Making connectivity suck

You know that scene in Casablanca in the marketplace where Rick is trying to make nice with Ilsa, who’s pretending to look at some textiles so she doesn’t have to talk with him? And the cloth vendor keeps holding up new, lower, prices as it becomes clear to him during the conversation that she’s in the “special friends of Rick” category?

Well, dealing with ISPs is like that, except that they start out with their “special friends of Rick” pricing on their website, and you end up paying much, much more and geting much, much less than that when the installer and the bill arrive.

Case in point: because I’ve been in the dark realm of Comcast for the past 15 years, I thought that this time around I’d try Fios from Verizon. Leaving aside the issue that their website is a very miracle of obfuscation and endless loops that take you from screen to screen without giving you information that’s of any help in making a, you know, informed decision, so that you’re driven to speak with a telephone rep or enter into one of those dreaded chat sessions, it doesn’t matter which way you go at it: you’re screwed.

 Here was my starting point: bundled phone, Internet and TV at $69.99 per month, no two-year contract.

 

Note the “100 Mbps Internet”. That seems pretty clear, no?

But even after spending 20 minutes on the phone with one of their fast talkers, here’s the price point I ended up with: $106.36, for a bundle that includes Internet at 20/5 Mbps. (Oh—and this actually is a two-year contract. Imagine that!)

The extra $40 is for the equipment that’s necessary to deliver these services (the modem, router and set-top box). Meaning: the $69.99 is for Verizon to push the services to your walls. If you actually want to use them, you have to cough up the extra dosh.

In fact, there is no option for purchasing the set-top box; you’re completely stuffed. So the $69.99 “deal” is…at a minimum, bait-and-switch.

 

 

(Kind of like airfares, when you come to think of it. You know—they advertise one-way tickets between SFO and JFK for $229, but when time comes to give them your credit card details, you’re on the hook for $474.)

But the Internet speed is another stab in the side. When I called their sales line to ask what’s up with the promised 100 Mbps but stipulated delivery of 20 Mbps download, I was told that the offer is “up to 100 Mbps” (which, as you’ll note, is not what they actually say on the website), and that I’m only getting 20 Mbps because we’re talking about a multi-unit building, and that’s all they can do.

(They don’t even qualify that 100 Mbps in the fine print, which you have to scroll down to the bottom of the page to find.)

 

Well, they could muster up 30 Mbps, but that costs another $20 per month.

But wait—there’s more. For some reason I looked at the delivery order and didn’t see any mention of DVR capability, so I spent another 20 minutes on a chat with “Destiny”, one of their agents. That’s an extra service, too. To the tune of $12 per month.

See how quickly it adds up? I’m not even watching any premium channels. I’m getting very basic TV, phone and much slower Internet than I’d been led to believe, and I’m paying 65% more than the come-on price.

Seriously—if this isn’t bait and switch, it’s just plain demanding money with menaces. Verizon is moving its way down to Comcast status before they’ve even stepped foot in my house.

This is not the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

 

"In case you're really this stupid..."

I’m seeing more of these messages on various websites—companies chastising me for using ad blocking applications of many stripes. It’s on all kinds of sites, from the penny-ante ones right up to the big boys.

But basically I agree with this sentiment:

Because—what the hell?

Piss off, Facebook

Between Facebook prompting me to find out what “people are saying” about every step in this presidential election and foisting “memories” on me, I rather wish I were still in the Valley They Call Silicon so I could deposit some sort of memory on their doorstep.

It’s not like I don’t click the Close-X on the former every time it presents itself to me, or on the “Hide post” box every time that presents itself to me.

I even walk through the extremely limited and kludgy interface that they give you to tell them which dates and people you want to block.

(And isn’t it interesting that they don’t give you the option of never displaying used memories ever again, and that they frame your preferences in terms of “blocking” people, like you’re being anti-social?)

I find it both annoying and insulting that they’ve built their little algorithms on the premise that Facebook knows better how to live my life (both past and present) than I do.

Gratitude Monday: Modern finance

I had occasion to need certified funds last week, which set me into a tizzy. The last time I needed such an instrument, 2011, with my credit union five hundred miles away from me, I had to get a cash advance on a credit card, which carries extortionate fees, and then withdraw my daily limit from local ATMS over a period of five and pay slightly less criminal fees to get five money orders from the USPS.

We’ve progressed a bit in the past few years, though. Turns out my credit union now has “shared branches” with other suchlike across the country, and I could go to one a few blocks from my office and get a cashier’s check. At least that’s what Claudia at Kinecta Federal Credit Union’s customer service line told me on Wednesday. Problem solved, I thought.

Well, come Friday, I walked over to the DVA Federal Credit Union office in Chinatown and entered quite a blast from another planet.

The branch was a quasi-subterranean bare-bones affair with nothing but a roped-in queue to three tellers behind four-inch bullet-proof Plexiglas windows between them and customers. (My credit union in Sunnyvale was a carpeted expanse with a receptionist and nothing but completely open counters for the tellers.) Immediately I was struck by the pervasive stench of stale cigarettes and alcohol.

