Words Mean Things

Service Industry Lessons

The epic movie Lonesome Dove had its moments. One of the best was this little lesson on customer interaction in the food service industry…

Vonage Uses All of Downstream?

It doesn’t happen to many folks, but it does happen to some. And it’s a problem that is not easy to replicate on the tech support side of things…

You have a shiny Internet connection with gobs of bandwidth. You hook up the Vonage stuff and it works. But you notice that your download bandwidth has been murdered. As in, 90% of your available download bandwidth is being soaked up even when you are not using the phone attached to Vonage. Vonage is only supposed to use 90k in both directions at max. In my case a 6 meg download line that provided nominal bandwidth of 5.23 meg was being knocked down to less than .5 meg. Ugh. Called phone support which suggested that a new adapter would solve the problem. It didn’t. Then got in an email support march that wanted to send yet another adapter. That didn’t help. Then the email folks suggested that this was out of their control and that I should just go buy a third party adapter. Huh? One last phone call to tech support.

Kelly answered the call after I navigated the barely tolerable automated voice response system. I described the problem to Kelly. Kelly knew exactly what the problem is and apologized for the lack of help offered by previous reps. Apparently, there is some kind of DNS conflict that can occur between the Vonage box and some home routers. Mine was one of them. Here’s how Kelly told me to set up my Vonage box:

• Assign a static IP to the Vonage adapter in the Vonage configuration manager.
• In the same manager, assign a new primary and secondary DNS. We used OpenDNS
  • 208.67.222.222
  • 208.67.220.220
• Click the apply button.

That’s it. Really. All is well.

Update: Not so much. Now my speed is back in the dumper and I am talking with somebody who has a thick Indian accent who wants to start all over. Her fixes were temporary.

Jason has remotely rolled back my firmware thinking that will solve my issues. He’s going to call back in four hours to make sure that all is still well.

Bill got involved late Tuesday. He tried a few things. But it was no help. He said that he had to bump me up to “Tier 2″ support. They were unavailable, so he made an appointment to call me back on Wednesday. The time came and went with no contact.

It’s now Thursday.

Drunken Ingenuity

Useless Crap I Have

Most of our life effort can be divided into two neat activities: acquiring stuff and getting rid of stuff. Sure, there are other ways to do it, but this is an approach worth considering. I know several folks who have been up and down that continuum several times (on purpose!). As I look around my little section of the world, I notice that there is a lot of stuff. It occurs to me that some of this stuff is totally useless. So here’s my top 5 list of of worthless crap I own that I really should get rid of:

• Tortilla press. This is the old “manual” style with two handles. It’s far easier (and cheaper) to just by a sack of tortillas at the grocery store. I tried to use it as wall art, but that failed. Next garage sale, the thing is given tot he first person that looks at it.
• Tie hanger. This little gizmo looks like a small wire clothes hanger with a small chain attached to each end. The hook part of the hanger is supposed to attach to your shirt button and the chain restrains your necktie. I have no clue where it came from. I used to wear ties all the time but I never used this piece of silliness.
• Pedi Paws. My mother-in-law gave this gadget to us. It’s a battery operated torture device for pets. a spinning drum covered in abrasive is supposed to gently trim and shape your darling pet’s claws. She has two tiny yip dogs. We have two cats. We could have a sloth tranq’d up on 3 pounds of Xanax and it still would not put up with this whirring affliction. She probably knew that…
• Fax machine. For the early part of my life in corporate America the fax machine was an indispensable piece of modern technology. I’ve worked out of my home for a very long time and having one seemed like a good idea until email went mainstream. So I got rid of mine. And now I am in an industry that seems to have just discovered that faxes exist. So I had to actually go out and buy one. Huge, giant step backward. I’d use a fax/modem in my PC to send and receive, but it is a major pain to scan, convert, compose, attach to send a fax. So I am wasting precious flat office space to accommodate the Luddites. Does Obama want to make a significant dent in energy/resource waste in America? He should outlaw fax machines right now.
• Swing set. We have one of those galvanized steel pipe numbers in the backyard. It is sunk into the ground with concrete footers. It will likely survive a nuclear attack right along with cockroaches. It’s open pipe ends serve as a phenomenal homestead for every wasp and bee colony in the neighborhood. My parents bought it for us when the kids were tiny with the proclamation that this was the exact same kind that my brother and I had when we were kids. My kids are now 17 and 12. The swing set hasn’t been touched in years in a recreational way. The other day I drove past the home that I grew up in, stopped, and peeked over the fence. The swing set is still there.

What kind of useless/worthless crap is in your home?

More Cute Than Cute

Remorse

With all the shenanigans going on in the world, it’s kid of refreshing to hear of an actual occurrence of remorse. Maybe even stunning. Marc Drier screwed over a lot of folks. But it seems as though he actually understands the impact of his actions.

View this document on Scribd

Arby’s: Bad Omen?

I’m thinking that Arby’s was a bad move for lunch today. My youngest spawn pointed to my curly fries and asked “what happened to that one?”… It was kinda distorted and I realized that it looked like an Ebola virus. I also realized that there was absolutely no way I could explain Ebola to blossoming teen girl whose only item of fixation was the Jonas Brothers. So I ate it.

Sahel Kazemi Slutster?

Police say McNair’s mistress, distraught about mounting financial problems and her belief that he was seeing someone else, shot him four times while he slept, then positioned herself next to her dead lover so that when she put the final bullet through her own brain she would crumple onto his lap. By the time police arrived, her body had fallen to the floor. So what would a 36 year old retired NFL quarterback with a wife of 12 years and 4 kids see in a 20 year old? Boobs. Slutty boobs. That he was willing to throw it all away for those slutty boobs is pretty amazing.

But Can She Open a Beer With It?

A Russian woman has set a new world record, lifting a 14-kg. glass ball with her vagina muscles. “After I had a child, my intimate muscles got unbelievably weak. I read books on Dao and learned that ancient women used to deal with this problem using wooden balls,” she said. “I looked around, saw a Murano glass ball and inserted it in my vagina. It took me ages to get it out!”

I once witnessed an “exotic” dancer opening long neck beer bottles with her butt. Not saying I’d drink that bottle if it was opened with either set of muscles, though…