Blessed by the Potato

There was recently a problem with Bell’s phone lines in Markham. It had been ongoing for weeks, and though it didn’t affect me directly, I do have friends and family caught up in the problem. It’s not a constant problem: the phones become useless in the rain. So it has to be raining, which makes diagnosis tough, especially when Bell doesn’t take the issue seriously enough to send service techs out until the day after a complaint is made. Even then, many times the techs (though themselves pleasant and hard-working) didn’t seem to be fully informed: one person might complain and Bell would dispatch a tech, and another person next door would do the same, and Bell might dispatch another tech, and the techs would never be told that the problem was affecting more than one house.

In the power outage of 2003, we were without power for days. The battery backups for our radios and cell phones went dead, as would the backup batteries for a competing phone technology like a VOIP system or Rogers digital phone. But Bell’s POTS worked, and continued to keep us in touch with the power company and our relatives across the country while the blackout was resolved. It is said to have “five nines” of reliability: it works 99.999% of the time, which comes out to about 5 minutes of downtime per year.

That is the one reason we are still with Bell: the call quality and clarity is so much better than a cell phone, and the reliability cannot be touched by VOIP or digital systems.

Except for customers in Markham, where Bell has failed them. In an area spanning several blocks, affecting many customers, their phones simply stop working in the rain. Sometimes it’s merely bad quality: crackling and popping noises that drown out any attempt at talking, though perhaps in theory some communications could still be made (e.g., dialing out to 911, at least enough for them to receive caller ID information). Sometimes though, the phone fails to work entirely. No dial-tone, no ringing in, nothing.

That this has been going on as long as it has is unacceptable. I understand that intermittent problems are the worst to try to diagnose and fix, but rain, though intermittent, is not exactly beyond our ability to predict. Bell gets the weather network, too. Bell could have laid all-new wire in that neighbourhood by now, and at least should have looked ahead to the forecast and had someone standing by to try to finally solve the problem the next time it rained.

But the phones weren’t ringing in Markham. Though they are ringing in Bell’s call centre. One long-time customer has called almost 20 times now, first to get the technical problem resolved, and then to get the customer loyalty one fixed.

This doesn’t even directly affect me, but I’m pissed off. Reliability really is Bell’s only selling feature: though Robbers Rogers certainly doesn’t put too much effort into competing for POTS customers, Bell is not really all that price competitive. Certainly not for feature-laden phone packages. And people aren’t exactly staying for the cheery and helpful customer service. So when reliability is gone, what’s left? I ask Bell: how are they going to make this right?

So far, they’ve offered to refund a portion of one month’s bill: the local calling component, which was largely nonfunctional anyway. But no refund of the long distance plan (which was equally useless for much of the month), no good faith go-forward discount, no sorry-for-the-terrible-inconvenience incentive, no cash to compensate for the many cell phone minutes used up while the landline was dead in the water. In short, no admission that taking weeks to solve a problem might be anything other than par for the course.

Bell: it’s time to step it up.

I’m in full-on defer everything thesis mode. Whatever it is, it can wait until after my defence to get handled. Whether it’s cleaning, buying new shoes because my current ones have holes in them now, or restocking household supplies, it can wait. Except I may have cut it too close: I saw that I was down to my last 3 Q-tips, with two days yet to go before my defence. I asked Wayfare to bring a few with her, and “Please don’t tell my mom I nearly ran out of Q-tips. She’d probably let the zombies take me. ”

I thought that was a clever little bit, so I put it on Twitter, to which people asked “…What??” So, for those who don’t know the story of Q-tips:

My mom is a bit of a hoarder. Not in the reality-TV crazy way, but in the she grew up in rural PEI and has at several points experienced what it’s like to be snowed in and isolated from the rest of civilization for a week or two at a stretch way. So she stockpiles things like food and toilet paper and what-not.

We say that our house is one of the most zombie-apocalypse ready ones since we’ve got lots of food and bandaids stockpiled, enough to last months without having to venture out to resupply. Indeed, that’s what we do when we open a cupboard and find 48 cans of soup, or a giant 44-lbs bag of flour in the storage room: we shake our heads and go “well, mom’s ready for when the zombies come”. And as an aside, a 44 lbs bag of flour is seriously impressive to see outside of a bakery. I remember the first time I saw that Wayfare only bought the little one pound bags of flour, and I was like “oh, that’s so cute, it’s like a travel-size thing of flour for when you’re baking on vacation.”

But what really strikes me as bizarre is that more than food, toilet paper, ammo or medicine: my mom stockpiles Q-tips. Q-tips come in boxes of 400, and you probably use about one a day (maybe a few more if you use them for other purposes). So there’s my mom and dad, and sometimes my brother and sister, and she also occasionally uses them to clean out the pets’ ears or face wrinkles. Whatever. A box of 400 Q-tips is still a several month supply. One or two boxes of Q-tips should, realistically, satisfy any normal person’s need to stockpile Q-tips.

But my mom has two or three boxes in the bathroom. Three more in the ensuite. One in the closet. One in the guest bathroom. Two in the kitchen, one in the laundry room, and two more in the basement storage. At any given time, my mom has something like a 3-4 year supply of Q-tips on hand.

