Close encounter

You know, on the whole, I really love Twitter. I don’t know where else I’d come across something like this:

Not actually Number 1

I rented a car last week to drive down to Palm Springs. My car runs fine, but on a 500-mile each-way trip down California’s Central Valley, I just feel better knowing that if something goes wrong, someone else is going to have to fix it.

Plus, there’s a Hertz store about a mile from me, which means I can walk there and back. And usually it’s a decent experience.

But this time—whoo.

I got a deal on an “intermediate” class car—although I have to say that I don’t know when Corollas became “intermediate”. As a Gold Club reservation, the damned thing should have been waiting for me, but the rep at the counter had to fish around for it—it was in the computer, but not in the slot.

Then he told me, “The tank ¾ full.” What? When did Hertz start handing out vehicles without a full tank? What a crock. But imagine my surprise when the instant I drove out onto El Camino the needle dropped to 5/8 of a tank.

This really irritates me—first of all, not giving you a full tank not only means you’re starting your journey not fully ready. But it’s also much more difficult to fill fuel to a particular line on the dial instead of full-up. The likelihood is that you’ll either over-fill, and they won’t credit you for excess; or you’ll under-fill, and they’ll charge you $9/gallon to hit the mark. (And of course you don’t know whether they hit that mark or just keep on filling it.)

It makes me think Hertz is trying to chisel its customers for a couple of gallons of petrol every time, and that they think we won’t notice. Which is kind of a crappy approach to customer experience.

Moreover, the Jetta I was given about gagged me with the perfumed car-freshener smell. And it has the least ergonomic steering wheel design I’ve ever seen. Try driving that for 500 miles and see how flexible you are when you get out.

But the worst thing was—the car had no cruise control, and I didn’t think to check until I started out at 0200 the next morning. Who the hell even makes cars without cruise control? (Well, Volkswagen, apparently, but WTF?)

Let me just say that the 300 miles down the central valley were a gigantic pain in the tusch, literally. And that, without CC, your tendency is to speed. Partly because you can’t keep your eye on the speedometer all the time, and partly because you subconsciously just want to get the bloody drive over.

Well, made it to PS, saw family and friends, and drove back up in record time. And I did manage to add just enough (I hope) fuel to reach the 5/8 mark (I’d called the store the evening I picked it up and had them change the contract) before I returned it to Hertz.

And I completely cracked up when the rep handed me the receipt with an invitation on the back to take an online survey. “If you rate us 9, you’ll get $25 off your next rental,” he advised. And he wrote it on the receipt so I’d not forget:

Nine is the highest rank you can give on that all-important Net Promoter Score (NPS—“How likely are you to recommend us to family or friends?”).

Seriously, Hertz? What kind of low-rent pathetic enterprise collects “voice of the customer” information that’s completely invalid because your employees tell them they have to give the top rating to get a $25 discount?

Guess what score I gave them?

O brave new world

This story came to me Sunday, through Twitter-pal UK Cop Humour, who usually tweets a lot of silly stuff. But this one is different.

Background: there have been a lot of cutbacks to frontline policing in the UK—I don’t know the details, but there have been huge numbers of tweets about it, and the basic research I’ve done indicates the usual: Parliament demands value for money, do more with less, etc. Same thing for fire and ambulance services, and public (NHS) hospitals.

(As an aside, and you can interpret the politics on your own, Parliament has also just voted themselves an 11% pay raise. This was their response to the continuing scandals about what they were claiming as expenses—well, if we can’t be reimbursed for theatre tickets, duck blinds and packets of crisps, then I need to make much more than £66,396 per year for a half-time job. And, Bob’s-yer-uncle, an extra £7300!)

You should read this story all the way through because you need to catch the tone, but the summary is that—apparently due to budgetary cutbacks—a local station in some unnamed city was deemed adequately staffed at four officers…to cover 12 square miles…on a Saturday night.

Listen—12 square miles in any British city is going to include double- or triple-digit numbers of bars, clubs, pubs, liquor stores and other venues that invite all kinds of troublemaking, so to declare minimally-acceptable staffing on a Saturday night as four officers is kind of eye opening to begin with.