I waited in the queue, filled out the “shared branch” paperwork, waited again and then ran up against a snag: evidently my credit union imposes a limit on the amount that a member can withdraw via a shared branch. (Don’t know why, or who sets the arbitrary limit; perhaps they’re worried that you could be in the hands of kidnappers and this is so they’ll know you can’t raise the full ransom they’re demanding, so they’ll let you go. Or kill you.) So I had to call their customer “service” line again, and waited 28 minutes until one of the apparently three representatives they have working at any given time picked up.

(The details of this are for a different post, but let me just state the blindingly obvious: any customer “service” line that makes you wait more than five minutes to have a humanoid answer your call is telling you in unequivocal terms that their time is vastly more important than yours. And you’ll notice that they always manage to staff their sales line more fully than their customer support line.)

So, eventually Penita got the ransom-foiling limit raised, and I got back in line again.

And that’s when I realized that someone was having a much worse day than I was.

I’d had time to notice that almost every customer in the credit union was taking out cash—maybe depositing a paycheck, maybe just making a withdrawal. I didn’t get the details (because it was taking place behind that Plexiglas wall). But they clearly were living in a cash economy.

This one fellow was apparently trying to deposit/cash his paycheck, but he didn’t have either his account number or a photo ID and the teller couldn’t take it. The man would have to go wherever these documents were kept and return, but of course he couldn’t do that before the office closed at 1600. And he needed the cash because he had bills to pay. The teller was adamant, however, and eventually the guy left.

Now, I’d got myself entirely wound up about the transaction that I needed to complete, but if I hadn’t been able to do it, I would still have had options. Not pleasant ones, but viable nonetheless. This guy—not so much.

When I finally got back up to the Plexiglas wall, the teller crept her way through the issuing of my check. It was hard to hear each point of the transaction, even through the gouged-out “communication” portal. But when I finally realized that she was asking if there was anything else she could do for me, this slipped out before I could stop it: “No. Not unless you’re serving drinks.”

That amused some of the queuers, but not the teller. I collected my check and bolted, back to a great job that deposits my pay electronically into my accounts in an institution that has electronic bill payment capabilities.

This is something I don’t typically think about unless there’s some kind of glitch in any of the processes. But when you do think of it, it’s a wonder of modern technology, and as it happens I’m truly grateful for it.

Bleeding white

A hundred years ago the war on the Western Front had been on for a year and a half, with no change in the battle lines since September 1914. Hundreds of thousands of men dead, of course. But static emplacements marked by long gashes in the farmland of Northern France and Belgium.

The strategy on both sides was in broad strokes identical: periodically lob a few extra tons of artillery shells at the enemy and throw a couple of divisions into the expected breach. The results were also identical no matter who was attacking or defending: massive casualties on both sides with no discernable gains or losses in territory.

Basically your classic definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.

In a slight variant on this strategy, on 21 February 1916, the German army opened fire on the area around Verdun, France, in a campaign designed by Chief of Staff General Erich von Falkenhayn specifically to “bleed the French army white.” The idea was to create such a meat-grinder around the town (perceived as too important to national dignity to lose) that France would keep feeding troops into its defense until there wasn’t anyone left.

What Falkenhayn failed to take into consideration was the cost to his own army that such an endeavor would entail. Under the battle cry, "Ils ne passeront pas!" ("They shall not pass!"), future Maréchal Philippe Pétain devised a system for rotating troops into and out of the meat grinder that maintained the defense, although not without a price. By the time it all wound down on 18 December, somewhere in the vicinity of 750,000 casualties had been sustained, almost evenly distributed across both sides. Maybe half of them were killed; quite a butchers bill for a single battle.

(It was also partly with the intention of relieving the pressure on the French at Verdun that the British conceived the catastrophic Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916.)

The town itself was surrounded by a circuit of forts, including Douaumont and Vaux. The lightly defended Douaumont fell early on to a daring raid by a small German force, but Vaux held out until it was the focus of an attack in June. The garrison of the underground structure had suffered months of heavy artillery bombardment, and were reduced to eating rats and licking water from the walls. By the time they were captured, many were raving mad, and their comrades had had to live with them as well as the shelling.

I spent about 40 minutes inside that fort once, when the hallways were lighted and the surroundings were quiet. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

The woman who ran the place asked me what I thought of it as I was leaving. I could barely speak, because those guys held out from February until June, and I could not imagine living in that tomb for that amount of time, forget about the constant shelling. My comrades would have strangled me (saving ammo) in less than a week, because I’d have gone insane. I told her it was oppressive, even in its benign state—quiet and safe. Imagine, she said, what it was like in the filth and dark and damp, with constant shelling and vermin swarming over you.

To tell you the truth, I don’t know how anyone can visit Verdun without sitting on the ground and howling.

The land has taken back a lot of the ugliness that exploded around Verdun a hundred years ago. Douaumont is ghostly in the morning mist and the ground softly rises and falls where the artillery shells left a splintered, shattered moonscape.

You can follow another circuit around Verdun—that of the hamlets that once existed in the hills surrounding the town, which were destroyed in the ten months that the war came to town.

