Category Archives: Work

From Beneath You, It Leaks…

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Helping to install and sort through old technology has raised a spectre that I’ve rarely thought of before. There is one place that almost everyone has in their home that they spend absolutely no time thinking about. Somewhere in your house you have a box with some sort of gadget: a box of remote controls, a few alarm clocks, perhaps an old music player or two. Hidden in these little bits of convenience technology is usually a pair of batteries. These cells just lay around for years and nobody pays them any mind, everyone but of course chemistry. Chemistry knows full well, and when it goes along with time, hand in hand, it’s sometimes a recipe for some really hazardous consequences.

Alkaline battery cells that are very old will tend to leak battery acid. This is really not good for anyone, nor the environment. These little caches of chemical consequence lay inert and placid for a very long time. They are almost always stored in pretty tit plastic housing containers where time, gravity, and chemistry can really work their wonders on them. When you open up one of these old gadgets you might discover an oozing corroded leaking alkaline battery cell. Getting this cleaned up can be a challenge if it has progressed far enough. So, if you happen to have a box of these battery-powered gadgets laying about that you won’t ever really use again or won’t for a very long time, please take the alkaline battery cells out of these devices!

Just throwing them in the bin is not enough either. These cells really need to be recycled. If you have a glass jar or a plastic bin, store all the dead or questionable alkaline battery cells there until you eventually take them to a battery recycler. In Michigan we have a chain called BatteryPlus and they accept recycled batteries of any type gladly and for free. BestBuy also provides a battery recycling collection program as well if you can’t get to a BatteryPlus location. At the least you really shouldn’t just toss these cells into the trash – the chemicals they are made out of aren’t good for anything. Not good for birds at might come into contact with the cells in a landfill and not good for any amphibian that might find itself in runoff water from a landfill. It’s corrosive, it’s harmful, and it is likely waiting silently for you in your very own basement or junk drawer.

If you work in a business or run one, one of the best things you can do for the environment is to sponsor a battery recycling collection point. I do this at my workplace. I found a useless plastic index card box, slapped a label on it and told everyone to please use it. People, if told that a recycling depot is handy will use it! My recycling bin at work fills up every few weeks with an assortment of dead cells in various states of decay. On my way along I carry this box of hazardous waste off to BatteryPlus. They greet me with a smile and thanks for recycling. It’s good for the environment and takes almost zero thought and nearly zero investment. The rewards, birds and frogs that aren’t poisoned are all you need to see to know you’ve done the right thing.

Christmas Redux

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Christmas never ends. That’s the trick with having family in far-off places. We travel and end up having multiple iterations of the holiday. It would be one thing if we shipped Christmas and concentrated on our families but so far we’ve been meeting up and there have been little explosions of Christmas over and over again.

This Christmas had a definite theme. I am becoming thoroughly French. Scott, in the guise of Santa gave me Rosetta Stone Francais, the full shot which should give me basic fluency with a level commensurate with emigration if I so choose, not that I would. I really enjoy the french way of life, the language, the cuisine, and that second part, that’s another part of Christmas. I have a Crepe Stand, a pan, several tools and a crash course with a french chef in Chicago to make french crepes. I am definitely cruising towards a fate made of crepes. There are worse things. Waking up in the morning and making a fresh crepe and filling it with Nutella – yeah, what punishment that is going to be. How ever will I cope. 🙂

Other members of my family gave me money to buy gifts I wanted on my own. With the money so far I bought two pair of Levi’s 501 jeans in my newer smaller size. My waist is about 36.5, these two jeans are 38’s and they are shrink-to-fit, so they fit wonderfully well and the style of the 501’s really appeal to me because they are button-fly, something very different from the tyranny of the copper-colored zippers. There is a part of me that doesn’t like the idea of sharp zipper teeth in that region of my anatomy. I know there isn’t any risk of anything happening, but it’s a matter of principle.

So I have lots of cash on hand and a huge number of iTunes tracks on my wish list there. That’s something that I really don’t understand. Apple enables their customers to make a wish list, but they don’t enable you to export it or build a list, or even export it socially so that other people can see your list and perhaps surprise you by buying the music and then leverage iCloud on Christmas morning to an iPod which is magically chock-full of music that you wished for. We’ll have to see if some of that will be in the plan for my Christmas cash.

