How to Stretch Your Dollar

I learned the hard way

Yesterday I went to eat Thai green curry with a friend of mine at a little restaurant at the base of Nob Hill on Polk St. It’s a street full of shops like a dingy donut store, Bob’s Donuts, Out of the Closet thrift store, and Good Vibrations, a vibrator superstore with an antique vibrator museum inside it.

At a certain point during the dinner my friend asked me if I had ever left a review on Google reviews. I had. I was still in Grass Valley. I went out to do laundry one day to a place called Gold Run Laundromat. I had brought exact change and the first dollar I put into the change machine was eaten. I had already dumped detergent and my clothes into the machine, so I was now stuck at the laundromat with not enough money to do the load. So I went to the office door and knocked. No answer. I called the phone number on the door. I got a voicemail and left a message. But no one was calling back. So finally I went out into the parking lot where people were waiting in their cars while their laundry was being done, and I panhandled for the dollar that the machine had eaten. By these means, I did my laundry.

But I was annoyed. The laundromat owed me a dollar. Now I was careful not to make a big deal out of this because it was only a dollar, and if I wasn’t careful I was about to waste a lot of time and labor that was worth way more than a dollar. But on principle, they owed me a fucking dollar. I mean, credit card companies and the government tally what you owe up to the cent, so…fuck ’em. (They tally what you owe to the cent but when it comes to spending it’s like who fucking cares we have so much money)

When I got home to my sublet room overlooking the Brunswick Basin, I looked up the Gold Run Laundromat business on Google and found whatever contact email I could to kindly ask them to refund me a dollar, on principle. They never responded.

So finally, I wrote a review detailing how the machine had eaten the dollar, that I had to panhandle to get the money, and that no one at the business bothered to respond. Well, guess who now promptly attended to my complaint. The business owner responded to my one star review.

To be honest, at the time, I was afraid. I was afraid yesterday when I got a call from Jacksonville, Florida, and I knew it was the result of my drug test, and I had intense anxiety. Not about whether I was positive for drugs or not, but for having to speak to a stranger on the phone. It’s fucked up. I also told my friend I would experience less anxiety fighting a tiger than I would socially challenging a stranger. That’s fucked up.

I was afraid of confrontation over this Google review thread. So when Google sent me an email that said the owner had responded, I didn’t open the email but I did see the first line which said, “I am the owner and I take customer complaints very seriously…” and I figured they addressed it but never looked at it again. After all, it was only a dollar.

Well, yesterday as I told this story, my friend wanted to see the review, so finally after over a year later I read the owner’s full response and they pulled a Donald Trump, saying “you didn’t leave a message because we would’ve gotten it and you can email this email here. All the information was there blah blah blah.”

This really pissed me off. Because they were lying. They didn’t address me at all. But it’s only a dollar. But when that Big Old Scoprio Snake rears its head, man (those of you who know me, know), when that ancient viper energy in me gets rustled it’s hard to talk me out of some shit.

So over a year later and over only a dollar I updated my review to say the owner was false. None of that information was available. And they only responded because of my public review.

It is sad that when you get frustrated in the world, it’s really easy to go after the lowly owner of a coin operated laundromat, and not say YouTube, who if you use copyrighted music in your video will not allow you to monetize the video, and will instead monetize the video and pay EVERYTHING to the giant copyright holding corporation, and not even a fraction to you, even though you also put labor into that content, so now your labor is being exploited by a big corporation who’s giving you nothing. Fuck humanity. I hope we all die.

What’s my point? My point is this. It was only a dollar. However, money has no relationship to value anymore. You’ve got day traders who can suck hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the market just by moving stocks at the right moment. You’ve got people throwing millions of dollars at NFTs. You’ve got people lying, conning, and scamming their way into people’s life savings. And I don’t mean con artists. I mean “legal” corporations. But what’s the difference really? Meanwhile, you’ve got teachers making $26K a year raising a generation of humans for all of us and essential frontline workers making minimum wage while their misogynistic boss gets hired fresh out of daycare with a business degree.

The point is, a dollar has no value. It’s completely fictitious. You’re like “yea you only lost a dollar” but as that means nothing what are we really looking at? Some asshole who inconvenienced me. Not even anything criminal really. No swindle, no rape, no murder. Just an idiot asshole minding their own business, trying to run a business, though somewhat poorly; but really who among us had not done that? And if you think you haven’t, you’re a liar. So I’m an asshole too.

And that’s the circle of life.