Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

It is pure greed

The homies and I were eating lunch at a Shake Shack. The gentleman next to us friendly interrupted us to ask whether or not the food there is worth it. I bluntly replied a resounding no. $20 for burger, fries, and drink will forever be too damn high, no matter how gourmet it is (I would say Shake Shack is only slightly above McDonald’s). The only reason we were there for lunch is there was a buy-one-get-one offer on the Shake Shack app.

Apps are downright mandatory these days when eating at chain restaurants. Most will have deals that aren’t advertised in-store. The gentleman was bemoaning the fact he did not know about the free burger offer. In these times of inflated eating out costs, app deals are the only way to get me to spend money at restaurants. (Unless I’m eating with others.)

Speaking of inflated costs: can someone explain how can banks possibly charge $5,000 for simply closing on a mortgage? This feels like pure fat off the top, doesn’t it? The institution is already making money on the loan by adding points on top of the benchmarking lending rate! You mean to tell me that it cost $5,000 for a few people to crunch the numbers (I concede that underwriting due diligence requires some labor) and press the return key on a keyboard?

Worse: when it comes time to refinance - with the same bank - you will get charged another $5,000 for closing that. For what is presumably a formality! The bank knows your information already, and have records of you paying on time. Unless the borrower is completely upside down on house, all the bank has to do is rearrange the numbers internally. And for that, the easiest $5,000 made ever. Even a Porsche cars salesperson would blush at such wetting of the beak.

Be realistic

Sometimes you must get honest with yourself: are you infatuated only with the ideal, or is it something you’re really going to do (or want)?

An example is the person who bought a treadmill thinking he will run marathon amounts of miles (or kilometers for those you with nationalized healthcare) every week. What ends up happening is the treadmill will sit and gather dust after the first week of ownership. He fell in love with the image of himself being a fit runner, but his actual proclivities never made the change. He’s never going to be a runner, and that’s okay!

My family bought a $400 Vitamix mixer thinking that smoothies will become a regular thing. That unit has since been gathering dust on the counter. Same thing with that air fryer, too…

I’ve had this ideal of owning enthusiast cars and taking them on many roadtrips, documenting them along the way. That practice has not materialized at all in the past decade plus of driving. What I actually prefer is owning the cars, but not to have too much to do with it otherwise. If it were possible for a car to never require maintenance and the paint always keeps shiny - sign me up. I much rather be driven (or walk) everywhere than get behind the wheel.

It’s being painfully honest with myself that explains why I’ve never owned more than one car at time. I enjoy seeing enthusiasts’ garages with a fleet of cars. It would be nice in theory to have many cars of my own, representing different varieties the automotive world has to offer. But if I can’t even be bothered to do anything with one car, buying any more would simply be a burden.

Being realistic is why I recently sold the BMW M2. It was costing too much money to support the ideal of being an owner of such an amazing car. I don’t use it, it mostly sits, and the insurance for the car is amazingly high. I would be lying to myself if I kept the M2 on the pretense that sometime in the future I may use it as I’d imagined. It’s highly unlikely, given the five prior years of ownership it hasn’t already happened.

Spending money is easy. So is imagining our changing lifestyle with that new purchase. I think it’s important to deeply think over whether or not it’s merely the idea that we are enamored with. Are you buying a house just for the sake of buying a house? Will your present lifestyle actually be improved? Or will the house just add more costs and responsibilities that, in the end, you really don’t want?

Always work sometimes

It’s always interesting to see just how much of the common Internet runs on Amazon’s AWS. When AWS goes down - granted, not often at all - you quickly find out that half the websites you rely on everyday is no longer accessible. How can I function at work when Reddit doesn't load? Nobody can.

That goes to show how important AWS is, and how it really should have absolutely zero downtime. The backups and failsafes should have their own backups and failsafes.

Qualtrics - the online survey company - was completely non-functional during the AWS outage two days ago. (I know this because it’s a service we use at work.) Qualtric’s IT people must have the easiest troubleshooting job in the world: throw hands up, blame Amazon. There’s not much to do when the contracted third-party server your service runs on is acting up. Calling AWS support isn’t going to make them go any faster in fixing the problem. I don’t email Squarespace help whenever their service goes down (more often than I’d prefer, honestly). There's only the wait.