But the story’s not about that—not directly, anyway. It’s about a cop being called out to the home of a 95-year-old woman, whom he calls Doris for purposes of narration (and I’m referring to the constable as “he” for purposes of narration, as well, since I don’t know his/her anatomical disposition), who needs an ambulance to take her to the hospital that discharged her only hours before. Doris had got up at 2100 to make a cup of tea, slipped, fallen and cracked her head. It took her four hours to drag herself to the phone to call 999; at the time of the call, no ambulance “could commit”, so they sent out one quarter of the available police, the only one not already involved in some action.

Once at the scene, our guy tried for two hours to get an ambulance to take Doris to hospital…a couple of miles away. He couldn’t move her for fear of breaking something—she’s 95, for pity’s sake, and he’s only got himself there. He couldn’t even get her sitting up without massive pain, so she lay on the floor until finally, at 0320, the paramedics arrived. It took these trained professionals 40 minutes to get her into their bus and stabilized for the journey.

Well, the bare bones of this story don’t do it justice, so you have to read the original. Because the anguish, the frustration, the helplessness and maybe some fear, are all evident in the cop’s account. Which, he points out, is going to repeat by some order of magnitude when they close down his station and move those four officers seven miles away. To save money.

(I’m sitting here wondering how many police stations or extra ambulances could be funded by the approximately £4.75M per year MP raises will amount to. But I understand we’re talking different pots of money. And nobody’s going to pry that dosh from the parliamentary fists. As with pols pretty much the world over, when it comes to money, they’ve got the grip of a pit bull.)

Now, here’s the thing that struck me about this: at age 95, Doris has survived the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, the General Strike of 1926, the Great Depression, World War II, post-war austerities that lasted through much of the 1950s, Thatcher and a whole raft of other things. This is obviously a woman with heart and nerve, even if her joints are rheumatic and her step a bit uncertain.

And the 1942 Beveridge report that led to post-war social changes in Britain was based on the notion that everyone had made sacrifices to defeat Nazism, and therefore the nation owed its citizens some basic things—housing, education, employment, healthcare. You can make the case that subsequent generations have taken the piss over this social contract, and God knows that the NHS is completely swamped and falling further behind every day.

But the Dorises of Britain fucking earned these services, including not being discharged from hospital if there was any question of her ability to care for herself (no intermediary care facility? WTF?), and to have an ambulance respond without having its metaphoric ankles chewed on for hours. By cops—so they knew the need was genuine. Even, as our narrator points out, deploying a pair of constables might at least have got Doris comfortable for that unconscionable wait.

As you know, I’m acutely aware of emergency services here in the Valley they call Silicon—every time the engines from Fire Station No. 4 roll I listen for any follow-on sirens on El Camino that might indicate there’s something really awful going on.

But it’s all awful; whenever these guys are called out, it’s always awful for someone. As the story of Doris and our lone, frustrated, helpless cop illustrates. So there’s just something fundamentally wrong about this situation.

I’m not talking about fairness—we all know that life isn’t fair. This is about a social contract made with people like Doris, which her elected government has reneged on; in fact, her elected government is pretending it doesn’t exist.

I understand that the budgetary problems didn’t show up last week; they’ve been building for decades. And there are multiple layers of causes and blah, blah, blah. And for all the people involved in the various melees, robberies, road accidents and whatnot that went on while our constable remained with Doris—really sorry your government thinks that four officers constitutes adequate staffing for a Saturday night.

Meanwhile, the Dorises of the country lie in pain on their floor, the constables are weeping (inside if not outright) at their inability to help, and Parliament is spending £65,000 to do up a couple of toilets for the House of Lords because what they have now isn’t befitting their status in the world.

O brave new world indeed that has such people in’t!

Gratitude Monday: Peter O'Toole

Gratitude Monday, and I’m remembering the amazing presence of Peter O’Toole in some fabulous films over the past…well, 50-some years. He died yesterday at age 81.

It was a seven-day wonder, of course, that he lived that long, given the amount of booze he drank and hell he raised throughout his remarkable life.