Western let us know before the holidays that they would be making a one-time-payment to us employees as a kind of bonus. It was in lieu of not getting a COLA, having our health insurance premiums increased, and a factor of other reasons that are only really attractive to the accountants. I got my $400, but thanks to the IRS, I only got to have $256 of that. It is more than I would have otherwise, so I don’t complain too loudly, but still, it is a little source of irk. I’d rather have it the other way around.

So Christmas has come, and come again. When we get back Santa will eventually swing around AGAIN. I liken it to the idea that Santa has an odd case of retrograde amnesia. He visits over and over again, spreading Christmas cheer well into mid-January. It’s a theme we’ve all fallen into, we dwell in the Christmastime afterglow and then we announce with mock surprise that we found something that Santa left under the tree that the elves forgot to place properly. In a way, Santa gets the last word, even if he has to visit on Saint Swithins Day to win.

Pure Michigan

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“Michigan Legislature Moves To Ban Domestic Partner Benefits”

I live in Michigan. I am a gay man. This bill is proof that the state in which I live in regards me as unequal under the law. Everyone else can be married and share benefits but this will not be the case for me and my partner of FOURTEEN years. We are excluded from equality with everyone else in this state.

If this bill passes and becomes law, I know that I for one will never forgive any born-and-bred Michigan resident for their inaction on this heinously bad bill. It will become a statement of fact that people like me are less than other Michigan residents. Who I am, what I am, and who I love will be the basis on which the state agrees that my rights do not matter.

I am not personally seeking to share “Domestic Partner Benefits” with my partner, but this bill, if it becomes law, sets a precedent that gay people are second-class citizens within the borders of Michigan. If this bill passes and becomes law then I will have no choice but to begin looking at migration away from Michigan. This is of course not really a threat as I have for a very long time been considering leaving this state for good and returning to New York.

Funny that my birth state respects my rights and my equality more than my adopted state does. It’s clear to me now, even without this bill being passed into law, just what the surrounding Michiganders feel when it comes to people like me. I am not seeking your permission to lead my life how I see fit to lead it, the only thing I really ask for is to honor equality under the law. With a vote of 27 to 9, it is clear to me that the people of this state, through their state representatives behavior and choices think of me as unequal.

You are free to take this bill, if it becomes law and use it to look down upon my kind, it is a free country after all. But know this, that people like me have measured you as classless hateful bigots. What we say when we refer to you all will not be pleasant or complimentary. That is the nature of discrimination, the majority that suppresses the minority are on display as the slovenly bigots that they truly are. I can only hope that when you look into the mirror that you can stand what you see staring back at you. We will see you for what you are. It’s not pretty.

Work Doing

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I won’t ever forget anything at work ever again.

It all comes down to adhering to a rather involved procedure to keep my work tasks organized, people connected, and to leave a cookie trail behind me so that if I have to ever refer to what happened in the past, there is an easy way to get at it.

At work I use the Mail.app on Mac OSX Snow Leopard, on my work iMac. Technically since I use IMAP the application itself is irrelevant, but this is where I do most of my work tasks day-to-day. WMU provides a web-based interface called Webmail Plus, but I really prefer to not use that. I get more mileage out of Mail.app.

Everyone has learned that the best way to alert me and my staff to things that they need is by email. Email creates a kind of digital documentation, a little slip of virtual paper that people write up and tack to our door. It doesn’t get lost and serves as a reminder of things we have to do, with details that we need to complete the tasks. It’s really the best way to go since email is so ubiquitous.

I get tasks in Mail.app whenever I run the app or bring it to the foreground. Because it’s IMAP whatever I change in the account is reflected everywhere else I have a connection to that account, like a window. So my iPhone, my iPad, my MacBook, my home Mac Mini, or my work iMac always has the right list of emails in my Webmail Plus Inbox.

When I get a new task in Mail.app I use the key combination Command-Shift-E, which in Mail.app redirects the incoming email so I can send it somewhere else. It’s better than forward, it resends the message as if it was originally sent to where I want it to go. I redirect all my tasks to my Toodledo account’s email address. Right before I send the redirected message, I tack on to the subject of the task a little bit of text “@work #today” which informs Toodledo to make a new task for me, set it in my Work Context, set the due date for Today (or really whatever day I want) and then hit send. Doing this keeps my Webmail Plus Inbox blissfully empty. I get tasks and punt them forward to my Toodledo to track them and organize them.

