I became an avid Yelper sometime around 2012, when a friend brought to my attention that they’d featured my review in one of their newsletters! That got me really excited about the whole thing and I reviewed like crazy until I achieved Yelp Elite Status. Funny enough, once I was Yelp Elite, I didn’t do much more. I never seemed to make it to the events and after awhile my reviews dwindled. They renewed me for 2013, but by this year I’d been inactive on the reviewing side for so long that I am no longer Elite. I still check in like my life depends on it though (and I have no idea why, though getting statuses like this time I was briefly the Queen of Cardiff on Yelp is super fun). Once upon a time I was connected to the owner of a Japanese restaurant near work through my review on Yelp, which was awesome. I’m also pretty sure I got a free appetizer or dessert because of my Yelping at least twice. And of course I still turn to them whenever I’m trying to figure out where to find the kind of places I’m looking for on any given day. They make it a lot easier to find great new places to try!
Posts Tagged ‘yelp’
365great Day 332: Yelp
When a trip to NYC becomes so much more
I should have known a weekend trip to New York could be so much more. As it was, this was set to be an awesome long weekend: Panda and I would spend a day going through my old town of Brewster, then spend a day in the city before heading home on the third day to settle back in for a shortened work week. I was really excited to revisit the areas of my early teens, from Westchester to Putnam counties. It was also a chance for me to share a bit of my childhood with Panda. We were both looking forward to exploring New York City together for the first time – this was my first long weekend since starting work and I wanted to make the best of it (and we most certainly did)!
Don’t just have fun – document it and share it and tag it! Friends might just come knocking.
I’ll share more about the trip another time. What really struck me about this experience was when I posted a few items to my various social media channels. Something completely unexpected happened again and again: my friends in the area began reaching out to say they were nearby! This is exactly what social media is great for, encouraging connections that otherwise would have been easily missed. There were my Singaporean friends and former coworkers who messaged me that they were in the city for one more day before returning home. There was the Yelp comments from my college friend who lived in my building one year and was now in grad out in New Jersey. Then there was the Instagram conversation I had with another college friend, who did Orientation with me (and Panda) and was now doing her residency in Jersey. I mean, I knew I had friends out in the region, but it hadn’t occurred to me who I might be able to meet up with on our trip!
Each of them reached out to me on a social media channel last night and I messaged all of them through those different channels. Funny how they all found me through a different site/app! By this morning, I had arranged to meet with my grad school friend (Shadow) and the Singaporean coworkers (Starfish and Zen). Shadow met us at our hotel in Secaucus, where we had breakfast together. Panda knew her from when we hung out in college, so it was nice for the three of us to catch up and meet up so far from UCLA. I had thought she was still doing Teach For America, but she’s already well into her first year of a grad program! After she left, Panda and I headed into the city to meet up with Starfish and Zen at the MOMA. It was really nice to be able to introduce them to each other, since I talk about them here and there and now Panda has a better impression of who they are. We hung out for about an hour before splitting ways – they were off to a lunch meeting and we were due to head home.
I’m really glad I was able to get those two brief encounters with people I love seeing. Too bad Opti, my optometrist residency friend couldn’t meet up as well… that would have rounded things out nicely. Still, it’s great to know that next time I head up north I’ve got some friends to hang out with. And to think, it was all because I shared bits of my life on Facebook, Instagram, and Yelp! I guess next time I can do a better job of letting friends know my plans, since I probably could have met with a bunch more had they known.
Strangely motivated
Last week, I was innocently checking in to various listings on Yelp as I always do, keeping unofficial tabs on where I’ve been. When it came to the 405 freeway, I found to my dismay that someone had ousted me from the Duchess spot (you become the Duke or Duchess if you have the most check-ins)! This got me all riled up. I refused to have someone beat me out like that, so I started a check-in war.
To better understand the context of this, let me lay down some of the rules we have to follow:
- You can check in to any given listing no more than once every 4 hours.
- You can only check in when you are within 1 mile of the listed address of the listing (with some exceptions).
- You can check in no more than 25 times in a given day.
So, immediately I started checking in every 4 hours or so. Of course, life would get in the way and it wouldn’t happen that much, but I did log multiple check-ins a day. I reasoned that I’ve driven up and down the 405 hundreds of times (if not over a thousand by now), so all these excess check-ins are making up for previous visits. Thankfully, I live and work in an area within a mile of the freeway, so I can check in throughout the day without having to move. I also don’t check in to places arbitrarily – I like for my check-ins to actually reflect my visitation to whichever listing, so I rarely ever get up to 25 check-ins in a day. That’s a lot of places to visit!
Well, unfortunately it appeared that little Ms. Piggy saw that I was catching up to her, so she started checking in full force as well. I call her that because she doesn’t have a real profile picture, but just a cartoon pigging saying something about pigging out. Every time I’d check in after a few hours, I’d find that she was also checking in to keep her lead. This went on for about three days and I was getting just one or two check-ins behind, but then came the weekend and my trip to NorCal. While I was away, I wasn’t able to keep the pressure on her, but it appears that she eased up as well. Maybe she thought I had backed down and let her guard down.
As soon as I came back from my weekend trip, I was checking in again at maximum capacity and today I’ve managed to tie her at times and be one check-in behind at others. By tomorrow, I think I can take her down and reclaim my title as Duchess of the 405 freeway. Once that happens, I plan on continuing until I have a healthy lead that reflects the hundreds of times that I have driven the 405. It’s a silly little thing, really, but this really brought out some of the competitive edge in me. I am not going to give up on this mission! Why it means so much may be beyond most people, but it’s a fun challenge for me.
