Project Miner

I have started riding the bus into the office in Decatur. Katy and I are doing the one car family thing and I’m working in Decatur twice a week to keep myself out of the house and maintain a bit of my sanity. Marta has an absolutely putrid website, but I was finally able to find a route that went from very near my house to very near the office location. This morning was the first attempt (on Monday, Katy drove me to the Marta station a few miles away and I rode the train to the station very near the office).

This morning, I left the house at 6:15 and walked a half mile (according to Google Maps) to the bus station. The bus rolled up within a minute or two, right on time at 6:22. I hopped on, paid my $1.75, sat back and read (“The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle“, by Haruki Murakami, which is awesome so far). The bus arrived at the Avondale station at 6:50 and I was opening the door to the office (a short walk away) at 6:55. Awesome, awesome.

Things I love about riding the bus, after Day 1:

• It takes me 30 minutes in my own car, 45 minutes by bus. But, I’m reading, not driving, so it’s sooooo much better.
• I get my body moving and energized with the walk to the bus stop.
• The dirt head in me loves that I’m not throwing extra pollution out – the bus would be running that route with or without me.

Since I’m an early bird, I don’t have many concerns about the bus being off-schedule. The 6:22 bus should always be there right around that time (barring a breakdown or something), because it won’t have any traffic to deal with.

It’s interesting to me the negative social connotation that riding the bus seems to have. Even in DC, where public transit was a normal thing, it was as if riding the bus was “for poor people, or people with suspended licenses”. I don’t get it. The bus I was on was clean and comfortable. The driver was nice, the other riders were quiet (mostly half asleep).

I love the bus. Of course, it’s Day 1, so that can certainly change, but for now, I’m happy to report that I’m officially a fan of the bus. And there are stops within spitting distance of our house! I’ll now be looking into all the routes and where they can take me.

RAGE. There is no other word to describe dealing with phone systems where you have to speak and some damn computer doesn’t understand a word you say. I recently called our health insurance company (which is a whole different rant for another day) and had to “talk” to an automated operator.

Things that infuriated me during this call:

1. Computer woman asked me to say my member ID, but then said to not include the first three letters. WTF? If they knew enough to program computer woman to tell you not to include the first three letters, couldn’t they program the response handler to ignore them?!?
2. While I was trying to slowly speak my member ID, computer woman interrupted and gave me a brief lecture about how to say the ID… which seemed to mirror exactly what I was doing before she interrupted me.
3. She then asked me to say my birthday. My birthday? I said “twelve twenty six seventy five”. She said “I’m sorry, I did not understand that, try again, what is your birthday?” My ID number was just a sequence of numbers and I got a lecture on how to read that, yet my birthday, which could be said in a bazillion different ways gets no format. I tried again “December twenty six nineteen seventy five” and again, she couldn’t understand.

I eventually just started screaming “HELP” until she said “I don’t understand that, please hold for the next available agent”. What happened then was infuriating enough that I won’t even bother here, it’s a post for another time.

If I had a point with this rant, it’s that computerized conversations are not ready for prime-time and customer service really should not be the place for it. The problems, as I see it are:

1. Real people are all a little bit different when it comes to cognition. Conveying what you need from people requires slightly different instructions for each person (or type of person). If the computerized voice can’t adapt (and the one I just yelled at certainly couldn’t), then it seems a lot of people will end up in a frustrating “I didn’t understand your input” loop.I’m pretty tech savvy and I get what they are trying to do, so I try things to make it work better (speaking slowly, formatting properly, etc), only to get frustrated and start screaming (because we all know that being loud helps. sigh). If you want true comedy, watch my Grandma try to deal with one of these systems.
2. We spend time getting to the point where we understand what the computer wants, and then it doesn’t understand what we gave it!! Not because of a formatting problem, just because voice recognition sucks. RAGE. This must stop. Seriously, if it has a “95% success rate”, that’s 1 in 20 words missed. If each person is speaking an alphanumeric value 12 characters long, that’s a TON of mistakes. “Not ready for prime-time” doesn’t even begin to address the situation.

One last note, this reminded me of something Thomas told me the last time he called me. I picked up the phone and he was laughing, saying “Voice recognition sucks”. The situation he had just gone through was this…

Thomas to phone: “Call Eric Muntz”
Phone to Thomas: “Did you say ‘Call Supercuts’?”
Thomas to phone: “NO”
Phone to Thomas: “Ok, calling Supercuts…”

If the voice recognition fails on “no”, me thinks it should not have been released to the public. I can’t even think of a similar analogy, maybe a car not understanding it’s gas pedal? Sigh.

My tech blog is now open for business. I have been wanting to geek out and write nerdy programming stuff that maybe others would find useful (or I’d benefit from archiving). So, it’s open for business now, if you are a programmer, check it out – http://www.projectminer.com/techblog

Just a quick post on something I found useful that maybe some of you will. I have Shingles, which I won’t even start to detail and complain about (or I would be writing forever)… basically, it is the suck. I have medicine to take for it, and I am terrible about remembering to take medicines. I thought “damn, it’d be nice if I could easily setup my phone to bark at me to take the meds”. After asking Joogle (which is asking Jol to look things up for me, because he is like a librarian on steroids… and I be lazy), I decided to use Google Calendar to setup events and attach SMS (phone text messages) reminders to each of them.

What I did was:

1. Setup a new calendar, I called it “Eric’s Medicines”, so it will be useful again some day.
2. Setup a repeating event for each daily dose (i.e. Take Morning Valtrex @ 8am, Take Afternoon Valtrex @ 12pm, etc), made them repeat daily for however long I’m supposed to take the meds.
3. Setup a reminder for each to my phone (you have to register your phone by going into settings and adding your phone number, then google sends a text message with a verification token)

That does it. Easy as hell and now my phone says “hey, donkey, take your meds to get the scabies to go away” (Katy and I are calling them “scabies”, at least I have a sense of humor about my skin feeling like burning).