Once the task is in my Toodledo list, I configure the list to show me Work tasks, organized by due-date and then by priority. I don’t really enrich the tasks with priority data so the principal sort is actually alphanumeric beyond the due-date sort. It’s in Toodledo that I spend a majority of my time. Toodledo captures everything, the text, any attachment files, you name it. This way I am sure I am not missing any tasks. I may be late with a task or two, but none should fall off the edge. As I work tasks I complete whatever it is the task requires and then I copy the body of the task, which is the body of the redirected email into a new email and then tack on some pleasantries like “Task complete” or some-such and on the CC line I include the email address for my department WordPress.com blog, and right above the signature line on my outgoing email to the task requestor I include a WordPress [tags] and [end] blocks to keep the usually messy signatures from clogging up my blog and setting all the tags so that when people ask me about a certain thing I can browse the tag-cloud on the WordPress blog and find the task, the time and the date it was completed. I don’t have to muck about with Sent Items or any of that malarkey. As an added extra, WordPress automatically creates pages for tags and sets up RSS feeds for tags so interested parties can just browse to the tags they are most interested in to see what is going on. Most people aren’t interested and the WordPress blog ends up mostly being for me. I quite enjoy it, I no longer have to spend time trying to remember when I did whatever I do and so I can sort of mindlessly chug through tasks without having to waste any precious brainpower on any of it. WordPress, Toodledo, and Mail.app do all the heavy lifting and storage for me, all delightfully complimentary.

In the morning I adjust a search on Toodledo to find all the tasks in Toodledo that I have completed the day before and then I use Toodledo and Byword to quickly markdown the tasks as a numbered list and then ship that off using MarsEdit off to the blog. The overall goal is to free myself as much as possible from the headache-inducing parts of my job as I can manage. Did I do something? When did I do it? Was there some kind of trick in fixing something or other? It’s all in the blog. In many ways I have replaced the need to form new memories about my work off to WordPress, so I really don’t know in a day-to-day way exactly what I have done here. I don’t want to know it. WordPress knows it for me. The only thing I bring to the table are my skills and abilities. Everything else has been farmed out elsewhere.

There is something very secure about such a way of managing my life. I can’t answer any questions posed to me about my job. I don’t form any long-term memories about this place. I’ve gotten used to the relaxed almost meditative way that I chew through my days. Technology keeps the things I find irritable or troubling. In many ways, doing it this way has vouchsafed the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. My spotless mind.

Nook vs. Kindle vs. iPad

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I’ve been watching a lot of the press surrounding the brewing three-party war between Apple, Barnes & Noble Booksellers, and Amazon over the tablet space for the past few months. I was one of the first people to be in line two Aprils ago when the first generation iPad was released by Apple. I bought it without hesitation, knowing that it was exactly what I had wanted and dreamed of all this time – a much larger version of my beloved iPod Touch. As I’ve had some opportunity to use different devices I’ve discovered that at least for me, each device that I own serves a particular purpose. Here’s a handy list of the device and what I use it for:

  • 24” iMac – General computing, work and writing.
  • 13” MacBook Laptop – General computing, work and writing.
  • First-Generation iPad – Convenience browsing, game playing, reading comic books, cookbooks
  • iPhone 4 carried by Verizon – Telephone and 3G data access with the HotSpot feature. I use it for mobile data access, taking pictures, scanning prices and comparing retailers and writing down notes and ideas for my writing. Sometimes inspiration strikes when you least expect it. Also enables me to play Foursquare, as well as many other location-aware games and activities that my family has come to enjoy.
  • iPod Nano 6th Generation – Contains my entire music library and is the device I use when I want to play music. Also has a very useful pedometer that I use to track my steps and calories burned while I work.
  • Nook SImple Touch – Contains a giant book library and is the device I use when I want to read.

