Tag Archives: cell phone

Logic…

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I like keeping my phone on a belt clip. It’s geeky and will never be a fashion-correct approach, but it’s convenient and that trumps either of those other considerations. I’m also finicky about the clip and case combination I use. It probably won’t surprise anyone who knows me that I like things precisely the way I like them… and pretty much no other way. This past weekend, the clip caught on something and broke so I’ve been attempting to make due sans clip for the time being. That’s not going particularly well given the combination of pen knife, keys, and other random ephemera that ends up in my pockets.

Having dropped my phone more in the last four days than I’ve dropped any phone over the last four years, I’m forced to concede a change is in order. There’s a method to my madness, of course. Things here seldom happen without there being some underlying logic to them. Even if it’s logic that only makes sense between my own ears.

In a herculean fit of warped reasoning, it occurred to me that spending $30 on a clip to fit a phone I’m due to replace any time now is kind of like putting new tires on a car you’re about to trade in. In my mind, addled as it is by years of accounting for money in those special ways that only Uncle Sam can fathom, the more logical thing to do was to go ahead and buy a new phone and a new clip now instead of waiting another month or two. Let that percolate for a moment if you will. Somewhere in my head it sounded perfectly reasonable to spend $900 on a new phone and then $60 on a new case and clip than it did to spent $30 for a replacement clip to keep the old phone in operation a bit longer.

If anyone wants to know the exact date and time I realized I’ve spent too long working for the government it was Saturday, November 19th, 2016 around 2PM… When I decided spending $960 to save $30 somehow made sense. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed for the time being… though I still don’t have an acceptable or convenient way to keep my phone tethered to me at all times so the whole experience has been decidedly unsatisfying for all involved.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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The One Network that Rules Them All. When I got back to the office on Monday my computer didn’t work. Well, it worked, but the network didn’t. After 30 hours we stretched a Ethernet cable halfway to Baltimore so I could at least check email, but so far the official response has been “we have a help ticket in.” If you want an employee to be productive it feels like the minimum they should do is make sure you have basic office equipment that works. But alas, that seems to be a bridge too far.

National security. Apparently the cell phone storage area at the office presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States. The solution to this was to move the unlocked cabinet that contains 20-30 personally owned cell phones at any given time out into an open hallway. Perhaps we have served national security, but it feels like all we’ve really done is encourage property theft in the process. Call me crazy, but leaving an $800 phone unsecured in a building where people steal pie from the fridge feels just a little bit stupid. Net result, instead of being able to check my phone periodically during the day when I’m on my way to to meetings or go take a whiz, I’ll now be adopting a smoker’s schedule and schlepping out to my car once an hour. If only there were an easier way to be compliant and not try to pretend your employees live in 1983. Sigh.

Blaming others for bad personal decisions. Two douchebags were cornered in a cheap motel room by the police earlier this week in my adopted home town. Then they decided that being on the run from felony charges in another state wasn’t the only bad decision they wanted to make. One after another they raised their very realistic looking BB guns and very quickly paid the price for that level of stupidity. There are a couple of lessons here: 1) If you’re planning on making a last stand, try to have something with a bit more kick than a kid’s toy and 2) If you’re wanted on a felony warrant and the tactical unit shows up, all of your options from that point forward are bad for you… but some are worse than others. Now to the people who say it should have been ended peacefully, that they should have starved them out, all I can say that the only people to blame for these deaths are the ones that ended up getting killed. They committed a violent crime, they fled the jurisdiction, and when the police caught up with them they threatened the officers. I’m sure they were someone’s son and daughter, after all someone loves even the most useless of human beings, but as for me, well, sometimes I think it’s nice when the gene pool cleans itself a bit.

Go ahead, ask me…

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After a couple of weeks of relearning how to spend most of the day without a cell phone, I can say that it’s at best, unpleasant. I’ve made a few necessary adjustments to my personal workflows that have made the circumstance a bit less onerous, but I’m afraid there is just no good substitute for having my digital life at my fingertips at all times. Technically I guess I could go back to the dark ages and start carrying around a paper planner all day, but at that point why not just switch back to stone tablets and chisels? At least I’ve managed a few work around that keep me mostly connected during the day. They’re not seamlessly integrating my life, but they’re at letting me limp along, which I suppose is better than nothing. Just barely.

