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A cat may look at a king. (Image: The Spinoff)
A cat may look at a king. (Image: The Spinoff)

SocietySeptember 5, 2024

Help Me Hera: I want to ask out my cat’s vet. Is that wrong?

A cat may look at a king. (Image: The Spinoff)
A cat may look at a king. (Image: The Spinoff)

Normally I would never ask someone out at their job. But I think she might be the most perfect person ever to exist. Help!

Help Me Hera is brought to you by Bumble, the women-first dating app that started a movement by putting women in charge when dating.

Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nz


Dear Hera,

This is a hilariously stupid problem, but I have the BIGGEST crush on my cat’s vet. My cat has a recurring medical issue so I’ve been to see her a few times in the last couple of months, and I get so flustered every time. 

I know it’s not cool to hit on people at work and I really don’t wanna be a creep. But I think there’s a slight possibility that she might be into me as well. She’s extremely friendly and complimented all my tattoos, and has even gone on random tangents about pretty personal stuff, including how she shares custody of her dog with an ex-girlfriend, so I know she’s gay. But I’m traditionally horrible at knowing when people are flirting with me, and I could be misreading the situation. 

Normally I would never even consider asking out someone at their job. But I think she might be the most perfect and beautiful person ever to exist. Help!

Thanks in advance,

Crushing   

A line of dark blue card suit symbols – hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades

Dear Crushing, 

Thank you for this gorgeous and hilarious letter. 

Whether or not you can hit on someone at their place of employment is an extremely controversial subject. Many people would say absolutely not, under no circumstances, and I can kind of understand where they’re coming from. Anyone who has ever worked in a public-facing role has probably had at least a few extremely tedious encounters with someone who has confused a friendly customer service interaction with the precursor to a great love affair. 

In general, it’s wise to remember service workers are essentially being paid to be nice to you, and aren’t allowed to tell you to fuck off without putting their livelihoods at risk, so it’s not a great way to gauge someone’s potential romantic interest in you. 

On the other hand, as someone who has worked (and still works) in customer service, you often do meet really great people on the job. I’ve made a few friends over the post office counter. I think the growing realisation that we shouldn’t treat retail workers like a dating sim is fundamentally a good thing. But shooting the shit with strangers is a delightful and enriching part of life, and you can’t afford to be too precious. After all, a cat may look at a king. 

There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to dating. I find the idea that asking someone out at their job is inherently unethical a boring way to live. It’s also a fairly modern attitude. Ask any married person whose relationship predates the internet how they met their spouse, and you’re guaranteed to hear a few stories that would put hair on the modern, depilated chest. Before we had the apps, the world was rife with people propositioning their hairdressers and the department store clerk gift-wrapping your son’s model train. 

There are definitely some professions it’s more socially acceptable to hit on than others. It’s much creepier to ask out your regular massage therapist than the guy who works at the zoo gift shop. But you don’t have to go far to find examples of people who have beaten the odds and hooked up with their gynaecologist or children’s piano teacher. I’m of the opinion that you should be able to give your number to anyone, even Mr Whippy, if the chemistry is right. 

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— Wellington editor

In the spirit of sociological research, I looked for variations of this question on r/relationships and found a couple of very similar quandaries, with various vet nurse professionals weighing in in the comments. Some vets were strongly against the idea of being asked out at work. Other comments were full of charming anecdotes about vets who had met their future spouse after pumping the anal glands of a handsome stranger’s elderly bichon frise. With such mixed responses, I can only err on the side of romance. 

The problem with being overly prescriptive about dating rules is that it frightens off those with emotional intelligence, and does absolutely nothing to deter the serial offenders, who are unlikely to be put off by a stern advice column and will continue to hit on every midwife, arresting officer and 17-year-old exotic pet supply store clerk, happily unencumbered by the burden of self-reflection. 

Like most questions of dating etiquette, the real answer is to learn to read the room. And I think your “reading” suggests modest cause for hope. It’s impossible to tell whether your vet fancies you, or whether she’s just naturally gregarious. But her mentioning an ex-girlfriend tips the balance slightly in your favour. Maybe it was just a throwaway comment and not a lesbian bat signal. But it sounds like the two of you are on pretty good terms, and the way you describe your interactions makes me think she probably isn’t the kind of person to be mortally offended if you ask her out and it turns out she’s not interested. 

Of course, there’s no harm doing a little research. Can you tell anything about her relationship status from her social media profiles? Have you ever seen her on the dating apps? What if you narrow the search parameters to single gay vets in a five-mile radius? You could even wait until the next time you’re picking up your cat’s worming tablets, and throw out a few unsubtle references to an ex-girlfriend of your own. None of this is proof of concept, but it might help you to feel more confident in your approach. 