It’s interesting to me that all the obits I saw had headlines along the lines of “Lawrence of Arabia star dies”—when that was about his third film; out of nearly 100. Well, Lawrence was stunning, and O’Toole tore up the desert with his performance; he’s probably what everyone pictures when they think of T.E. Lawrence.

But he also owned the persona of Henry II, playing the younger king in Becket, and then the, well, The Lion in Winter. He tore up the castles in both of those, duking it out with fellow hell-raiser Richard Burton in the former and Katharine Hepburn in the latter. You probably didn’t even notice Anthony Hopkins as Richard in that one, because O’Toole and Hepburn just commanded the screen. 

And then there was The Stunt Man; and The Last Emperor. Even King Ralph—shoot, I bought him as hereditary king of Britain.

O’Toole took a wide range of roles—some because he needed the money, and some, I think, out of sheer cheekiness. Or maybe it was bloody-mindedness.

But the one I love the most was as the past-his-prime swashbuckling film star doing a guest stint with a live 1950s TV show in My Favorite Year. By the time this film was made, O’Toole’s drinking had caused him so many problems he was actually on the wagon. But he gave a bravura performance as the alcoholic actor with more mettle than you might have expected.

Well, I expect O’Toole is probably having a major discussion somewhere with Burton, Oliver Reed and Richard Harris. If booze is on offer, everyone else better watch out, because the convo will get raunchy and the fists will probably fly.

We’ve lost a Titan, but I’m truly grateful for the gift of Peter O’Toole in the movies I grew up with. Damn, I’m going to miss him.

Better than flying reindeer

Last year Canadian airline WestJet made the prestigious Parallax Views Holiday Flash Mobs list, as you may recall. They seemed like a company that knows how to have a good time.

And, of course, breaking up the tension at airports, especially during the stressful holiday travel season is always a good thing. As long as it doesn’t disrupt the actual takeoff and landing schedule.

But I believe they’ve topped themselves.

This year they picked a couple of Toronto-to-Calgary flights to give their passengers just that little bit extra: they had a virtual Santa Claus ask what they wanted for Christmas at Toronto, and by the time they arrived in Calgary, the gifts came out—wrapped—onto the baggage carousel.

The gifts ranged up to and including a big-screen TV.

Take a look:

(I’m betting the guy who asked for socks and underwear wishes he could have a do-over.)

Frankly, it looks to me like the WestJet employees who went shopping and wrapping had at least as good a time as the passengers.

I wonder what they’ll do next year?

It's in the mail again

I had one last package to send for the holidays, and I finally got it all suited up to mail on Friday. I went to the USPS Agnew Station in Santa Clara, figuring I’d try for something different from Sunnyvale.

Only it turns out that the US Postal Service basically trains all its customer-facing employees in techniques of idiocy, disdain and general unhelpfulness.

As with both Sunnyvale stations, there was quite a line; and as with every post office I’ve been to in the past several months (Los Altos, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara), they only had two windows open.

I had plenty of time to observe the three staffers (as one came up to serve passport applicants, another just closed her window and walked away) display the maximum of disinterest in their job and the public.

When I finally got up to the counter, the woman threw a hissy fit because my return address had only my street, number and zip code. “You have to have the city! And the state!” “The zip code incorporates not only the city and state, but a specific area within the city; that’s the definitive placer.” “You have to have the city and the state.”

(Which, BTW, I did not on any of the packages I’d mailed three days before. Maybe it’s a Santa Clara thing. Or maybe it’s just a “you have to have something wrong with this package” thing.)

Whatever.

But my packages are sent; they are in the hands of the shipping gods.

And next year I’m going UPS. Enough is freaking enough.

Deck the halls and lawns

You know, you just gotta love people here in the Valley they call Silicon; tradition just means…who knows what to them.

I’ve already mentioned how they go whole hog on decorating for Halloween. Turns out they have a somewhat different take on the whole yule thing.

Here’s one:

Because nothing says Christmas like Darth Vader duking it out with Yoda. Especially since they’re on the same lawn as a whole Snoopy contingent.

