A puffin would also be fine, thanks!
November 6, 2017 7:34 PM   Subscribe

Last week, author, UN speaker, and Chuck Tingle avatar Zoe Quinn was banned from Postmates for attempting to order a penguin from the zoo.

Look, she had to get that order in before they closed. Then Aaron from TaskRabbit got involved.

Contains cake, friends, and redemption.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit (35 comments total) 25 users marked this as a favorite
 
this is everything <3
posted by numaner at 8:05 PM on November 6, 2017


It could have been worse. What if they'd actually gotten her one?
posted by Slinga at 8:07 PM on November 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


wait i'm confused...is chuck tingle and zoe quinn the same person? also, huh?
posted by sexyrobot at 8:14 PM on November 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


(When Chuck Tingle was nominated for a Hugo, she represented him at the award ceremony. That later led to Project Tingler, which is an FMV adventure in the Tingle universe, among other things.)
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 8:26 PM on November 6, 2017 [10 favorites]


I'm confused. When, exactly, did reality become an ARG?
posted by loquacious at 8:27 PM on November 6, 2017 [14 favorites]


Good times were had by all.
posted by maryr at 8:31 PM on November 6, 2017


Welp. Looks like I need my meds adjusted.

AGAIN!
posted by Samizdata at 8:36 PM on November 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


Man, you don’t want a puffin. They are good to look at but otherwise uninteresting.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:39 PM on November 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


Man, you don’t want a puffin. They are good to look at but otherwise uninteresting.

That's a real funny way to spell makes funny noises like a wee 2-stroke engine and will walk right up to you.
posted by The Gaffer at 8:42 PM on November 6, 2017 [25 favorites]


I keep meaning to check out TaskRabbit, as a rabbit. Thanks for the reminder.
posted by numaner at 8:43 PM on November 6, 2017


Postmates reply:
ty for the cake, @UnburntWitch 🎂 pic.twitter.com/OF2KLCFoXT— A. R. Cohen (@aphex) November 7, 2017
Cutting the most important piece

I like this reply to Zoe's original thread: "are you familiar with the term "chaos monkey"? [...] basically a pentester trying to break a system. like application fuzzing. you’re a food delivery service chaos monkey."
posted by nicebookrack at 8:43 PM on November 6, 2017 [8 favorites]


UberEATS:

"You want a penguin? I can get you a penguin. Believe me. There are ways- you don't want to know about it, believe me.

Hell, I can get you a penguin by three o'clock this afternoon...with nail polish."
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:47 PM on November 6, 2017 [11 favorites]


Man, you don’t want a puffin. They are good to look at but otherwise uninteresting.

I have questions.
posted by middleclasstool at 8:47 PM on November 6, 2017 [8 favorites]


That's a real funny way to spell makes funny noises like a wee 2-stroke engine and will walk right up to you.

Interesting, that's very like a penguin except they sound like a child's toy with a broken squeaker.
posted by traveler_ at 8:49 PM on November 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


Postmates replied "Sigh. Fine." to the unbanning request, then arranged a return cake.

Of a penguin or a puffin, which one is going to leave more excrement all over my floor?
posted by zachlipton at 9:00 PM on November 6, 2017 [14 favorites]




Feuding messages on cake are my new everything...
posted by gemmy at 9:09 PM on November 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


I've been informed that puffins are very tasty, however.
posted by Canageek at 9:53 PM on November 6, 2017


Embla, our Norwegian puffin dog puppy, feel that this is within her field of interest.
posted by Harald74 at 11:36 PM on November 6, 2017 [9 favorites]


(A puffin dog (norsk lundehund) will eventually be housebroken, zach, but they do have an independent streak. Awesome family dogs, though. And ahem, puffin has not been hunted for decades, btw.)
posted by Harald74 at 11:37 PM on November 6, 2017


A puffin needs to fly. Most of all, it needs to fly up to the top of a cliff to play peekaboo with the humans looking over the edge. They're adorable. And half the size I thought they'd be.
posted by ambrosen at 12:15 AM on November 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


She also donated $100 to my local zoo.
posted by k8t at 12:31 AM on November 7, 2017 [3 favorites]


And then the Postmates account added a cake emoji to their name .