The real issue I’ve run into after becoming essentially phoneless for large chunks of the day is that I’m losing track of the myriad of notes and reminders I’d regularly send myself throughout the day. Outlook does a good enough job of keeping me on track with most official functions, but I’m feeling the absence of emails to remind me to look at one particular memo or stop for milk on the way home. I’m really missing the ready place to keep track of the copious number of ideas that passed the “I should write about this” test and made it onto my running list of possible blog topics. So it turns out the next step in the process of learning to live with traumatic loss is to come up with some kind of system of recording notes and ideas that doesn’t depend entirely on me seeing the right post it note three minutes before I’m going to need it.

Go ahead and ask me how much I enjoy creating solutions to problems that really have no need to exist at all in the 21st century.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Selling online. There are a few pieces of lawn equipment and other odds and ends I don’t have use of anymore. For ease of listing and in hopes of not dealing with too many crackpots, I opted to post them on the local neighborhood website instead of Craigslist. In retrospect I would have been far better off just loading everything in the truck and hauling it over to the dump. I know I’ve spent at least $150 worth of time answering questions about a $25 item. Lesson learned. From here on out I’ll just throw stuff away. It’s not worth the aggravation for so little return on investment.

2. Walking and talking. If you’re on your phone and wander into the street without paying the least bit of attention I should be within my rights to hit you with the truck. I’m not talking about flattening anyone, but it feels like giving these dipshits a glancing blow with the side mirror should be accepted if not encouraged.

3. Connectivity. Having access to email and the Internet are pretty much my only real job enablers. I’m sure I could do at least some of the work without those tools, but everything would take days longer than it should. Some of it I can get done by phone but the “must have a signature” stuff not so much. If you’re a knowledge worker access to a function network isn’t a convenience or a perk, it’s a necessity. If you the employer can’t provide that then you’d best not look at me cross eyed when I start telling you there are things I can’t do. Like it or not, without connectivity there’s no path between Point A and Point B that doesn’t involve hand written letters and a book of stamps.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Flint River water. Look, if I open my spigot and the resulting water is brown and filled with particulates, I’m not going to drink it no matter what local officials tell me about its safety. That’s exactly what I don’t hear from news reports coming out of Michigan. There are plenty of reports though of people who continued who were drinking away, despite what some might consider an obvious problem with the water… and now suddenly they’re surprised by the spate of health issues that have resulted. I’m afraid these Michiganders have fallen victim to two fallacies: 1) The government is looking out for your best interests and 2) Anyone else has ultimate responsibility for what you put in your body. While there is very clear blame to be laid on the state and local government in this case, there’s more than enough to spread around to individuals who failed to exercise their own personal responsibility in protecting their health and wellbeing.

2. A report out of the National Transportation Safety Board calls for the total ban of cell phones while driving, claiming it’s a distraction. Well bugger off. Everything inside the passenger compartment of a vehicle that’s not the steering wheel, gear shift, accelerator, and brake pedal is a distraction. The radio is a distraction. That drive-thru grease-burger is a distraction. Crying children in the back seat are a distraction. Bees flying through an open window are a distraction. So while we’re going, let’s ban all the distractions and save so many, many lives. We’ll do away with radios and drive-thrus, crying children and roll-down windows. We’ll cover the damned cars in bubble wrap and install an engine governor ensuring they can never go faster than 15 miles per hour. Fine, safety is important. While hurtling around in a one ton metal bullet we should all be paying attention to what we’re doing. What I don’t understand is what on earth anyone thinks passing one more law making a specific subset of distracted driving illegal (which in many jurisdictions it already is) will really do. Prohibition didn’t stop drinking. The war on drugs didn’t stop drug use. I have a hard time believing a ban on cell phones is going to stop people from checking that next text message. Don’t even get me started on the jackassery of how anyone might plan to enforce such legislation once it’s law.