Then there’s the house that just can’t get beyond Halloween:

But one that quite grabs my attention is the one so full of joy...

That it has no fewer than three nativity scenes out:

Plus Mickey, Minnie and the Peanuts gang behind one of the nativities.

Since I first took those pictures, they’ve added this sign urging us to simplify the holiday. Which I find rather droll.

Shooting story

For my birthday this year, a friend gave me a Canon PowerShot P&S camera. It replaces the POS Nikon I bought a couple of years ago, which went bad shortly after the warranty expired. (That clunker makes me rethink ever getting another Nikon product, and I’ve been shooting with them since I was in high school. In fact, my Nikon rangefinder was what inspired the name of this blog.)

That POS replaced my old Canon PowerShot. And look how they’ve compressed the tech, from 2003 to 2013:

This baby will pretty much do everything except the dinner dishes. But what they’ve also trimmed back is what they send you by way of operating instructions. The little green-rimmed thing is what comes with the camera. It’s divided into English and Spanish versions so you barely get 70pp of info. 

They expect you to use their online user manual—online meaning it doesn’t just come on a CD, but you have to be connected to the Internet to access it. You can’t download it onto your hard drive.

And it’s a PDF file with no way to get through it except by paging through—no hyperlinks, no go-to-index option. Seriously, Canon—WTF?

What I ended up doing was emailing their support people and whining that I can’t read the dag-blamed online manual, so would they please send one to me. They didn’t want to—“We have to print it out. On 8.5” x 11” paper”—but I insisted.

And what arrived was indeed on letter-sized paper. One hundred ninety-five pages worth. That’s how complex this puppy is.

Anyhow, I love my new toy, and I’ve been slowly figuring out the various functions. Playing a lot with low-light shooting, taking pictures of latte art and carrying it around when I take walks. It's even inspired me to pick up the DSLR and try to learn more about its functions.

Color me happy. And digital.

Gratitude Monday: Mechanical perfection

I was reminded last week of how great it is to have a good auto mechanic, where you can take your no-longer-in –production car for maintenance and repairs, know they’ll be done right and that they’re not going to rip you off on the charges.

I’m so grateful for Swedish Auto Factory in Santa Clara—a small shop that I’ve come to know well in the three years I’ve been in the Valley they call Silicon. (A lot better than I would have liked, on account of having to replace the antenna something like six times in the past two years. There was one period a few months ago when I had it replaced three times in four weeks.)

Dan, the owner, always calls me “kiddo”, which would be enough to make me propose marriage, except that I know he already is. And he never ridiculed me for the whole aerial thing, which I really appreciated.

SAF specialized exclusively in Saabs and Volvos for a long time. When Saab went down the GM drain, they added on Subarus to try to make up for the lost business. But apparently that’s not filled the hole, so last week, when I went in for an oil change (and an adjustment to the parking brake, because it…well, it just wasn’t holding at all. And I would have gone in earlier if there’d been anything wrong with the foot brakes, but, you know, you can’t take the key out of the ignition unless it’s in Reverse, so that always holds it…), they had a banner out proclaiming them “European Auto Specialists”.

Although they’re still servicing Subarus.

Dan appreciated my contribution to their bottom line but six aerials in two years apparently does not feed the bulldog.

I hope they find the right mix, because I have no plans to give up a car that doesn’t even have 90K miles on it and runs fine (if you don’t mind having to occasionally thump the back panel to get the antenna to retract), and it’s so hard to find good, honest mechanics who treat their customers as well as they treat their customers’ cars.

So today I’m grateful for SAF, and hope that other drivers in the area come to appreciate them, too.

The truth about cats and dogs

I really got a giggle out of this research undertaken at the University of Tokyo: it seems (after an eight-month study of 20 animals) that cats actually do recognize their, uh, owner’s voices when they call. But they just don’t care.

The astounding thing about this study is that anyone felt the need to conduct it. All you’d have to do is ask a couple of feline-servants, and we’d have told you. For nothing.

Actually, I believe that Gary Larson nailed the whole cats/dogs vocal recognition thing 30 years ago. Tokyo researchers—I give you this for nothing, too.