I have to be very clear here, I am an Apple fanboy. If Apple makes it, I’ll use it. Over the years all the Apple devices have worked exceptionally well and over time they have gotten better. I still love using my iPad and my iPhone. There are four devices that I simply cannot go without whenever I travel, my iPad, my iPhone, my iPod, and my Nook. The iMac is a work-only machine and I leave it at work all the time. My MacBook I use from time to time, but I actually prefer to work on my iPad to my MacBook unless I’m writing something very long. The iPod Nano fits in my pocket so easily, or clips to my shirt so well that carrying it everywhere I go is a non-issue. My phone keeps me in touch, mostly over SMS and iMessage, and secondarily by the voice service itself. The majority of this post isn’t about these other items that I find indispensable, but rather about the tablets.

I can speak for the iPad and the Nook Simple Touch. I was absolutely sold over the iPad, especially when it comes to reading comic books. As for reading “regular” books, the glossy display and backlit nature of the iPad does start to wear down the eyes plus the native book app in the iPad, which is iBooks, doesn’t support the font I like the most, which is Helvetica Neue. I was a little dubious about the Nook Simple Touch at first, but the device won me over with it’s eInk display and it’s expandability via a microSD card port on the upper right corner of the device. The Nook Simple Touch has a lot of really compelling features going for it which made it’s purchase a sure thing. Here’s a list of what I like about my Nook Simple Touch:

  • Size – It’s perfectly sized. It feels a lot like a paperback book, this size really is a sweet-spot for me because this device can fit in my front and rear pants pockets when I want to carry it without having it in my hands and it can be easily stowed anyplace a book can go.
  • Weight – It’s surprisingly lightweight. Even with the microSD card, which only adds maybe a gram or two to it’s total weight, the whole package is very light.
  • Textured and Contoured Back – The rear of the Nook Simple Touch is contoured to fit my hands and rubberized so that I can keep a nice grip on it without having to strain.
  • Interface – Ever since the 1.1.0 Nook Firmware upgrade the device has been surprisingly quick on display updates and the touch sensitivity has also been tuned and I notice it. You can either use the side navigation buttons or a tap or swipe on the display to advance pages. It has a built in dictionary and wifi, with some social features but so far I haven’t explored those enough to report on them.
  • Compatibility – The Nook Simple Touch (as well as the iPad) both can open and display ePub format books. There is a special place in my heart for the ePub format. it’s open, it’s well understood, and there are tools like Calibre which I can use to convert PDF or DOC or MOBI format (actually there are a huge number of formats that Calibre understands) and convert them all to ePub. I bought a 4GB microSD card and was able to store thousands of free eBooks on my Nook without even a second glance. I know the books will work, I know they are configurable, it’s perfect for me.

So now I’m witnessing this war brewing between Apple, B&N and Amazon. I’ve never really used a Kindle, but I assume it’s most like the Nook devices. The latest device to be released, and is shipping now is the Amazon Fire. I’ve heard a lot of people going on about how the Fire may be Amazon’s answer to Barnes & Nobles Nook Tablet and may compete with the iPad. Out of curiosity I went to Amazon’s site where they describe the new Kindle Fire and as I was reading along several alarm bells went off in my head all at the same time. Here’s a list of issues I have with the Kindle Fire, even before laying my hands on it:

  • Eight hours of battery life – Even my iPad can beat this rating. I will hand it to the Kindle Fire that they were able to squeeze such a battery lifetime out of a device that was smaller than the iPad, but when you are watching video I will bet real money that end users never see these eight hours of battery life, let alone their hedged-bet of seven and a half for video playback.
  • Incompatible with ePub format! – This one took my breath away! Any device should at least be compatible with the ePub format, but Amazon has elected to support their own format called AZW instead. There are other formats supported, but ePub is not on that list and my library is configured to support ePub and I prefer it that way.
  • Prime Membership – If you want the most bang for your Kindle Fire buck, you’ll have to spring for an $80 a year Prime Membership. This could be useful if you do a lot of Amazon.com purchases but I don’t. It’s a little creepy that Amazon sells you a device and then charges you over and over again to use it fully. Feels more like a cash-grab and/or a gyp to me.