I was driving around that circuit around Verdun, following the signs to the “villages détruites”. So I parked at the parking lot for one of them, and was walking toward where the sign pointed to “village détruite”, and I was getting pissed off because I couldn’t find the flipping village. And eventually I started stomping back, muttering, “those bloody Frogs, honestly, etc., etc., etc.” And I decided to cut through the trees to get to the car park. And the ground’s a little gribbly—you know, not even. And all of a sudden I realized that I was in the village détruite.

I’d expected to find a couple of walls, a chimney, something ghostly, maybe; the skeletons of the buildings. But all there was were some foundations that had long since been claimed back by the grass and brush. Nothing above ground, no sign of the houses, the boulangerie, the café; all the elements of French village life.

When they said “détruite”, that’s precisely what they meant. Utterly destroyed. Nothing at all left. Razed. Not a single thing there to indicate habitation.

But Verdun never fell. and as for Falkenhayn’s strategy of bleeding the French Army white…he was one of the first generals I wanted to bitch-slap when I was in college because even a Valley Girl could tell that he was kind of missing something with that.

And the insanity would continue.

Snow in the city

After working Saturday and Sunday at a conference, I was quite looking forward to having Monday off. Presidents’ Day, don’t you know.

I was also looking forward to Sears delivering a refrigerator to replace the one here that packed it in a week before.

However, when I got up Monday there was more than a dusting of snow, and it came down most of the day. Which meant no refrigerator; now rescheduled for next Monday. Maybe.

But I’ll admit that the snow looked pretty if you weren’t concerned about being able to eat at home. Viz. the Madison building at the Library of Congress:

Science grows on trees

In the exhibition hall at the AAAS Annual Meeting, they had something I found interesting: a Science Wish Tree. Well, three of them.

The deal was they had red tags for scientists to write down their greatest wishes, and blue ones for the non-scientists.

A couple of the reds:

Including one that seems to have a bit of an edge:

And a couple of blues:

To be honest, I’m not sure that people understood the red/blue significance, because I’m not finding a distinction between practitioner and non-practitioner issues. However, here’s one that articulates definite science pain:

The family of science

You see some interesting sights when you visit the Family Science Days at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I was there this weekend, and the place was a positive hive of activity. It really was a treat to watch the way even the smallest kids got wrapped up around various scientific inquiries.

The adults were a hoot, too.

Here are a couple of shots—one of the posters on display:

(What animal do you see?)

And one of…well, the embodiment of the science of Africa booth:

Conference capitalism

Working a booth for three days at a conference gave me a lot of time to consider the closed ecosystem of the conference venue/hotel.

In this particular case, it was the Marriott Wardman Park, but it could have been pretty much anywhere. The Marriott WP is in the Woodley Park/Adams Morgan neighborhood of the District They Call Columbia, so it’s not like it’s the only place out in the middle of nowhere. But it’s still closed.

If you don’t want to take your food and drink from the hotel, you have to walk outside to one of the eateries on Connecticut Avenue or Woodley. And if you’re dodging between seminars, workshops and sessions, that’s extra time you don’t have. (The conference provided no food to the general attendees, so you fended for yourself.)

Moreover, this past weekend we had temperatures in the 20s, with a wind chill even lower, so making that short trek was even more daunting a prospect.

The hotel was Metro-accessible, so that’s how my colleagues and I got there the first day. But on the second, one of them drove in and parked in the Marriott’s garage. He commented, “I realized the hotel’s business model: extortion.”

And that’s basically what you get in that closed eco-system. Everything comes with that we-can-get-away-with-this surcharge. If you didn’t want to bundle up and brave the arctic wind outside, you just sucked it up. A plain brewed (not even cold-brewed; whatever that is) coffee is $4, and don’t even think about refills. So is an apple or a banana. A bare-bones sandwich is $8. A prepacked salad of a fistful of greens and a slice of tomato is $10.

And parking your car for two hours is $26.

But it’s more than that. The closed ecosystem means that service is also we-can-get-away-with-this lackadaisical. Things get done (ish) when they get done. Or they don’t.

This point was driven home to me on Friday, when a colleague and I went to get one of those overpriced sandwiches at a coffee-and-prepacked sandwich stand, the only budget (relatively) alternative to the hotel bar or restaurant. It being lunchtime, the line to pay was extensive, and nearly immobile. I noticed two contributory factors:

In an age where everything related to credit card transactions is done electronically, with purchases under $20 requiring no signature, the Marriott’s sandwich stand printed out receipts and required customers to sign them. (With the line for the tip included, so at a minimum you had to zero that out and write in the total in addition to your signature.)

But then one of the two women working the cash registers picked up her cash drawer and walked away. Apparently her shift was over, and there was no replacement. Twenty people lined up were not a concern at all.

Closed ecosystem. It’s like the Mafia, but with sales tax.

Gratitude Monday: A day off

I’ve spent the past three days working a booth at a conference. Even though I didn’t have to stand through the whole thing, as I’ve done at other conferences and trade shows, I’m still completely knackered, because I was “fronting” a product I know very little about. That kind of thing just beats the daylights out of you.

So today—on what should have been the third day of a three-day weekend—I’m grateful to finally have a day off. I’m thinking bacon and French toast and finishing yesterday’s Washington Post.