The earth did not move

I spent the day yesterday moving into a Confederate state. Without ever leaving my building I clocked 16K steps.

By 1730, I had connectivity and DVR, found enough sheets and blankets to make my bed and ordered delivery pizza, which you can eat without knives and forks. (I have yet to unpack the cutlery, although I did find the compostable paper plates I nicked from my employer for exactly this purpose six years ago.)

I also have been mainlining Naproxen.

Well—it’s a start.

Social platform

You know, it’s bad enough that the presidential election idiocy has pushed its way into time more than 15 months before the actual, you know, election. It frankly feels to me as though we’ve had a parade of political buffoons passing before my consciousness since about 2013, and I’m heartily sick of every single one of them.

(And this is just the presidential wannabes. I’ve come to hold everyone in both houses of Congress and most of the judiciary branch in permanent contempt. Only their position on the list changes from time to time.)

I used to get some measure of relief by not watching any live TV and fast-forwarding through the increasingly frequent and abusive political ads. Because: Internet.

But Facebook is definitely pushing its way up my nose with its attempts to force politicrap on me, regardless of how many times I try to click it away.

However am I going to make it to November?

Early childhood development

Well, of course, I don’t know, but my best guess is that this will not end well:

 

 

 

Google hangout

I don’t recall off-hand what occasioned this appearing in my Twitter feed, but since yesterday was one of those days where you just can’t seem to win for losing, this is all I got to give you:

Gratitude Monday: Assistive technology

I very often crab about technology—“hot” apps that are more style than substance solving extremely limited first-world problems (e.g., a valet parking app for those times when you can’t be arsed to find a parking space in San Francisco, or maybe Manhattan, but not many other places, and you’re perfectly willing to give complete strangers access to your credit card details and your car); arrogant subscription policies; crappy user experience.

So allow me a little space for a petty bit of personal gratitude: for the past couple of months I’ve had my first access to Netflix, along with a large (by my standards) TV. Even though I don’t think it does a great job of letting you find out what they actually have in their library, I’ve been ridiculously happy to be able to watch full seasons of Foyle’s War, cherry pick some favorite episodes of Quantum Leap and ferret out the occasional actual, you know, film.

The other night, in fact, I wallowed in one of my all-time best-loved rom-coms, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. What delight!

And I could pause it to run to the kitchen and top up my wine, fast-forward over parts I’m not wild about and rewind and re-view those I especially like.

Now, this is technology without a downside: on-demand video. And I say hurrah for it.

The really bottom line

With respect to yesterday’s report on my experience with Verizon Fios even before they start delivering what they’re pleased to call service, and in the light of every experience I’ve ever had with Comcast over the years, here’s what I take away.

This is how miserable they are even when they are in competition. In the Valley They Call Silicon I could have gone with AT&T or satellite, although I admit that Comcast offered a more robust technical capability. And in the current situation, the building is wired for both Comcast and Fios.

They are literally sharing the same conduits.

And yet they still feel free to jerk their customers and potential customers around like latter-day robber barons with secure monopolies.

Way to go, free-market capitalism, way to go.

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.