I don’t really believe the Kindle Fire will pose much of a risk to the iPad and iPad 2 class devices. I haven’t gotten a chance to hold either of the more relevant competitors devices in my hands to give it a right and thorough review. Based on just the description from the manufacturers alone, and even considering the Nook Tablet costs $50 more than the Amazon offering I can say just from the start that the B&N device is the one to get. Better battery life, better storage, better hardware, ePub format, that’s the one that I would get if I didn’t already have an iPad.

Keep your eyes peeled on this blog. I doubt I’ll ever get my hands on a Kindle Fire, but I’m pretty sure I’ll eventually be able to review the Nook Tablet.

First Workout

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Today was a beast at work. I upgraded the systems and right afterwards everyone started to complain about how slow everything had gotten with running reports. I knew I was cheating fate a little bit, putting SQL Server 2008 R2 on such an old server but it took and it ran and things were at least after a style, minimally acceptable. Of course, we instantly started to run into issues, mostly PAGEIOLATCH_SH locks galore all over the system. People noticed that immediately, it was a lot like running headfirst into a wall of gelatin. Wheee – fwap – splutch. The server is hosting a 15GB database and it’s got 3GB of RAM to manage. So of course I had to bite the bullet and advise TPTB that we needed a new server. My first design came in at $8500, the next design came in at $3500. I thought we had ordered it, this was all last week that this was brewing. In the meantime people were still complaining so I decided to see if I could write up some non-clustered non-unique indexes that covered most of our biggest and most used tables. That helped out just a little and I was putting pressure on our ordering department for an update for our server. Oh, they hadn’t ordered it yet. They wanted to inform me that they were able to shave $500 off the price, but had to tack on a $25 licensing recoupment fee and that we’d have to fill out the paperwork all over again and get it re-authorized. Well, after some gnashing of teeth and a righteous flurry of emails, the damn thing is ordered. Now all we have to do is wait. The new server will be set up with a 64-bit OS and then SQL Server 2008 R2 will play in that, with 32GB of RAM to play around in. Upon further inspection the PAGEIOLATCH_SH locks are all IO bound issues. Once those go away I should be right on top of things with respect to this report server. I have hope, and that hope extends to when this server IS GOING TO BE SHIPPED. Come on boys. Come to Daddy. 🙂

Of course, we all did the Q&A for what we were going to do for the labor day weekend and thankfully I have nothing planned. I was able to get down to Anytime Fitness on Stadium Drive right after 5pm. I couldn’t get in, but I think that’s because I have to register my keyfob with the management of that one, as Scott and I set up our account with the Anytime Fitness in Portage. A nice gentleman let me in and I got my stuff all stowed and hit the treadmill. I set it for 15 minutes and walked, then for 1 minute (which you can’t do, so it turned out to be 5 on the treadmill) and ran for about 3 minutes. I only had a 1-minute run actually scheduled through Nike+. Once that was done I set the treadmill for 60 minutes and pounded down my 5 mile walk very easily. While I walked I watched the Star Trek marathon on SyFy channel, which was very nice. After I logged that 850 calorie burn I took a short break and got my iPad out and plugged it in and hit the recumbent bicycle. I set that for 60 minutes and started to pedal. I shot another 600 calories and while I was pedaling for my life I was watching Netflix and laughing to a comedy stand-up show that Craig Ferguson did a while back. I was pedaling and laughing. It wasn’t half bad.

One thing that I did notice was that after I was done with the treadmill, and hopped off it, I had this overwhelming urge to move forward even though I really wasn’t. It felt a lot like vertigo. I had to shake it off several times or I was going to drop on the floor and start making little running gestures. I hope that I get used to that feeling, I knew it was coming but when it hit, I was still quite surprised. It’s a very strange sensation. Your body tells you you are walking but your ears inform you that you are not. The disconnect is very disconcerting!

My next step is to have dinner, then chug down 2L of water. Perhaps read some comic books or maybe get a little further on my Nook. We’ll see.

Law of Unintended Side Effects

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Yesterday, around noon I took our databases IIS component offline and disabled the database triggers on the “attribute” table. I then inserted 248k attributes into the database, took all of about 5 minutes. I re-enabled the triggers and everything was working well. I went home, without a care in the world.

