Ranting about Time-Warner and Information Flow

Well, long time readers will recall I had nothing but good things to say about Time-Warner last time I had to have someone out for a service call. The guy showed up, on time, early on a Saturday morning and he was professional and competent.

But THIS time the Time-Warner guy was supposed to show up sometime tonight between 5 and 8 and never did. So I called the service center, waited on hold for 20 minutes. And when I got through to a person, they contacted the technician and reported that he coldn't make it out tonight and that he had tried to call me several times.

Grrr.

The part about trying to call me may or may not be true, which leads me to my second gripe, which is that they index all of their accounts by phone number and they phone number they have for me is my phone number from 1987 when I moved to Cary. That was like 4 phone numbers ago and I have long since forgotten it. And EVERY TIME I ever have to call Time Waner I ask them to update the phone number and they always say that they have but it never actually gets changed, apparently because every time I call them for service the first question I always get is "What's the phone number associated with your account?" And I tell them the updated number and they always tell me its an invalid phone number.

So maybe the technician was trying to call my phone number in Cary from 1987 to get through to me because that's the one still on the acount.

But I doubt it.

The reason I doubt it is because for this latest work order, I went to the web site and filled in the work order on their online system. And there was very clearly a phone number field to fill in _for the work order_ whcih I filled in with my current mobile number. So I've done everything I could do to get the right information to them. I have learned over the years in my job this this is actually a very common problem in complex organizations that have lots of different IT systems. Often no one every quite knows which systems are trading information with which other systems and no one quite knows where the "authoritative source" for information is. So if two systems have differnet information about a customer (like a phone number), no one knows for sure which system has the right information. So yu can fairly ofen get these situations where updates to information are made in system A but periodically system B goes in and overwrite the information with the old information because it's set up to do that. So what really needs to happen is updates to the phone number need to be done in system B, which will then propagate the updated information to system A. Problem is, sometimes, the IT environment is so complex, chaotic, poorly documented, whatever that no one actually knows what the information flow looks like. This is how bad things hapen to your data.

So I dunno if it was a problem in the IT systems or a problem with the technician lying or whatever.

In any case I missed the chance to hang out with fritz tonight because of this and he does not come to town that often.

So the CSR on the phone tells me that she can reschedule me for tomorrow. But I can't be at the house tomorrow. I have to be in an all day meeting in RTP so I told her it would have to be after 5. She kinda acted like that was a problem for the technician, but at this point I have no sympathy.

Grrr. Arrrgh. Whine. Moan.

Right Equipment For The Job

One of my New Year's resolutions was to do a better job of keeping up with my house chores. I'm not a super messy person, but I could do better. The chore I hate the most, bar none, is sweeping the floors and vacuuming the carpets and mopping the floors.

People always act surprised when they hear that. Everyone says to me that the chore they hate the most is cleaning the bathrooms. And I agree that it's kinda disgusting but I can make myself do it on a regular basis. I could never explain why it's the floors that I hate so much

Until today. I figured it out today.

The problem is that I don't have the right equipment.

The first floor of my house is almost completely hardwood floor and it takes a long time to sweep it. Today, after I'd been sweeping for about 10 minutes my back started to hurt and I thought to myself how much I hate this chore and then it dawned on me. My back should not hurt. Merely sweeping the floors with a broom should not hurt my back. "What's going on here?" I thought to myself

I started paying more attention to my pain and trying to figure out why and then I ealized it's because my broom is way to short. It needs to be at least a foot longer, probably more like 2 feet longer. When I'm sweeping I have to bend over at an awkward angle in order for my hands to be at a low enough level to make a sweeping motion. After a while this awkward angle makes my back hurt.

The situation with the vacuum cleaner is not quite so bad, but it's a pain to vacuum the stairs with it because I have to lift it at an awkward ange and try to move it across each step while supporting its weight. Plus it's just a pain to move furniture around in order to vacuum under things.

So as of now I'm in the market for at least a new broom and possibly a new vacuum cleaner and maybe I'll be able to keep up with this chore.

Recycling CO2 Emissions

Imagine sicking in the CO2 emissions from auto exhuast or a coal fired plant and converting it back into Gasoline? That's just the sort of blue sky thinking being pursued at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. And, by the way, they use sunlight to do it.

Makes my brain hurt just thinking about it.

So far it's only been demonstrated in laboratory environments and large scale commercialization is still a decade or so away. But the possibilities are intriguing. For one thing, if such a process were in place, you could literally buy yourself carbon offsets by buying tyour share of time on a CO2 recylcling process!