“Seamless" came apart at the seams

At about three last night, I was woken by constant thunder and lightning.  It was continuous, more continuous than I have ever heard in my life.  Then strong winds and heavy rain were added.

Fortunately, we only had one set of windows open and I was able to close them before much rain came in.

Then the lighted clock went dark.

I tried to sleep, but the light of every lightning bolt went right through my eyelids.  I laid on my stomach and hid my face in the pillow.

I don’t know how long it took the storm to pass, but it did.

At about seven, I woke up and checked Duluth news on my iPhone.  It was quite a wide ranging storm causing outages and deaths.  Trees were toppled blocking roads and damaging houses.  No travel was advised.

All day our cell phone service has been erratic.  Sometimes our phones work, sometimes we can’t even get a signal.

I can see a cell phone pole from our house, but I can’t remember if it had visible equipment at the top or not.

My wife couldn’t even call on her phone.  The call could not be completed.

The strength of signal was one bar most of the day; my phone is now up to four.  But instead of 4G or LTE service, it only shows E, whatever that means.

I was able to get websites, now loading some of them gets stuck.  I wonder how much local data there is.  Just now I could not load Yahoo! Finance, but I could get most of the New York Times.  But going to a different article is going very slow, but maybe that is because convention news is so popular.  On the other hand, the online banking page of my bank is not making any progress loading on my iPhone.  Meanwhile, I started and finished reading a convention article.

So much for the seamless, at-our-fingertips operation of our gadgets we rely so much on.  We are retired and it is only a nuisance.  But there are many people who depend on these gadgets to do their work.

Now, how long will this take to post?  Essentially, quite a while.  As soon as I typed the first sentence, I tried loading blogger.com.  Firefox could not find the page!

Finally!  At 4:30 pm the web seems back to normal.  I have five dots and LTE on my cellphone and Yahoo! Finance came right up!

Can our electricity be far behind?

Good service still exists

If I rant about all the screw-ups in corporate America, I should also praise good service when I encounter it.

I have a blog in mind on how Apple giveth and Apple taketh away. One of the taketh aways was how PDF files download from websites. I tried downloading my statement from Ameritrade with Safari. I could get a window with the statement, but I could find no way to save it as a file. I gave up and used Firefox and had my statement downloaded in seconds. I sent feedback Ameritrade and received and answer in a day. One now has to hold down a key while clicking on the link to a downloadable file. Let's see, I wonder how quickly I would have been able to unbury a similar answer in Apple's forums.

I have some bizarre clues for my passwords, and sometimes I can't figure out what I meant. When I tried to get my US Funds statement I couldn't figure out my password. This particular site doesn't give you many chances to try again. Even when asked the security question, I couldn't answer it correctly, probably because I used a different variation on the spelling of the answer. Poof! Please call a representative.

I did that and I did have a wait with some Mozart. But when I got a representative he asked how the weather was here and mentioned that his daughter had visited Two Harbors recently. He quickly gave me a temp password and I gave it another go. Then I couldn't change it because I couldn't find anyplace to do so. Another call but with no wait time and with the same representative. He pointed out the pull-down menu that linked to password maintenance (it was kind of obscured by a poorly-chosen color overlay).

Both of these incidents are cases where effectiveness is more important than efficiency. Should these representatives' performance be measured by how many customers they serve a day (efficiency) or by how courteously they give satisfactory solutions (effectiveness)? I'll take effectiveness any day, even if I have to wait for it.