Back to the stone age with Verizon

When I was working for a college newspaper, the professors/advisers used to threaten less conscientious reporters with going to press with a huge white hole in a page, slugged “This blank space brought to you by [name of reporter who didn’t get copy in by deadline].”

Well, today’s hot steaming pile of white space is brought to you by Verizon FiOS, a company that has accomplished what I had not thought possible: it’s made me wish I had Comcast back.

Both phone and Internet service went belly up on Wednesday. When I called their we-won’t-help line and got Eric somewhere in the Philippines, he ran a line test and informed me that the problem was with “the big box”. (Not the first time since I moved in two months ago that I’ve had to call Verizon about equipment failure.) This turned out to be the high-rise apartment building equivalent of the customer premises equipment (CPE) box that regulates the “last mile” of wire from a central line to each customer’s unit.

And Verizon would have a technician out to look at it…sometime between 0900 and 1700 on Thursday.

Checking yesterday on the Verizon trouble ticket got me this:

Their idea of "working hard" is a possible fix two days after the failure is reported.

So, without access to my normal blogging device (i.e., personal laptop), I’m doing a quick bootleg post from work.

Where I’m also checking out Comcast services. Because their equipment is working fine in my apartment building.

Low-riding

Okay, I’ll confess that this is something I never saw in the Valley They Call Silicon:

I’m guessing it’s some sort of motorcycle cover that was dislodged by winds or possibly would-be thieves. But it looks remarkably like a two-wheeled version of sagging.

Drive by

On one of my walks around the ‘hood I encountered something that nearly transported me back to the Valley They Call Silicon. Because y’all know how much I love making stories out of car art.

This sticker was a first:

And of course it was on a Prius.

The spook in the 'hood

I’ve written before about how big Halloween seems to be in the yard-decoration stakes in the Valley They Call Silicon. Some displays take weeks to install, and I wonder where the zombies and tombstones live for the other 11 months of the year.

This was not a big deal, that I recall, during my last sojourn in a Confederate state, but recent walks around my NoVa neighborhood makes me wonder.

Only about a block and a half from my current residence I encountered this as a permanent installation, in the front yard of a house that is otherwise perfectly anodyne:

Gratitude Monday: The scent of spring

I rambled around my NoVa neighborhood on Saturday and Sunday. It’s an old one—well, reasonably old by Virginia standards. New construction is seeping into it, but for now, at least, the balance is in favor of houses that date well back into the early part of the last century.

The yards are old landscaping, too, which I really enjoy. Especially when I come across an abundance of flowers. No matter what kind of crappy mood I’m in, flowers on the hoof always lift my spirits.

And on both days, I experienced the joy of walking into a wall of the scent of wild roses before I actually paid attention to the shrubs.

And then there were the beautiful flowers themselves.

It’s been a while since I’ve had that kind of encounter, and I’m very grateful for being reminded that all sorts of beauty fill my life every day.

Crime wave

As I was walking past the Marriott at Metro Center yesterday I became engulfed in a swarm of spandex-clad cyclists, who turned out to be cops.

They were taking part in the Police Unity Tour, an annual event that raises money in honor of cops who have died in the line of duty. Participants come from police departments around the country.

Here’s what I thought, though: now might be the moment for someone to knock over a liquor store in Orlando, Fla., or Long Beach, N.J.

Social strategy

As long as I’m on the topic of web annoyances, let me remind you of promoted tweets. Those are the massively irrelevant ads-disguised-as-tweets that appear in your Twitter feed.

If you want to block them (meaning that the offending promoters’ content will never again darken your timeline) you have to go through a multi-click process. Yes, in the global scheme of things, clicking to rid yourself of pests is not onerous. But in social media terms, it’s a gigantic pain in the butt.

I do sometimes click on the tweets just to see the blowback they get from others also pissed off by the ads. That can be pretty amusing.

But I still wonder what the ROI is on these things, especially for the smaller businesses that think a few promoted tweets are going to take the place of real lead generation.

One example came into my feed yesterday:

It originated in October 2013. Do 23 retweets and 18 likes outweigh the hundreds of people who’ve blocked all of this company’s content for the past two and a half years?

Design creep

Well, isn’t this interesting—just one day after I happened to be discussing annoying web practices, I was doing some research on events management and came across something else that I’m seeing more frequently: online stalking.

I’m referring to the practice of having invitations to chat (or take some other action) not only pop up when you’re trying to ingest their content (in fact, before you’ve had a chance to read it), but also stalk you as you scroll down the page. Viz.:

And

I do not know what designers and companies are thinking with this, but I wish to hell they’d stop.