So the only explanation we can come to is that more than food or bandages or cricket bats, more than clean water or bottle caps, Q-tips will be needed in the zombie apocalypse. I don’t know if it’s because keeping your ears clean will help prevent infection with the mind-destroying parasite, or if throwing handfuls of them at the undead will lead them to kill themselves by putting one into the brain through the ears, but whatever the reason, they will be needed. And my mom is ready.

Yet there I was, raised in a household that respects the power of the Q-tip, and I nearly let myself run out. So please don’t tell my mom that I nearly ran out of Q-tips.

These look pretty cool. Definitely watch the video. I’m immediately reminded of Leviathan.

**spoilers**

There’s a part near the end where they fly the shark in to a girl sleeping(?) in bed and she freaks out, as is proper in that situation. Full warning: if I ever get woken up by a FLYING SHARK I will punch whoever sicced it on me in the throat. That’s scary enough when you’re fully awake.

Netbug sends along this gem of an anecdote of a blimp owner who wakes up to find the blimp has drifted through the house and into the bedroom in the night.

“I awoke the way you awake when you suddenly know that there is a large levitating sinister presence hovering towards you with menacing intent through the maligant darkness.”

Now imagine if it was a shark.

The big news this week seemed to be the US debt downgrade and the stock market. I’ll likely get around to posting about the market sometime later.

I never liked Top Gear, but then again, I’ve only seen it when pointed to it by something outrageously unrealistic, like when they tried to pick the only test where a BMW could beat a Prius in fuel efficiency (all-out throttle on a closed track at speeds you could never drive on a police-patrolled road and hope to keep your license). So it’s not surprising to see them called out again for distorting a “test” to make their point that they don’t like technology or saving gas — in this case draining the battery of an electric car before setting out on a trip to cripple the car. They seem to have a genuine, irrational hatred for any new technology or even the very notion of saving fuel instead of going fast. Zoom-zoom is definitely a bias present in many automotive journalists, but Top Gear is brain-damaged in their fervour about it. “Jeremy Clarkson is either an idiot or a genius. He’s either an idiot who actually believes all the badly researched lying offensive shit that he says. Or he’s a genius, who’s worked out exactly the most accurate way to annoy me.”

An interesting juxtaposition in the Globe this weekend: a “Me and My Money” column on a GIC-only investor who claims to have achieved returns of “within a few dollars” of the S&P500 from 1980 to 2002 using just GICs, and another article says that we can’t avoid investing in the stock markets with our nest egg since cash doesn’t provide the needed returns. For the GIC investor, I suppose it’s possible that he did match the market performance with just his GICs: though the S&P500 increased 900% (not including dividends) over that time, for a CAGR of ~11% (probably more like 13% once dividends are included), interest rates were high over much of that period. Plus, 2002 was the bottom of the tech wreck, so he looks to have cherry-picked. Though I do have to wonder if he’s including the effects of taxes (did he have enough RRSP room for an all-GIC portfolio?), or perhaps he forgot about dividends.

The uproar over Google’s real name policy for G+ continues to rage, even picking up a moniker of its own: the “nymwars”. The EFF weighs in, as doesMicrosoft Research, calling “real” name policies “an abuse of power”.

Michael James talks some more about the futility of active investing, with the help of Larry Swedroe’s “The Quest for Alpha”. I keep meaning to get my thoughts out into a blog post on why I think active investing is possible (though still not a great idea for most people), but it’s getting harder and harder to get motivated to write that as my “alpha” has been firmly negative in 2011 (and getting worse).

It’s 4am right now and I’m awake. I don’t want to be awake, but I have a massive headache that’s just riding that edge where it’s threatening to spill over into a migraine… that or it’s just a really bad headache and the heat from the day (though now I’m safely ensconced in my air conditioned lair) is what’s making me nauseous.

I looked up the weather for tomorrow: 38°C, feels like 49°C. That is just stupid hot. 49 is painfully hot, like if you were to run your hand under hot water that was 49, you’d probably only be able to tolerate it for a few tens of seconds before having to pull it out from the pain. So if the humidex is right and it will feel like 49 all over my body tomorrow in the sun, then that is not good. That is going to be painful. Even without the humidex adjustment, it’s going to be above body temperature even in the shade. That is not healthy. I’ll probably be catching up on sleep all day once this headache lets me finally rest, but if I am awake I am going to be doing everything humanly possible to not go outside.

I had plans to go to a friends’ cottage this weekend. Like most cottages (but unlike my crazy family’s) it doesn’t have A/C. I kind of laughed at my dad when he put A/C in the cottage, since hey, it’s a cottage. It’s not as hot by the water as it is in the city, and even though most days can get pretty sticky in the summer, at night it cools off enough and there’s usually enough of a breeze that it’s ok for sleeping. There’s really just one or two weeks where the heatwave strikes and it’s just too hot to manage, and for those weeks I reasoned we could always just chill in the A/C in the city.

But this is that week.

It might be because at the moment I don’t want to move my head for fear of my brain exploding, but I’m seriously reconsidering this crazy plan to drive for four hours just to slow roast in my own juices. However, there is a fallback option: the Prius is a hatchback with folding seats, making a deck just large enough for a foam mattress. As a hybrid, it will run the air conditioner off the battery, then cycle the engine on as needed to keep the battery charged. Only a few L of gas should be burned overnight to keep the A/C running. Could be fun.