Last night, at around 3am my nightly-scheduled “Data Sync” program ran on my primary database and it’s designed to markup “attributes” that are missing some key details. This script ran into my 248k attributes and was busy processing them, in fact, it was busy doing that all along until I discovered it was still struggling at Noon today. Of course I sort of knew something wasn’t right as I didn’t get a successfully completed email from my database server telling me that this program had completed. I should have had the presence of mind to check first thing this morning, but, like many things, it slipped my mind. 🙁

After I discovered what was going on I fiddled with the triggers and mopped up the data. Now all is right with the world once again. To say I feel foolish is an understatement. I really have to work on my spidey-sense when it comes to these things. 🙂

“All’s Well that Ends Well”…

Nike+ Coaching Plan

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My job is killing me. Not in any dramatic way like radiation or asbestos or flaming ceiling tiles, but rather slowly by inactivity. Not that the people at WMU don’t care, they do, encouraging us on a 10k steps a day competition but frankly some of us Morlocks don’t have the time to spend walking about. It’s this idleness, this physical idleness that is making us sick.

I’ve been kicking around for a while that I should start to run. Everyone else is hitting the gym and bettering themselves, why can I do it too? No reason! So I decided that sooner rather than later would be a smashing good time to start training.

The Nike+ GPS app and the Nike+ site, for free, enable anyone with an iPhone to pick up a coaching program. The one I selected was walk-to-run 12 week program. Get started gradually and work myself up to running. I don’t want to compete, I don’t want to run marathons. I just want to drop all this extra weight.

Why not join a gym? Gyms are expensive, socially awkward, and usually frustrating. Waiting for a machine to open up can be an epic pain in the ass. This way the entire outdoors is my gym and technically I can exercise anytime I like, even in the rain. There is no excuse to not walk/run, since I can do it anywhere I am whenever I want and it doesn’t cost me one red cent.

So I will be blogging as I experience this adventure. Not during the actual huffnpuff, but likely right afterwards. Currently I look and feel like a tub of lard that is flopping along wildly. Hopefully with some willpower I can lose this weight, feel better, and maybe run without flopping over like a fish out of water. So keep your eyes peeled as I begin this adventure. 🙂

Power Outages are always fun

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Last night we had a rather hefty batch of thunderstorms move through the area. One of the strikes tossed our local power distribution grid for a loop and every computer was off this morning. This is always a really interesting time to find out what fails. It’s during these events that devices, computers, network gear, you name it take a hit on the chin. Maybe they’ll be fine, maybe it’ll be a total KO.

So far we’ve got the “Garden Level” out of network capacity altogether, the third floor has spotty connectivity and when I pulled into work my phone was ringing that people on the second floor were having problems accessing their files located on one of my servers. That wasn’t it though! Of course not.

My computer was off, when I turned it on my Apple Trackpad was unreachable via Bluetooth. Tearing the device out of the bluetooth settings and rebooting then re-pairing fixed that, and we’ve had instances of that happening throughout our office for people using the trackpads.

It’s a lot like the USS Enterprise when she’s hit by a torpedo. It’s always Engineering that is picking up the pieces, dealing with leaks, or exploding. Sometimes I feel a little bit like Scotty, “It’ll take 3 weeks to fix, but I can have it done in 2 hours” or Chief O’Brien “That’s broken? AGAIN? I JUST FIXED THAT!”

At least it keeps us employed and occupied. We won’t go into how these strong storms and odd weather patterns are cause for concern… p’shaw. 🙂

Verizon

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My day was poisoned by Verizon and Asurion, one of them is a nationwide wireless carrier, the other is an insurance company. They are the Reese’s Cup to my wasted blown-out day. Thanks guys.

Situation: Coworker breaks iPhone, takes it to a Verizon store, nothing comes of it. Coworker gives me the dead phone and I try to make heads or tails out of the knotwork that is Verizon and Asurion.

Email 1: (me writing to Verizon Rep, upset at being lead on a wild goose chase for most of the day, MIKGOVTEAM is an email to a bunch of people who are supposed to help me, a part of Verizon’s Customer Care … Team.)

