The customer [data] is always wrong

It's been some time since I've written here. I could offer excuses, but I already have those recorded for posterity on just about every page of my journal. In truth, I haven't had my schedule be so dictated to me that I couldn't take the time to write here. I think my problem is twofold: 1) I try to make these posts perfect (I write and rewrite until my grammar is flawless, at least to my limited understanding of the English language), interesting to read, and long enough to have some substance; 2) I don't want to spend that much of my free time writing blog posts.

It used to be that I wasn't busy every minute I was at work, so I could write little-by-little there. Well, that's changed. I've even been putting in overtime to finish a very important project, for which I have a large amount of responsibility. I also don't often have things in my life that qualify as "interesting to other people," and I'm not good at just discussing something on my mind; it almost has to be an external event to get me to talk about it. The project is rather interesting, and would make a perfect subject for a post -- if I were permitted to talk about it.

At risk of sounding like a whiner, I wanted to detail the trials I've had with my first major move. It's kind of funny looking back on them. Some are resolved, some still aren't, and every now and then another one pops up. I hope I've seen the last of them, but I'm not counting on it. So I present, for your amusement, the list. When I moved from Virginia to Maryland....

My apartment complex:

• got the address wrong on my lease agreement, twice.
• raised the rent noticeably between the time they accepted my application and moved me in.

My phone company:

• took over a month to activate my DSL service.
• failed to send a DSL modem with my service activation kit.
• sent the modem later, but charged me for it when it was supposed to be free (as part of my service plan). On top of that, the charge was 50% more than the advertised fee for the modem independently.
• charges my credit card directly, rather than sending any kind of bill or statement. So I was rather lucky that I even noticed the overcharge.
• drops my cellular phone calls rather frequently in my new residence.

My power company:

• wanted me to give them my SSN. I refused at first.
• wanted to charge me in the triple-digits for a deposit, for some reason that they wouldn't tell me.
  
• had to activate my service three times. This is because I had the address change twice. After the first activation, I realized that they wanted to charge me the large deposit because I had not given them my SSN, which they intended to use for a credit check.
• eventually got my SSN out of me. (I didn't have much money at the time of the move, or else I would have gladly paid for the deposit.) But they still managed to misspell my name, and repeated attempts to correct them have gone unacknowledged. (I wrote them a very passive-agressive note about it.)
  

My car company:

• associated my new car with a person from New Jersey with my first and last name in their database. They also recorded it as not being attached to any service plan, despite the thousands of dollars they charged me for one.
• replaced this information with more incorrect information. They got my apartment number wrong, but even worse, put me in Minnesota instead of Maryland.

Meanwhile, the USPS:

• always managed to get my bills to me, no matter how messed up address and charges were!

Is it any wonder that I'm not in a hurry to activate any other service, like a land-line phone or cable/satellite TV?

Numbers, numbers, everywhere

Like someone I know, I too am a little disappointed in the low amount of reading I do. (Unlike said someone, I don't think 15 books in half a year is "far too few." But maybe my judgment is clouded because my mind is "rotting in the abscesses of illiteracy" more so than said individual.) So, I've determined that I want to read more -- and not just fiction, though that can be a fun experience. I want to learn, and to "better myself," whatever that entails. To this end, I've determined that I will read at least one non-fiction book per month every other month. (No need to set the bar excessively high. I'd hate to fail and be consequently turned off to reading. Like exercise.)

I determined that I should stick to my interests. For example, last year, I read Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, and I really enjoyed it. So I began by perusing the physics section of the local ginormous chain book store/music store/movie store/coffee house. (Unofficial slogan: "Consoooom. Get hyped up. Repeat.") I browsed the titles and was a little overwhelmed. There were books on topics I had never heard of. I was looking for something that would be similar to Hawking's book, but focused more narrowly on a single topic, like quantum physics or string theory. Not finding the perfect book, I next wandered over to the astronomy aisle. This search was more directed, but still time-consuming. Eventually I found a book on binocular stargazing, a hobby I'm taking up. But I would classify that book as more of a guide than a non-fiction book. So I still didn't have a book to fit my demanding criteria.

Then it happened, by total chance. On the way out of the science section and towards the checkout counters, my eyes inadvertently scanned over the mathematics section, specifically a bookcase that was parallel to the aisle, while all the others are perpendicular. And I saw what I immediately knew would be my first book: The Numbers Behind NUMB3RS: Solving Crime with Mathematics. The book is co-authored by NPR's 'Math Guy' and the math consultant for Numb3rs. I've only read three chapters of the book thus far, but it's very interesting, even if you're not a math geek. (In fact, it's geared towards the layperson, so math geeks might find the book less interesting than the average person would.) It describes the background of the methods Charlie (the mathematician on the show) uses: who developed them, how they work, and how they've been put to use to catch or prosecute criminals.

Anyway, you can see I'm excited about reading again. And now, some numbers of my own:

5 - Ideal number of words in the title of a CNN news feed item. This leads to some difficult-to-comprehend headlines in the name of brevity. An example: "Sardinia row as trash ship docks." That's one extra word, and I still don't understand it. Is the city rowing a small boat? Or are they engaged in a quarrel?

3 - Number of thermometers in my living room. (One is on my digital clock. The other two are Galileo thermometers, which are awesome.)

76 - Degrees Fahrenheit my thermometers read at which I stop shivering in my apartment. (They can't all be reading higher than the actual temperature, can they?)

65 - Dollar amount Verizon tried to overcharge me on my first internet bill. Did they hope I wouldn't notice?

60 - Minutes spent getting Verizon to give me a credit to my bill. (Apparently they can't revise their bills?) I hate calling customer service. From any company.

