Your Tax Dollars at Work (08/20/2009)
The people who call meetings and those who attend them are not thinking about time as their most valuable resource.
- Reid Hastie
I'm moving in the next couple weeks. Most likely, I will be homeless. I think that's very exciting. While many people have expressed concern for my choice to live on the street, I figure, serendipity will provide for me! What else is there?
I was at the post office doing various work and they suggested I get the "moving kit" which involves a change of address post card I mail in. Of course, because I am tech-savvy modern american, I said "well I will just do this online!" and the postal agent said, "we charge a convenience fee online, but if you mail it in it's free." I mailed it in.
Here's the irony of the situation. The project team that proposed the online self-service version of this clearly created an ROI model in which the way they funded their project was by charging this convenience fee. The irony is, of course, that the proper way to fund the self-service project is not as revenue generation but as cost savings. Anyway, they did what they did. The program offers the opposite incentive of what it should. I choose to send in my form by paper because it was free to me, which kept the online service from getting my convenience fee revenue and cost them the savings of self-service. Way to go USPS. Your tax dollars at work.
Airplane Mode (08/05/2009)
Some people are born to lead-they just think that way-whether they want to lead or not.
- Andrew Wiggin (Ender in Exile)
Did you know I didn't have a phone for a while after I left college? If you are my parents then you knew it and were greatly annoyed. Most people are surprised to hear that I live quite a few years without a home phone line and without a mobile phone at all. It was trivially easy to reach me at the time by instant messenger or email, but to a huge set of the population I was a "hard to reach" person.
Spring-forward to today, and I have my iPhone glued to me 24x7. You might think that a drastic change from the man who had no phone, except that I hate the phone-portion of my phone. Oh yes, if you send me an instant message, an SMS or an e-mail I'm likely to get it quite quickly. If you try and call me, you'll probably get voicemail and I won't check that voicemail for days. I'm not sure why I have such a lack of desire to use the telephone, but I do.
One problem is, unlike the telephone, people don't feel a need to avoid e-mailing you, instant messaging you or even sending you an SMS all through the night. Automated banking systems are happy to send me fraud alert SMS messages at 2am. Social networks are happy to send me messages at 2am. Even my friends in Europe, Australia and Asia seem to have no qualm calling me in the middle of the night, "is this a good time?" And so, because of the annoyance of being constantly woken up throughout the night, I have gotten into the habit of turning my phone into airplane mode when I go to sleep.
This has been all well and good for quite some time. My friends, my family, are all quite used to the fact that I like to sleep soundly through the night without being disturbed by beeps and buzzes.
Ms Chaos has brought up the subject again. "It makes me sad to know that if I want to talk to you in the middle of the night, I can't." "Well, give me an example." "What if I go to the hospital in the middle of the night and am very nervous about whatever has taken me there, it makes me sad to think I couldn't call you to console me." Hmmm…. "Well, couldn't you call your mother?" "I could, but that's not the person I want to call in that situation."
I can't deny that comments like that make my heart melt a bit. They are far more moving than the comments other people have given me for reasons of leaving my phone on… "What if my car breaks down at 1am?" "Well, then you should probably call a tow truck." "What if a bugler breaks in?" "Well, then you should probably call the police." Yes, all of those I have answers for, but not the desire to be comforted. It's true, I am unique suited to solve that problem.
Unfortunately, I tried an experiment over the past few days and left on my phone throughout the night. I turned off everything I could, but I still get a lot of random SMS messages throughout the night from random services. I would be very sad to turn off these messages, but still might have to. Apple, why can't I have an SMS quiet time?