I agree that it’s usually bad form to hit on someone offering you a paid service. But I’m also a diehard romantic. If she secretly reciprocates your feelings, she’s currently more fettered by the situation than you, because if hitting on your vet is socially dubious, your vet hitting on you is a million times worse. So the half-chewed tennis ball is in your court here. 

If I were you, I would formulate a good exit strategy before going ahead. It probably goes without saying, but since it’s technically my job to say it, you need to be prepared to take any kind of rejection with extremely good grace. If it were me, I would probably consider pre-emptively switching vets for some allegedly innocuous reason that doesn’t reflect negatively on your vet’s talent, and take your last appointment as an opportunity to thank her for all the amazing work she’s done on your cat, Spiderman. Then, with appropriate humility, ask her out. If she says no, then neither of you have to suffer the embarrassment of ever seeing each other again. If she says yes, then please, for the love of god, send me an invitation to your wedding. 

If you were only casually interested in her, I’d advise you to give it a miss. But seeing as you have described her as “the most perfect and beautiful person ever to exist,” I can only throw up both hands and commend your soul to Cupid. 

Good luck! 

Keep going!
Todd Henry of Four Shells Kava Lounge.
Todd Henry of Four Shells Kava Lounge.

BusinessSeptember 5, 2024

An illicit drug? Auckland kava lounge online store abruptly shut down

Todd Henry of Four Shells Kava Lounge.
Todd Henry of Four Shells Kava Lounge.

As Auckland’s Four Shells Kava Lounge celebrates its fifth birthday, misconceptions – old and new – persist.

This story was meant to be about a birthday, a couple’s small business connecting Pasifika diaspora to curious New Zealanders and a drink powered by 3,000 years of Pacific culture and cultivation. Instead, shortly before interviewing the owners of Four Shells Kava Lounge, its online store was shut down out of the blue by platform provider Shopify due to the sale of kava products.

When co-owner Todd Henry queried the decision with the company, Shopify responded that it “understood the inconvenience,” but the closure was “not a reflection of the legality of the product but the stance of our banking partners.” Four Shells is not the only kava seller using Shopify to have had their online store removed.

Shopify said it works with these partners, in this case Apple Pay, who did not respond to a request for comment from The Spinoff, to “ensure products meet the Terms of Service for Shopify payments”. In cases like these, Shopify said, the issue is due to restrictions put in place by the partners for product categories supported by Shopify Payment. “Also, the types of businesses listed on the Shopify Payments Terms of Service page are representative but not exhaustive,” the response read.

Four Shells’ online store only makes up a small fraction of the business’ overall revenue, and its brick and mortar in Victoria Park Market is still up and running. E-commerce can be elusive for certain traders (in New Zealand alone, $1.39b was spent on online products in the first quarter of 2024), but it’s not the economic loss that Henry takes issue with: by removing kava products from Shopify’s platforms, he worries misconceptions around the drink will continue to worsen. Four Shells has only been in email correspondence with Shopify and Apple since its online store was removed, with no clear reopening date or plan in sight.

Henry suspects the strongest connection between Shopify’s terms of service and kava is the mention of kratom. In Part B, under “products or services that are otherwise prohibited by law or our financial partners”, the terms of service lists “substances designed to mimic illegal drugs”, specifying kratom.

Henry prepares kava at the Four Shells Kava Lounge.

Kratom is a herbal leaf native to Southeast Asia, which has roots in traditional medicine, but is now more commonly known as a mood enhancer or “gas station heroin”, often mixed into kava cocktails in the US. The US Food and Drug Administration does not regulate kratom as a controlled substance, which contributed to or caused 4,100 deaths across 44 US states between 2020 to 2022. A Tampa Bay Times three-part investigation found that in Florida alone, kratom had contributed to 580 deaths since 2013, and the substance is currently seeing a nationwide crackdown in the US.

Kratom is not legalised in New Zealand, but in the US, the substance is only banned in six states as well as certain towns, while Florida stands as the unofficial kava capital of the US. Last year Bloomberg reported that the number of kava bars in the US had grown from 30 to 400 since 2012, with only a few bars exclusively selling kava. The rest sell kratom alongside kava.

You don’t even need to go to a specialised bar to get a kava-kratom mixed drink in the US: you can find it in cans in supermarkets and gas stations. In 2021, the kava-kratom mixed RTD Feel Free was launched and marketed as a mood-elevating substance, but its use of kratom has since been found to have caused addiction, abuse and dependence in some drinkers. The 2.5k strong community of Reddit’s r/QuittingFeelFree sees daily posts from people documenting their attempts to kick their Feel Free reliance.