1 - Number of tasks I had at work a a weeks ago.

0 - Number of tasks I have at work now.

2 - Number of changes in ownership of my employer in the past 3 years.

92 M - Dollars being paid out (from stock shares) to employees' 401K plans due to the most recent acquisition of the company. (Even though the amount per employee is calculated from his time with the company, making my amount small, my estimated amount is still enough to make me glad I was hired before the buy-out.)

33 - Days since my last blog entry. (Sorry. (I'm assuming you read this blog because you like it and/or me.))

4 - Days this entry has been written but unreleased because it's only "nearly complete." It's still not complete in my mind, but whatever. I'm done with worrying about making it perfect. If I have other things to say, I'll revisit them in other entries.


P.S. Vote in the poll. Just a reminder for those of you who use readers instead of visiting my site.

Sans witty tagline.

Right. So I got tagged some time ago. I could try to come up with excuses for avoiding it for over a month, but instead I'll just jump right into it.

1. I have animal magnetism. Not the good kind. The good kind is when you inexplicably attract the romantic attention of others. What I have is actual animal magnetism. I have had close encounters/run-ins/altercations with many wild animals, including, but not limited to: an entire colony of fire ants, a giant horsefly (on my birthday), a goat (alright, he was a little less wild than the rest), a rattlesnake, various skunks, and schools of jellyfish. I'm sure I'm missing a few, but you get the picture. Interestingly enough, I have never been stung by a bee. I thought every child is supposed to get stung at some point.


2. Every child is also supposed to break a bone at some point. I have an experience with that, but I tend to discount it. (When I was one year old, my mother mildly spanked my diaper for doing something I wasn't supposed to do. The force made me stumble head-first into the corner of the wall, which had one of those metal strips to prevent it from getting damaged. The collision cracked my skull. I still have a faint scar on my forehead.) I never broke a bone during my childhood, if you discount my infant story. But misfortune caught up with me in high school. My first broken bone was my radius, damaged while snowboarding.


3. Do any of you out there ever have a muscle twitch? You know, one of your muscles, say, your thigh, ever so mildly spasms every several seconds for a couple minutes? Then it's all over? It's happened occasionally for me, but usually in my appendages. Well, for about the past week, my left eyelid has been doing that, but more frequently and persistently. It's really bugging me. ("You people make my [eyes] twitch.") Don't worry, I'm not psychotic. That's what the voices tell me, at least.


4. In elementary school, there were the "cool" kids (quotation marks absolutely necessary) and everyone else. I was in the latter group. (Somehow, everybody says that. Does no one really want to admit that they were cool in elementary school?) Well, I knew I was fairly smart, but I was always intimidated by some of the "cool" kids who were also smart. They talked themselves up (and put others down), and I believed them. It wasn't until sometime in the last couple years of elementary school that I won the school-wide mathematics competition that I stopped believing.


5. (This is going to sound like I'm continuing a story, but really I'm getting around to another fact about me.) From then on, I had what must have been an obvious disdain for the "cool" kids. For the rest of my public education, they continued with renewed and targetted efforts to make sure everyone knew I, in particular, really wasn't all that smart. When I graduated at the top of the class, they reassured me that if I had been in any other graduating class at that school, I would have been several positions lower. (I guess they just didn't want to say it the other way -- that they were all a little less smart than other classes.) Yet, they still wanted to sit by me during tests, and they all asked for my input on difficult assignments, or even to "compare answers." I began to expand my disdain, little be little, until it included just about everybody. Yes, I hate people in general. I hate crowds, I hate pop culture.


6. Last week I had my first experience of driving the capital beltway during rush hour. It wasn't as bad as I'd expected, but I was expecting something apocalyptic. It's hard to live down to expectations that low. Granted, it's not something I'd want to do every day, let alone twice daily, but still.... I'd asked my manager about it. I told him I wanted to get from 95 in Maryland (I don't know where this "Murraland" stuff is coming from -- I've yet to hear it) to just past the 66 west exit. I said I'd like to be there in less than two and a half hours after work, and he let out one of those dubious grunts -- not quite a chuckle, but neither a full-on scoff. And how long did it take me? About 90 minutes. I sometimes wonder if people just really enjoy talking about how bad it is, like some sort of adolescent pissing contest. As if magnifying their own suffering somehow makes them superior? I don't understand people. (See #5.)


7. Moving ever more towards the trivial, in an attempt just to finish this post and be done with it after having a draft for over a week.... At work, my keyboard's shift keys are terrible. It frustrates me to no end. Keyboards are made to operate with x number of pounds of pressure. You can feel that initial resistance, then, and you provide just enough pressure, it gives in and the keystroke is registered. But not so with these two keys on my keyboard! I can keep the key fully depressed, but if I'm not exerting extra pressure, or not pressing at the right angle, it doesn't recognize my efforts. Let's just say I've become acquainted with the backspace key. And that my pinky fingers are getting quite a workout. I imagine now that this is the reason that I come home at night with aching hands.

Well, this is supposed to be the spot where I "tag" others. Except all of my friends with blogs have already done it. So, once again, I stop a trend.

One percent inspiration....

...ninety-nine percent precision aiming. (Posted from my new apartment for the first time!)

The companies that loves misery

Thanks a lot, Despair, Inc. You sent your weekly new-product email out at 9:31 PM.

Thanks a lot, Verizon DSL. Your inability to start service in anything short of a fortnight caused me to not see the email until this morning, at work.


The result: I missed the limited edition shirt. :-(
Now, I'm left to wonder whether I'd look good in a baby doll shirt.


No. Probably not "good," just "disturbing."