3. The choices. Despite my personal preference for one of the other alternatives it appears more and more likely that 364 days (plus a leap year) from today, America is going to inaugurate a socialist, an unindicted felon, a megalomaniac billionaire, or a former Canadian citizen as President of the United States. Let that sink in for a moment if you will. I could launch into a long rant about how we got here, but frankly we’re more or less stuck with this band of misfits in 2016. My real question, the one that’s going to haunt me in my sleep, is how we get well from here. What’s it going to take to find some legitimate leadership in America in 2020 or are we henceforward and forever doomed to have such pretenders enthroned as the heirs of Washington and Jefferson?

Lost Not Found…

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As part of my highly specialized and important position, one of the duties I’m saddled with is performing oversight of a 750 seat auditorium. It’s like being on the event staff at a concert hall that never puts on an event more interesting than the 100-meter snooze or a Gregorian chant marathon.

In addition to approving reservations for such entertaining acts as Mr. Smith’s Retirement Ceremony and calling in service orders when the crack in the foundation starts leaking (again), about once a week I get to field calls from panic stricken people who have left something behind in my beautiful facility. We’ve turned up everything from briefcases, to iPads, to an entire box of key chains. More often, though, it’s a call about a cell phone or eyeglasses.

Today’s call, routed through a third party to me, inquired about a trifecta of loss – cell phone, ID card, and passport. I rolled my eyes and explained that no, no one had turned anything in matching that description. Knowing full well that the chances of any of these items being there were slim to none, I still schlepped down, unlocked the building, and poked around “where the guy thinks he might have lost them.”

Aside from a stray dime, my exhaustive search turned up nothing at all. The only thing it did accomplish is to set me thinking on what kind of human being goes the 40 miles between here and Baltimore without once realizing (or attempting to look at) his cell phone? Allowing that amount of time to elapse between checking in on the latest Tweets, posts, or headlines is just unnatural. Probably some kind of damned terrorist.

When a selfie just won’t do…

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scopesThe modern world is full of cameras. I’m willing to bet that every person who reads this post has at least one of them within arms reach at all times of the day and night. With that being said, I have not earthly idea how there is still a small army of college students employed by a company to spend their days trolling up and down the beach taking pictures and then selling them inside $.10 plastic key chains for $15. I would have thought that was a business model that should have died off with the rise of the cell phone. Apparently, though, it’s still very much a thing and steps in to fill in the gap when even the most artful selfie won’t do.

That was my one piece of learning for the week, so if you were stopping by hoping to find something deep and insightful on a Sunday night, boy did you come to the wrong place.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Summer. I can’t help but notice in the last week or so that we’ve entered the part of the year when I drive by the local high school twice a day and find its parking lot absolutely empty. I’m not even going to try getting into a discussion about teaching, whether it’s an over paid or under paid profession, or even whether it should be open for business year round. For good or ill, we’re still using the 10-on, 2-off schedule of the agrarian age… and as long as we are I will continue to be insanely jealous of our nation’s teachers whenever I drive past on a beautiful summer morning and find them not there. June, July, and August are truly the only three things I miss about teaching… and if I’m perfectly honest with everyone, I’m already looking forward just a little bit to that day in August when they’re stuck back in the grind with the rest of us.

2. “Working families”-based legislation. I’ve noticed this week that the administration is trotting out the whole “working parents” discussion again. Look, I get that having a job and balancing everything else in your life is at best a challenge and at worst an exercise in futility. For working parents, I can understand that taking care of your kids is your first priority. That’s good. That’s how it should be. On the other hand, since I’ve opted not to go that route, I think it needs said that I don’t consider my own top priority items any less important to me than yours are to you. Every time I hear a politician spout something about making life easier for working families, my middle finger gives a little twitch. How about we come up with a few programs that makes life easier for employees in general rather than just a subset of the group? Trust me, I don’t value paid time off or a more flexible schedule any less than you do just because my dependents have four legs and fur (or scales).