There are a number of US variations of kava Henry takes issue with, as kava itself is not consumed for taste, but for the community it carries with it. Henry says he has visited only one kava bar in the US, where the drink was flavoured with mango and pineapple to soften the blow, but he says these attempts at making kava more palatable for the masses (in other words, more of a money maker) take away from the cultural context of the drink. “You can try, but it won’t be authentic, right?”

“My number one gripe with all of this is the association that people have made of kava, with something else. People in the United States always talk about kava and kratom in the same sentence,” Henry says. “Here in the Pacific, kava stands alone: it doesn’t need anything else.”

Four Shells Kava Lounge co-owner Todd Henry.

He notes that the Pacific has very few export offerings, and kava is one of the biggest products in the region. There’s an opportunity here for the Pacific to have its indigenous food and customs on the global stage, but the threat of overseas greed has caused some to call on Pacific leaders to speak up about US exports. Henry hopes kava could still one day be seen as an opportunity for connection, rather than a boogeyman drug.

If you’ve never tried kava before, the immediate thing people will tell you about is the taste. It’s bitterly earthy (like a very strong cup of herbal tea) and having to take it in one gulp, as is custom, comes as a light shock to the system at first. Then there’s the after effects, mythologised by misconception and word-of-mouth as akin to those felt after taking xanax or drinking alcohol. It’s more of a light relaxant, and in the words of Henry, “half food, half community.”

“If we talk about kava as a beverage alone, that’s only half of what kava is,” Henry says, “the other half is the community it facilitates.” Customers frequently tell him they’re just grateful to have somewhere they can find meaningful connection.

It’s a drink that has been enjoyed by the likes of John Campbell and Chlöe Swarbrick, and Four Shells’ clientele ranges from artists to academics, working professionals grabbing a to-go cup on the way home, tourists wanting a taste of polynesian culture and Pasifika diaspora looking for connection. Henry describes their lounge as “pan-Pacific”, representing no one specific Pacific nation as so many have a unique relationship to kava. In Vanuatu, fresh green kava is served, and in Fiji, kava is enjoyed all day, while Tongan custom prefers consumption at nighttime. Research has also shown that Māori may have brought kava with them on arrival in Aotearoa, but as the land’s colder climate didn’t allow for cultivation, kawakawa was used as an alternative.

Think of kava bars like sushi stores, Henry argues. New Zealanders thought sushi bars were pretty out there, too, before they started popping up everywhere around the country.

Henry may not be the man you expect to see behind the Four Shells counter. Bespeckled and palangi, he’s Tongan by marriage – originally from Pennsylvania, he met his wife ‘Anau while working in New Zealand; the two wed in Tonga in 2010 into the family’s long history of kava cultivation. “[‘Anau’s] family was always in the kava business … up in Tonga, they would grow kava and had pounding machines they would fire up early in the morning, and pound kava all day. That was what put food on the table for ‘Anau’s family,” he says.

Kava became an easy entryway into learning more about his new family. “I got into drinking it because I wanted to learn how to speak Tongan and learn about the culture,” Henry says. “I thought, maybe they won’t like this palangi dude being there, but once you feel the effects of kava, nobody’s gonna be mean to you. I found [after] marrying a Tongan, they just treat you like a Tongan.”

Henry often hears that he should have set up shop on Auckland’s risque strip Karangahape Road (a suggestion that makes him laugh, because can you imagine dealing with all those drunks?), but this pocket of Victoria Park was his and ‘Anau’s final bet before giving up on the kava lounge dream. The couple had tried 10 different locations before ending up here, as potential landlords quickly closed their doors after discovering they were planning to set up a kava business.

“The hardest part of setting [Four Shells] all up was finding a landlord that would rent us a space for kava,” Henry says. “The question would come up: ‘what do you want to do here?’ Well, we want to have a kava lounge.” He says he dealt with “patronising” landlords who “would just ghost us, and a couple times people told us it was a ‘dumb idea, it won’t work, we don’t want drunk Samoans coming’ … It’s tied in deeply with racism, people looking at kava like, ‘brown people drink that, we don’t want them around here.’”

The muddied reputation kava is now suffering from its kratom association further fuels this kind of racism, Henry argues. There is no food as misunderstood as kava, and he says Shopify’s decision to remove Four Shell’s store undermines centuries of cultural tradition in favour of misconception. The online store is still closed, and Henry will now apply to use a new payment provider other than Apple Pay to regain access. Letting the issue slide seemed like it would have been more harmful than if they didn’t challenge it, lest they set an example for other kava businesses to be looked over by big corporations, he says. “It feels like it could be the tip of the iceberg for kava.”

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