Tag Archives: connectivity

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Estimates. Over the course of the last two days, I’ve tried to come to terms with how bad we are at estimating in complex situations. Starting Tuesday night, the “estimated” time to have power back on 9PM, then 11PM, then unknown, then 3 PM Wednesday, then unknown again, then 11:30 PM, and then finally 11:30 PM Thursday. Grid power came back around midnight on Thursday, so I have no idea where that final estimate came from. This all transpired over the course of 30 hours. I mean wouldn’t it be better to just say we don’t have any fucking idea when things will happen than engage in wildly over optimistic dart throwing? 

2. Connectivity. It’s not the fact that the power is out that’s the problem. In a pinch, I can always make my own. The larger issue is that when the power does happen to go out, I lose nearly all connectivity. Despite Verizon showing that I have two solid bars of LTE coverage, the best I can manage are text messages and some highly garbled phone calls. It’s a $1000 smart phone reduced to less capability than I had from my old Nokia 3310. It’s almost like those “service bars” are a marketing gimmick and have no actual relationship to your actual signal strength. 

3. Social media. You don’t realize how much time you waste on social media until you can’t waste time on social media. Unfortunately, that largely seems to happen when you have nothing but time in front of you. Fortunately, I have a finely honed ability to entertain myself indefinitely, but in a warped and twisted way I did miss being able to have news and world events beamed directly into my eye holes 24/7 via Twitter. 

Amish…

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This new job has a lot going for it, not the least of which is putting me 800-odd miles away from a certain batshit crazy senior leader. That’s not to say that there aren’t a few idiosyncrasies around here that I could do without. Until I’m self employed in a company of one, I suspect those are things I’ll just have to resolve to live with though. On balance, it’s been more than a fair trade.

There are a few things, however, that should be called out specifically. The first is that there isn’t a television anywhere in the building. That’s not inherently a bad thing, but I hadn’t realized how much I can come to rely on the quiet ranting of Fox News to help me tune out the random chatter that comes with life in a cube. The second, and perhaps more distressing is the distinct lack of cell service in the building. I’m fortunate to be by a window where I have just enough signal strength to punch out a text message or a tweet. Forget actually receiving a phone call or launching an app, though. This unhappy condition has the unfortunate side effect of leaving me largely at the mercy of whatever “fair use” I can manage with my desktop PC. Since that means I’m using Big Brother’s hardware, it feels like I might as well be Amish eight hours a day.