mansuetude: mild; gentel

lagniappe: a small, unexpected token; gratuity, tip

capacious: the ability to contain large amounts

egress: to leave or exit

1. Don’t post every 30 seconds. Honestly, nobody gives a rat’s ass if you bought Honey Oats cereal instead of Fruit Loops; or if your Wi-Fi was down this morning. Don’t flood other peoples’ timelines with your cesspool of incessant tweets.
2. Share the link love. Share posts or websites or other Twitter users’ tweets to your followers. There are many Twitter users that will follow you just for linking to their profile. Also, some of the most notable Twitter users link to interesting websites, news, articles or posts.
3. Create a conversation. Instead of talking about yourself, create a conversation that people can contribute or respond to. What sounds more intriguing: “Ah, my figgin’ phone keeps dying” or “Check out this website. 99 ways to prevent cancer:”? This builds your virtual presence. When someone reads that you have interesting things to say, regardless of whether they agree with you, they like to come back for more. They may like to argue with your or they may like to agree with you. It doesn’t really matter because you’re building a social circle. Ideally, you want to construct a steady stream of conversation that people can feed off.

Use these tips to build on your follower count or to become more of a pleasant Tweeter. People will notice when you care for your online social etiquette.

Waiters/waitresses often get the tougher job. They’ve got to take the heat for a problem often caused by the chef(s) or the bartender. How often do you go up to the kitchen and talk directly with the chef about the mistake s/he made on your salad even though the order explicitly says ‘no carrots or broccoli’? My guess is not too often. This issue is usually between you and your waiter. The waiter is usually helpless and can only say “well I told them no ice but…” Waiters/waitresses sometimes do make mistakes when recording your order but it’s not too frequent since they usually double check with you.

This can be tough for a waiter – what is s/he supposed to do? Well they could get a little help from their customers. Next time something’s wrong with your food, give the waiter the benefit of the doubt and don’t complain. Instead, ask kindly if they could fix the problem. It’s not the asking/requesting a change on your meal that could be bothersome, it’s the blaming or potential tip deduction that they probably don’t appreciate.

Consider a relationship triangle. Arthur and Carl don’t like each other. But Bill is friendly with them both. Bill will probably try to convince Arthur and Carl to get along. But Arthur and Carl are telling Bill that the other guy’s no good. You don’t need to be a math whiz to see that, as time goes on, either everyone will be friends or Bill is going to have to pick a side.

-Karen Hopkin (Scientific American)

Think about this for a moment. It’s essentially having mutual friend, but not befriending the person who also like the same person you like (hence mutual.) It’s a friendship triangle (the triangle representing three people) – like explaned above – but with one week edge. The edge of the triangle represents a relationship between two people. Two of the three edges are well functioning but one is not. So either the mutual friend amends the weak “edge” and everybody is happy, or the mutual friend cannot do so and the entire triangle collapses. Imagine this triangle, but multiplied. If the vast majority of triangles with one weak can sort things out, that would be beneficial. It could potentially promote new, well-functioning triangles. This could lead to peace among networks. But what if things play out opposite? What if the majority of triangles collapse? Potentially the once mutual friend is now not friends with anyone in the triangle. With more collapsing triangle-like friendships could lead to a network disaster. What do you think will happen?

Let’s do the math to find out how much you pay for coffee in a month, in a year and even 10 years. Let’s also find out what a few cents shaved of your cup of coffee can do in the long-term. The results may vary (depending on how much you pay for one cup, how often you drink a cup but these estimates are exactly that, estimates.)

So we can assume the average price of coffee, accounting for the sizes, could be $1.75. Assuming that you drink one cup of coffee in the morning every week day, five days, and at that price, you spend $8.75 on a week’s worth of morning coffee. If you spend $8.75 in one week, we can work that out to be $35 in one month. However let’s assume that you miss your morning coffee one day every month. That makes your monthly expenses on coffee roughly $33.25. Even if you go on vacation or for some reason miss work more than once a month – we have already accounted for the one missed day – you still usually drink your morning coffee. So once we crunch the numbers, the annual expense on coffee is roughly $399. Now let’s say that the average amount you spend on a cup of coffee, $1.75, remains the same for the next 10 years. That means you spend about $3990 on your morning coffee for 10 years. Remember that is just your morning coffee. If you have two cups a day you’re spending almost $8000 on coffee after 10 years. That’s what I mean when I say “that $1.75 compounds after time.”

One day you find out the local coffee shop, right next to the current one is charging $1.40 for a better cup of coffee. That’s 20% less. So instead of spending $399/year on coffee, you’re actually only spending $319.20 on a cup off coffee (not an astronomical difference, only about $80.) However after 10 years, instead of paying almost $4000, you actually only spend $3200. That’s $800 of savings by buying a better cup of coffee.

It’s not a life changing difference whether you choose one café over the other but it’s definitely food for thought (or drink for thought in this case.)