Hello,
Thanks for the resolution on this problem. I have contacted Asurion and completed the affidavit. My client indicated that the report that the device was exposed to water is incorrect, it fell face-first onto a concrete surface. Because this is the word of our coworker versus a Verizon store we have issued new policies for our clients to not approach Verizon ever again because of these miscommunications. Instead all of our clients will route their phone issues through my office and we will contact Verizon directly where the conditions of the events can be exchanged clearly and without any of this miscommunication. We are unused to how Verizon conducts it’s business because of our previous relationship with Sprint and Asurion when it came to handling insurance. Sprint acted as our representative to Asurion, which differs fundamentally to how Verizon manages the three-party relationship. This too has changed our policies and procedures when dealing with your company and when dealing with Asurion. It is rather upsetting as a customer to know that Verizon stores cannot be trusted, cannot provide services, and that our only contact is MIKGOVTEAM.
The only thing keeping us as your customers is your network.
Pray for the health of that network.

Response from Verizon:
Andy, I am sorry to hear that you don’t seem to value the service my team and I provide. There are many reasons for VZW Government contracted customers to only be able to work directly through the Government team, the main one being security. The stores are restricted on what they can see, they can’t see government accounts.
I would be happy to meet with you to discuss the many other reason for our decision to not allow retail environments access to your account, I can assure you it is to your benefit.

My final email to Verizon:

The entire reason for us having a mobile infrastructure is first and foremost for our major gift directors and engagement team to have as much of a reliable wireless connection as I can provide for them. Verizon was selected because Verizon’s network is the largest in the United States and therefore won by default. Verizon wasn’t selected initially in the past because of a difference in toolsets provided by Verizon and Sprint. Sprint has proven themselves to be grossly incompetent when it comes to managing a network and right before I migrated everyone to Verizon, Sprint was “Circling the Toilet Drain”. I have yet to be actually pleased by any wireless carrier as they all try to be more than what they really are. Verizon fought against this tooth and nail, doing everything in their power to refute being a “commodity carrier” but in the end, that’s all the customers really want. The value-added components I’m sure gratify other wireless customers and they’ve expressed their thanks to you. I do admit that it comes in handy, when it works as designed. Verizon provides the network and Apple provides the devices. It was 8/10ths the iPhone and 2/10ths the Network. I informed Sprint of this and they sent a fool to me and actually dared to argue with me about Droid. It was that meeting in which my Sprint contract died, because they sent a fool to actually pick a fight with their customer. I was paying a three-grand-a-month contract and they lost it because they sent a fool.

My attitude about mobile carriers in the United States is pretty much identical. Every company is pretty much all the same. Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. The networks are different, the frequencies are different and the rest is a dart board of bullshit that the customers have to put up with in order to get work done. I’d like to say that any one company is better than their competitors, but they aren’t. Verizon has the network but the stores are chock full of slime-balls trying to sell as much accessory junk as possible. Sprint is incompetent but the stores are reliable. I don’t regard AT&T as even a mobile carrier as they are just Cingular wearing the Death Star’s face. It’s macabre and it fools nobody. Cingular was incompetent on their own and their only singular saving grace was the iPhone, as AT&T. So in the end it doesn’t really matter how much I like any one company. Sprint screwed me with a $6000 billing error and I had to go through at least four wireless field reps and even still not getting anywhere as they continuously screw up billing.

So now we’re predominantly with your company and we just have to face some rather grim realities. It’s a compromise that we make. We trade a really quite excellent network for pretty much everything else. I have yet to visit a single Verizon store here in Kalamazoo (and man, are there a lot!) where I’m not either a used-car-shopper or in one case mistakenly thrown out of a store because looking for an iPhone bumper case is something AT&T can help me with… :~|

This entire interaction with Trish’s iPhone really had to come about eventually. It exposed a situation that we were not expecting to happen. One of my clients broke her phone, this was eventually going to happen. It’s why we bought the TEP Insurance because I know my clients have butterfingers and these devices would eventually start getting damaged. I made a mistake, so did Andy M, my assistant. We wrongly assumed that if Trish walked into any Verizon store that she could lay her dearly departed phone on the counter, that the Verizon store representatives would look up her phone number, see that it was a Verizon account, and then offer to replace her iPhone. What I was really hoping for was that the Verizon rep could then help her program the Exchange information on her iPhone and she could limp along with her device until she came back to WMU to get it polished off. If there was any costs associated with this entire hypothetical event, that they would be simply posted to the account. At best I was hoping for Verizon to offer her a warranty replacement free of charge and at worst replace the phone and ding us our insurance deductible. All of this so that I could tell all my clients that they could, if out in the big wide world, spy a Verizon store and know that they were covered, because a helpful person from Verizon was in any one of the multitude of Verizon stores and that they, in a manner of speaking, had my back.

