, you know,

is practicing the same horrible anti-labor business practices as the rest of them.

There tends to be about 12 to 16 workers at each shop. So I think the biggest union shop that we have has 16 workers in it. The shop that I work at is fairly small. We only have 12 workers. Workers right now. So fairly small. And I will say just to give some context for the organizing process for my shop as well.

Pete's did not make it difficult to organize in terms of like the policies that they were pushing. Yeah. Everyone was pissed off about how we were being treated. And so just sort of pushing people in one-on-one conversations to look for solutions rather than just bitching about it, which is great. That's where it all starts, right? Pizza's pushing poor policies. They're cutting hours.

That's one of the biggest thing. They're slicing our hours week after week, even as the volume of sales goes up. And so just being like, hey, do you want more hours? Like, do you feel like it's fair for us to be staffed this way? Let's try to do something about it.

Yeah, I would be more than happy to. I mean, one of the sort of primary catalysts for organizing for our shop was the introduction of Uber Eats. So when I first started working in the shop, it was around two years ago, they had just recently introduced DoorDash. So previously, you know, Obviously, it started, it was just a cafe. People would come in and get their coffee.

Later on, they ended up introducing mobile orders through Pete's own ordering system. And then when the pandemic hit initially and everything locked down, they started doing DoorDash to try to continue having a revenue stream. Now, after more things started opening up, they opened the shop up again. Obviously, they continued to have DoorDash because it brings in a lot of revenue for them.

And then without really any forewarning, and certainly without any increase in staffing for us, they introduced Uber Eats, which is a similar amount of volume increase, a similar amount of orders increase as DoorDash. Like, we're probably getting... At peak, like 30, 40 drinks per hour in addition to what we're getting in store from DoorDash and Uber Eats.

That's a drink every like sub two minutes. Yeah. Jesus. And we are expected to crank these out at less than three minutes in order. And that's per order. So an order might have like five drinks if it's DoorDash or Uber Eats, where in particular, people will order a lot of things at a time. Yeah.

Because it seems like using these sort of apps and stuff, people will order much more egregious things, much larger orders than they do when they're in store. And so everyone's really annoyed about this. Just like, okay, all of a sudden we have all this extra work to do. They're not increasing our hours at all. Yeah, you're not getting paid more either. Oh, certainly not.

And we don't get tips from that either. Oh, Jesus. Wait, you don't get tips from it? No, no. I mean, like... Wait, oh, the tips all go to the drivers? Jesus Christ. Which I won't... Like, that's not a bad thing necessarily.

But it's like Uber who's taking the vast majority of the money from that. Yeah. And Pete's. And so us and the drivers are both getting screwed over by this.

But we both have to do all this extraneous work. So people were super fucking irritated about that, myself included, for sure. And that really got people going with like, OK, what are we going to do about this? How can we try to push them to staff us better?

producing even more work yeah and I will say this is that they like to push out promotions to people of like buy one get one free that sort of thing for like our Pete's location constantly and they they never tell us about it So, you know, one day we'll just be getting like five large mochas and like six different orders.

And we're like, why are we getting five large mochas and all of these orders? And someone pulls up the DoorDash app and they're like, oh, it's because there's like a half off if you get more than four mochas or, you know, something like that. It's just like we never hear about this until it's actually happening.

And that's the case both for DoorDash New Breeds, but also for just like internal Pete's promotions. Like we tend not to hear about any of these things until we are on the shop floor working and people are asking us about it. Customers are asking us about it.

Not a single one.

So like anthrax, Zika, contaminated food, even like lead poisoning.

This system is where all the puzzle pieces come together. And it's how you move quickly in a moment of emergency.

A tear. So think of a teardrop. Like a teardrop is rolling down. Okay. Yes, but happy tears. Are you happy?

No, nothing, nothing.

The whole call didn't even last 15 minutes. I think we wrapped up within 10. The questions were softballs. Like, what is your greatest achievement here? And what do you think about Doge?

Dude.

What's up?

My name is Cole. So I sell solar. I'm like a marketing company for solar providers in California. So we sell to homeowners. I'm currently, we opened up last April and I did $850,000 last year. So I want to be at $10 million. I know, I know. The biggest concern that I have... Yesterday. Yesterday, yeah.

I think that my biggest concern right now is that I think we have very much of an apples-to-apples comparison to other solar companies. I don't think our offer is actually that special in terms of like...

you know relatively speaking commodity yeah for sure and so i've been trying to find ways to create an apples to oranges comparison our sales are it's like me and my business partner we're very good at sales so we have like a you know we did door-to-door for like decades so you know we're like 80 clothes rates um but it's a battle right we and we do lose people to price shopping which is you know we're 100 virtual so i'm trying to figure out how to create an apples orange comparison in the solar industry which is very much a commodity market

but you don't have control over the product, right? That's correct.

Yeah, my vision long-term is with solar, especially in California, it's a savings-oriented sale. So it's like your bill is this, you're going to pay less money, et cetera.

Which is also a problem. Soon. Yeah, for real.

Yeah. My ultimate vision, what I'm kind of been obsessed with is instead of selling on savings, I would way rather find a way to add services on top of that, whether it's like, you know, some sort of HVAC, AeroSeal thing, or, you know, the tax services with depreciation losses.

12?

At least you just came to your moment without having to go through a Wales battle track.

We've been meaning to tell you this for a long time. He's like, I cannot deal with Missy. Y'all are going to have to do that podcast. I'm going to give you the truth. I'm kidding.

With water with us, we only take things out of it. We never get it on top of it.