This is really hilarious.
posted by mephron at 2:52 AM on November 7, 2017 [8 favorites]


This. Is. Genius.
posted by Faintdreams at 4:36 AM on November 7, 2017


I'm confused. Does she want a real penguin, or a pet penguin? Because she can save on delivery if she buys locally.
posted by Elizabeth the Thirteenth at 4:56 AM on November 7, 2017 [3 favorites]


That was some impressive social media Judo from Postmates. I'd never heard of them before now, and now they seem cool.
posted by He Is Only The Imposter at 5:20 AM on November 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


That was some impressive social media Judo from Postmates. I'd never heard of them before now, and now they seem cool.

They're about as cool as waking up in a bathtub full of ice with some stitches over where your kidneys used to be. They're one of the more exploitative and fucky companies in the gig economy ecosphere.
posted by loquacious at 6:03 AM on November 7, 2017 [14 favorites]


There's an island near where I am right now with WILD PUFFINS. But it's like an eight hour round trip by boat to go visit them, so I haven't done it yet. But I will some day. Because puffins.

Anyway, Zoe Quinn is a national treasure and an icon to shitposters everywhere.
posted by tobascodagama at 6:20 AM on November 7, 2017 [5 favorites]


I don’t know why Aaron from Taskrabbit is getting such props. I mean, she clearly specified the cake was supposed to have a drawing of a penguin on it. There’s no penguin Aaron!

(This was, overall, delightful. But I wanted to see a cake with a penguin on it.)
posted by nubs at 6:28 AM on November 7, 2017 [7 favorites]


...How did she order a penguin from the zoo in the first place? I guess I do not understand Postmates? I thought it was food delivery.
posted by Rock Steady at 8:00 AM on November 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


Man, you don’t want a puffin. They are good to look at but otherwise uninteresting.

They taste pretty good, actually.
posted by praemunire at 8:12 AM on November 7, 2017


...How did she order a penguin from the zoo in the first place? I guess I do not understand Postmates? I thought it was food delivery.

In theory Postmates will deliver anything that a user can identify and legally purchase and deliver. So you can actually place an open-ended order for something like "I need 3 Macbooks at the best price you can find in town," and if a Postmates rider accepts the order they have an hour to do that or negotiate a longer run time or whatever.

In this case for an order that size a rider would probably contact dispatch and they might even have a few people in dispatch in that region/zone attack the shopping problem at the same time, return a result to the rider, pre-auth the purchase in their postmates debit/credit card and go from there.

You can also send Postmates riders on basically any traditional courier run, like picking up a full box of legal papers from a printer, or picking up a purse or wallet left behind at a restaurant to be returned to you at home.

When I briefly rode for them I got a couple of actual grocery store runs where I'm doing a bunch of shopping for someone with a cold, and the grocery list is something like oranges, orange juice, sparkling water, box of emergen-c, soup mix, cough syrup, tissues.

But, seriously, don't use Postmates. They treat their "contractors" terribly. They treat the restaurants you order from horribly. The pay is ridiculous. The Postmates platform and service model only exists on the backs of people that are desperate for work.

Use Taskrabbit or something where you can pay a fair wage or price.
posted by loquacious at 10:58 AM on November 7, 2017 [16 favorites]


Not too much of a penguin fan I'd much prefer my own pengling
posted by Field Tripper at 10:58 AM on November 7, 2017


Puffins: £0.42 / 100g

Penguins: £0.50 / 100g.

Stopping people passing off puffins as penguins: > £100,000.
posted by ambrosen at 10:59 AM on November 7, 2017


And thus it was that Twitter was briefly redeemed as being not entirely composed of methane and hellfire. Not so long as Zoe Quinn breathes and tweets. (And an olive in her Bloody Mary! The correct way to drink one! Man, I wish I could still drink...)
posted by bryon at 4:03 AM on November 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


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