What turned out to be was not that. Trish went to a Verizon store, they erroneously noted water damage (for which I know both Apple and Verizon have it in their best interests to push as hard as possible, since water damage isn’t covered by warranties) and they indeed proved the device was shot. They told Trish that they couldn’t do anything at all. And then Trish had to bring her dead device to me. I started with MIKGOVTEAM and was told that I had to go to Asurion. What really got me was the vicious circle that the both of you created. Verizon pointing to Asurion, Asurion pointing to Verizon and I’m in the middle, with a broken phone, and no way to resolve the circle. The advice from MIKGOVTEAM was useless. Being told to “Call Asurion” when I have a page from Asurion that says “Call Verizon” is just stupid. That’s when I reached out for you and Kim, since I was obviously getting nowhere in a big hurry. The process with Asurion wasn’t pleasant either, when I got to that. I had to cover everything all over again with them, get yet another claim number, and fill out an affidavit proving I am who I say I am and then faxing it to them.

So where we stand now is we can’t really trust any Verizon store. They run the gamut from used-car-salesmen to barely verbal thugs. They “note” water damage when there really isn’t any just to weasel out of having to put up with a warranty issue and then all of this that happened. If we invalidate all the Verizon stores and all I get from MIKGOVTEAM is “Call Asurion, 888-888-8888. Talk to them.” messages, then where exactly is the customer care, because I certainly don’t see it. So… to cope with all of this I’ve told my iPhone-using coworkers to just avoid Verizon stores altogether and bring their phone issues to me directly so I can corral all our dealings with your company through my office. It’s just another compromise. I am trading all that I wanted, the idea that even if my clients are in Houston, Texas, with a dead iPhone, that they will be able to get it fixed quickly for Verizon’s nationwide network. In the end, that’s what Verizon is to me. It’s the network. What I was really after isn’t possible and really all I need to know is that is how it’s going to be. I lower my expectations to match and we’re back to being happy customers.

When my clients get to Houston, Texas and realize their phones are dead they’ll have to find a Kinko’s and ship their phones to me so I can initiate an insurance claim, wait the days for Asurion to get to whatever they have to do, get the phone back to me and then FedEx it overnight to my clients. It’s messy and inconvenient and painfully expensive, but this is what we have to do in order to compromise.

If Verizon decides to make any of this better, I’ll be first in line with a smile and ready gratitude. I will admit that the website, when it works, works well. But Steve, you have to also know that it took Verizon nearly a month before I could reliably purchase iPhones through my website portal. The first half dozen iPhones I had to order manually through Kim. I’m sure there are other things that you and your team can do for us, but how much of it will be actually needed beyond ordering new devices, dealing with damaged devices, and the assumed-it’s-coming billing fiascos? Most of which I can already do through the website, and the billing fiascos, well, those will certainly be treasured moments yet to come. I don’t expect much and really all I’m after is the network, so don’t feel bad. It’s the best we can do with this compromise.

After my numerous experiences with Verizon stores, I certainly understand why you’ve established a walled garden around us all. I certainly don’t expect Verizon to change, but it will help you to understand that what we’ve lost stings quite badly. I can hope that we’ll never have another broken iPhone to deal with, but we both know it’s just a matter of time. At least now I know not to expect anything from the stores and I can skip MIKGOVTEAM and just contact Asurion directly. The only other reason I would need to contact you would be to help resolve problems with Verizon. The only eventuality I can think of is when Verizon screws up billing, and that might never happen, so if the world works out for the best, I won’t need to contact you or your team at all. If that isn’t the definition of a happy customer, I don’t know what is.

Now all we have to wait for is the other shoe to drop and witness the three-ring-circus that is Asurion. I fully expect that they’ll screw up and send us an empty box full of shredded newspaper and a $9000 bill, 60 days late with a collection notice rubber-banded to the box. My professional expectations start out at raging incompetence and there is nowhere to go but up!