3. Lack of focus. Yesterday the Supreme Court of the United States issued a unanimous ruling that law enforcement could not unilaterally search your cell phone without a warrant or in the most extreme of emergency situations. Read that again. It was a unanimous opinion of the court. A win for personal privacy doesn’t get much more decisive than that. But we’re collectively paying more attention to grown men kicking a ball or whatever celebri-skank did something whoretastic this week. Whether you agree with my assessments of daily events or not, I’d consider it hugely helpful if we could all at least try to pay a little attention to something beyond what’s “reported” on TMZ or ESPN.

Watch…

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Since sometime in the middle of the last decade, I’ve been using my phone to keep track of time. Wearing a watch seemed like a throwback when I had a device in my pocket that told me the time based on knowing wherever in the world I happened to be at the moment. As phones got smart it became possible to know the time anywhere on the planet at more or less the same time. Progress. That’s how things are supposed to work in the modern world. Except, of course, the Swatch Watch Flumotionsmodern world brings it’s own set of inconveniences… like spending an inordinate amount of time in rooms where your cell phone isn’t welcome. Maybe it’s a function of my OCD, but I like knowing what time it is, how much longer a meeting should run, or how close to on time I am for whatever comes next. That’s hard to do when your only time-teller is locked up in your desk drawer halfway across the building.

Somewhere in the detritus of my past, there’s probably a box full of watches. Some subtle dress watches, some big clunky dive chronometers, and more than a few cheap Casio and Timex models that were cheaper to replace than to fix when they inevitably broke. The problem is, I have no idea where that box might be. I’ve looked for it from time to time, but it really is nowhere to be found. Maybe I purged them when I realized the time-telling cell phone was going to be the wave of the future. Still, I’d love to know where my collection of wonderfully tacky Swatch Watches ended up. They’d be a real conversation starter in a room full of button down serious people.

Alas, the old watches are nowhere to be found, so in a fit of not being able to tell what time it was this morning, I pulled up Amazon and have a very sturdy looking stainless steel number heading my direction even as I type this. Nothing gaudy or over the top. Just a simple face and durable band… a workhorse of a wristwatch that hopefully won’t mind living in my desk drawer when I’m authorized to be a child of the digital age.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The dead zone. Although they swear it’s unintentional, the building where I work is essentially a giant Faraday cage. Outside in the parking lot, five solid bars of 3G coverage. Inside, at my desk, with my phone pressed against the glass, one bar of intermittent EDGE coverage. Sometimes. If all the atmospheric conditions are just right. I don’t want to sit at my desk playing Angry Birds all day, but it would at least be nice to know who called when the “you have a voicemail” alert manages to fight its way through to my phone. Mostly though, you just get to be surprised by the texts, emails, and voice messages that come rolling in whenever you happen to go outside. Maybe I should just set everything to roll over to my Google Voice account and really freak the IT security weenies out.

2. Forgetting the airbags. For the last two weeks, I’ve been mentally preparing myself to get the truck back on Friday. It’s not that the rental car is awful, but well, it’s not my truck and not being able to see anything further than the tail end of the car in front of me lacks a certain charm. I called Monday and everything was still on track for a Friday pickup. When I called to check in this afternoon, apparently there’s been a snag. A very sheepish office manager confessed that they had forgotten to include replacing my deployed airbags in the original repair estimate and had therefor not ordered them. I’m not a fancy big city auto body shop, but I think I would have noticed the big white deflated bits hanging out of the steering wheel and from under the dash. Maybe it’s just me though. The parts are ordered and the truck is allegedly back together now, so as soon as they get there hands on the airbags, we should be all set. As of a few hours ago, Tuesday is the new Friday.

3. Iran. Part of me is stunned and amazed that we’re going to fiddle around and wring our hands and wait just long enough for Iran to make their very own nuke. The other part of me then remembers that it’s a government operation and then all of me ceases to be surprised. Boy if you thought groups like the Taliban were dangerous before, just wait until their friends get the bomb. The world is going to change and while we had a chance to stop it or at least stand aside while someone else stopped it, we sat around fretting about convincing our enemies that stopping the madness was a good idea. A hundred years from now, the world is going to look back at this generation of “leaders” and collectively ask WTF, dude?