Yeah, okay—I do know what they’re thinking: they’re so eager for you to engage with a sales rep that they don’t care if you read their content; perhaps they don’t even want you to read it. I mean does anything shout “We want to sell you something NOW before you even know what it is” more clearly than blocking your access to the content, and continuing to block it as you try to move away from the damned box?

Not only that, it’s downright creepy to have that thing follow you about. It’s the online equivalent of Alex Forrest, and it does not encourage me to stick around your website, much less buy anything from you.

Round the block

Watching/using online properties is a fascinating experience. You’re a part of the struggle between Good and Evil on a daily basis, in so many ways. You don’t really need to pay $15 for a Star Wars franchise film (except for the Imax experience), because you get it whenever you hit a landing page.

Websites are becoming increasingly obnoxious about their ads—they literally explode in the middle of content, with (my biggest annoyance) loud videos just blazing into action and the close button nearly invisible.

Then there are the pop-up “sign up for our emails!” boxes that cover up the content about 12 seconds after you land. Very often you’re given only one option to make the obstruction disappear—enter an email address. (Although I’ve discovered that, even if they don’t provide a “Nope” choice, or a close-box button, if you just click outside the damned thing, it disappears. And if it doesn’t, I always decide that the content isn’t worth my time.)

Naturally, technologists saw the universal need in these scenarios, and thus were born any number of ad blockers, some native to the browser and some that you install as extensions. And as these products did their job, web publishers and advertisers upped their game to dodge, subvert and crush them.

Ergo the eternal war of Good and Evil.

For example, links to both Fortune and Forbes frequently are intercepted by a page that offers you a thought-for-the-day or some commercial message.

And I always wonder who it is, that one person out of their daily traffic of tens of thousands, who actually thinks, “Why, yes—I believe I’ll interrupt my quest for your pithy articles to watch some crappy commercial or ponder your faux-Zen management-lite truism.”

Recently I’ve noticed that Forbes is getting pushier about visitors to their site getting a free (at least an ad-free) ride.

I’m not the only one, as witnessed by this tweet that came across my feed:

But this is not the end of the story. Last week I was tracking down some information on events that Forbes puts on and I got into an endless loop of going-nowhere as the ad-blocker blocker refused to let me into the site, no matter how many times I clicked on the “continue to site” button. (I’d click and the page would refresh on itself.)

How did I solve the problem? I fired up Internet Explorer, used their crappy UX to get to the content page, and then closed it out again as soon as I got what I wanted.

I’m sure we’re due for more sophistication in ad blocking, to be followed by bigger hammers from the advertisers. I’m making more popcorn and settling in for the next chapter. It’ll be epic.

Gratitude Monday: I'll sleep on it

It’s a small thing today that I’m grateful for. Well, small and not-small. A bed. I’m grateful that, after nearly six months of make-do, I’ve got a real mattress and box spring to sleep on.

My previous set was way past its use-by date; I bought it around 1990, but I just never seemed to have the disposable income that would allow for replacing it. So it was always easier to not do anything about it than to go mattress shopping.

When I knew I was relocating across the country, I decided that ditching the set would be a forcing function, so that I could begin my new chapter on the East Coast with new sleeping arrangements.

(Getting it taken away turned out to be a Whole Thing, involving a company that promised way more than it delivered, causing me several new layers of stress on what’s already one of the life-shorteners. Maybe I’ll write about it at some point. Maybe not. But if you’re in the Bay Area, avoid an outfit calling itself Remoov.)

Once here, I mean, once in my new year-lease flat, it took me a while to summon up the energy and slime-repellant to go looking for mattresses. I don’t know why or how the sleep infrastructure industry turned into such a snake pit, but it rivals used cars and most medical procedures in terms of strategic avoidance of transparency and tactical bait-and-switch techniques.

So I went with Saatva, a direct-to-consumer online-only manufacturer. They weren’t nearly as transparent as they’d have you believe (they bury the fact that they charge $99 for delivery and set-up), and their response to me expressing my misgivings was to have some bolshie woman call to assure me that if I didn’t like their operating model I could take a hike. Which is certainly an interesting approach to customer satisfaction, particularly for something that costs more that five times what my first car did.

By that time, as I’d already told her, I was too tired to start the process over.

But my mattress did arrive (through some no-name delivery service) and it is such a luxury to be sleeping on a mattress, on a box spring, on a frame. I still have to deal with getting a headboard, but for the nonce, I’m just grateful to have my very own bed again. It’s a small thing, but huge for me.