Busy Signal vs. Fax Machine

While home in Utah last Friday, I was supposed to have carpet delivered and installed. My wife and I had picked this date 3 weeks earlier so I could be there to make sure everything went as planned. That morning my wife got a call from the installer that a family emergency had come up and we needed to reschedule. My wife let me know about the delay and I went into action fixing the wrong as we had spent weeks moving out of 3 bedrooms and ripping out the old carpet. I did not want to go another day without something we had already paid for.

I made my first call to the local store where we had purchased the carpet. It is a large chain store with many locations. I did that on purpose so that in the event that one installer had a family emergency, the company would have other installers they could call on to finish the job. The person helping me on the other end of the phone mistakenly hung up on me while trying to transfer me to her manager. Naturally I called back only to get hung up on a second time. That should have been a clue that this person did not know how to use a phone.

My next call went to the customer service department of this large store. I talked with a nice lady who eventually connected me back to the local store that I had called twice before. She routed me to the same employee that had hung up on me. This whole process didn't take long to write but actually took about 30 minutes of real time thanks to all of the automated phone systems and multiple explanations I had to make. Meanwhile the local store had tried several times to call me back but kept getting a busy signal.

With the ubiquity of call waiting and other features that come standard with our mobile phones, we don't realize that old hard-wired phone lines don't include them without extra charges. Some younger people today have never heard a busy signal and doesn't know what it sounds like. The lady at the local store kept saying she couldn't call me back because she kept getting a fax machine and didn't realize that fax machines sound nothing like a busy signal.

I probably made a mistake using an old land line instead of calling in on my mobile phone. However I called from my basement and prefer a land line down there instead of my mobile. I had to laugh about this person not knowing what a busy signal sounds like.

Ultimately I managed to resolve the issue and carpet got installed at 3pm that afternoon.

Laptops, Tablets, Phones, and Paper

I have several hours to kill while I wait for my next flight and so I am hanging out in Delta's Sky Club at the Los Angeles International Airport. Technology continues to evolve and so I thought I would look around to do a non-scientific survey of what devices people are using while they wait for their flights. The lady in front of me is working feverishly on her Mac laptop. In fact most of the laptops in here are Macs. About the only exception is the guy to my right with his Dell. However he is using his oversized iPhone, so does it count? In fact the majority of the people in the airport lounge are actually mostly staring at their small smartphone screens. I wonder how many of them are playing Pokémon Go?

I do see one or two women using tablet computers. All of them seem to be reading. Amazingly I don't see a single book out. I wonder if that is because there is a plethora of electrical outlets here, so everyone seems to be taking advantage of them to recharge batteries. Most of the aforementioned phones seem to be corded to the outlets as well.

Finally the older woman to my right has taken over her table with an old-fashioned paper notebook. Papers are spread everywhere as her husband carefully guards a small corner of space for his bowl of chicken chili. In a large room filled with about 50 frequent fliers, she is the only one using paper. Considering the lounge provides a stack of newspapers and magazines for everyone to read, I find that interesting.

As for me, I have my Mac laptop out as I prefer a full-sized keyboard over the simulated one on my phone. Earlier today I completed a Powerpoint presentation for my meetings this week and now want to top off the battery before my next flight. While I know there will be a power outlet by my seat on the plane, it still feels good to have a full battery just in case I need it. I also used my phone to call my wife and talk about her exciting morning without me. Yes technology is everywhere and most of my fellow travelers seem to be taking advantage of it.

Obamacare's Epic Fail

I flew back to Salt Lake from Oakland on Friday evening and couldn't help but notice all of the TV's showing President Obama apologizing for people losing benefits because of his affordable care act. Imagine that, a politician not realizing the long-term effects of his legislation. It seems that all of the politicians who were in favor of Obamacare never bothered to read the bill and just passed it because of partisan politics. I guess I'll chalk up reading as another thing the politicians running our country don't know how to do.

Right now I work for a company that provides great health benefits and so I am not one of the many Americans that will find himself "taxed" for not having healthcare once Obamacare goes into effect. I am concerned about the computer system that we Americans spent $400 Million to create though. What did we get for that price tag? A "clunky" system built by Canadians using 10-year-old technology. Now I have nothing against Canada or its citizens. Some of my best friends are technical geniuses and come from our neighbor to the North. They just happen to live in Silicon Valley now and that is where our government should have gone to build our nation's healthcare website.

If you look at the population of the United States, there are currently around 321 Million Americans. If you look at how much traffic popular massive multi-player online (MMO) video games process, it is in the billions of transactions per day. That means that any number of video game companies could build a website to meet the demands of every man, woman, and child pressing the "submit" button within an 8-hour window and still have enough processing power to kill a few monsters. Furthermore these same video game companies could build the entire system for around $10 Million. I think there are a large number of other companies outside the video game industry that could also have solved this problem. How many people do you think visit Google or Yahoo on a daily basis?

Kathleen Sebelius is the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human services and has gone on the record as saying that she is the responsible party for the Obamacare website's dismal failure. If that is the case, why is she still employed?