Bit Stampede

So I’m trying to sleep this morning, since things will be crazy today doing family stuff, and I just can’t do it, because I’m thinking about the fact that tomorrow I’m flying off to California for the quarterly MoCo all-hands meeting.

Previous remote jobs I’ve held that “required travel” required a lot less of it than this one. I don’t mind traveling, but I sure hate the means by which I have to do it. The last few years have turned air travel from a minor inconvenience into a major pain. Increasingly much of my travel time is spent on tiny little planes that are ill-suited for someone my height (and to be frank, width). And I get to spend increasingly ridiculous sums of money to do it (more accurately, I suppose, the company does).

This seems counterintuitive to me. I know the airline industry is having rough times, but making your customers uncomfortable and unhappy doesn’t seem like the smart way to go about fixing your industry.

A year or two ago, I realized that my travel was a lot more pleasant if I scheduled my trip with a longish layover in some airport along the way — say two or three hours. Enough time to stretch my legs, get a bite to eat, surf the net or play a game for a while. This plan worked well until they started moving all flights under around two and a half hours to regional jets. Now if I try to break up my flight into two roughly equal length parts, I wind up on regional jets the entire trip.

So I’m back to using Atlanta or sometimes Cincinnati as my plane-switching point. Which doesn’t lend itself all that well toward taking a nice long break, since it’s only about 45 minutes away from home. Not a ton of benefit in taking that long break that early on the way out, or that close to home on the way back.

I miss the old days before airlines used hubs, and you would usually just fly nonstop between whatever two cities you were traveling between. Might have been inefficient for the airlines, but man did it make air travel nice.

I wish we had high-speed trains in this country. I’d so much rather travel by train. The seats on Amtrak are so comfortable, with good legroom, footrests, and you can recline and relax very nicely. Not to mention that you can get up and find a table to sit at to eat, and so forth. Just not a particularly time-effective way to travel when you need to be somewhere. Looking quickly at Amtrak’s web site, I find that it would cost around $380 to get from here to San Jose, California, but would take a little over two days.

Now, on the other hand, if I could get Internet access on the train, then I’d be able to work and so forth along the way. In theory I’d be able to use my cell phone as a modem most of the time at least.

It’s an interesting notion. I don’t know how reasonable it is, but it’s something to think about trying once to see how it goes.

I’ve been offline for about three hours now. I tried to call their customer service (ha!) but on top of their horrible support they’ve added an obnoxious automated system that insists on making you jump through the hoops you used to be able to demand they not make you jump through (admittedly with varying degrees of success).

So let’s see. Take some of the worst Internet service in the country. Mix in the stupidest support people on earth. Then take lousy infrastructure, incompetent technicians, and a new automated support system designed for the sole purpose of preventing you from speaking to a real person. Nice.

On top of that, their system insists that my modem is fine, when any idiot can look at the fact that there are two solid lights and no blinking ones and see that it’s totally not connected to jack.

Ironically, the only reason I called was because they used to have a recording that would tell you about any known outages, and I wanted to see if this was a known problem. That recording appears to be gone now. If they’d had it there, I’d have been okay with this whole mess for now.

I just now as I was typing this got a call from my mother-in-law down the road. She’s having problems with hers too, so at least it’s not just us.

Still — Charter is completely worthless, and I’d like to use someone else — except there is no alternative in this town. Argh!