Good news for me, my livelihood is not dependent on this website. Bad news for Qualtrics, when your core service goes down for much of a work day, that’s a lot of lost revenue, never mind angry paying customers. Perhaps the company’s surely high-deductible insurance plan cover such events? If the cut is deep enough, I’d even think about suing Amazon. Word on the street is, Jeff Bezos has plenty of millions to spare.

Can you imagine your smart home devices stopped working on Monday because the backend is AWS? No doubt Internet-of-things make life convenient, but if a server outage somewhere causes me to be locked outside of my home, that’s not going to work.

Respect the trades

I recently bought a 2019 Volkswagen Golf GTI. With it I was thinking about finally trying my hands at a vanity license plate. In my previous cars I’ve been too cheap to pay the $45 per year extra on top of the existing licensing fee for the privilege. Now that I’m as financially secure as I’ve ever been, the timing feels right.

That is, until I received the randomly assigned standard plates from the California DMV: 9VWB456. Doesn’t get more serendipitous than that, right? When the god of random chance assigned me plates with letters VW - historical short form for Volkswagen, there is no way I can get a vanity plate now. It’s too perfect.

I don’t believe in any gods, but I can see why people reaffirm their faith when stuff like this happens to them. I too would explain it with a higher power looking benevolently upon me.

Part of the process of buying a used vehicle, I took the GTI to get new tires. The existing tires cannot be trusted. The local America’s Tire has a window looking into the work bays at the waiting area. So the whole time I was watching the endless toil the grease monkeys (I use this term with all love and respect) are going through. A typical wheel plus tire is easily over 50 pounds, and these guys are heaving and huffing them onto waist-high machines. Good exercise if you’re in a gym, horrible if you have to keep doing that for an entire workday.

Never mind all the cancerous fumes from the tires and vechicular particles.

People have said that the trades are a good alternative to attending university. It can absolutely be, but one has to go in while understanding the tradeoffs. The trades are incredibly physically demanding. I don’t suppose it’s possible to be a car mechanic and coming out the other end without some sort of chronic pain. There’s good money to be made, but you’d better religiously save for a future that might not be so rosy health-wise.

As person who gets paid well to work in a sterile office cubicle, I would say a college education that parlays to a white-collar job should still be the number one option.

Basic table stakes

For a control-freak like me, it’s difficult to entrust tasks to somebody else. But that’s just it: we can’t avoid that in this life. It’s impossible to have all the expertise. At some point you’re going to have to pay someone to do a job. More expensive the service, higher the anxiety. It’s a leap of faith every time I task things out to a new-to-me establishment.

My requirements are not (or shouldn’t be) out of the ordinary: competence, attention to detail, and great communication. I want the job done correctly and comprehensively. I want inquiries to be answered in a timely manner, and be constantly updated during the process. Control-freaks hate to not know what’s going on. You have no idea how much I welcomed package delivery tracking in the early days of the Internet. To be able to know exactly where a box is and when it will arrive? That’s just good customer service.

Notice I did not mention price. I am willing to pay a premium for any place of business with the three requirements I mentioned. This is capitalistic America, after all.

I try to mirror the same three qualities in my line of work. Solving user computing issues is definitely a customer service job. So I take care to be the sort of support agent that I myself would want to bring problems to. Users get timely communication every step of the way. The work will be done within an appropriate timeframe. Laptops leave my hands in better shape and cleanliness than when I receive them.

We’ve all encountered bad customer service in our lives. I do not want to be a part of the problem. And when I find an establishment I can rely on, we are best friends for life. For example: I will patronize only this America’s Tire branch for as long as I live in this region.

Our civic duty

Today was the first time in a long time I actually got summoned to jury duty for San Francisco. I’m old enough to remember when there weren’t a $6 travel stipend. You can even get financial assistance if your employer doesn’t pay you for taking time off for jury service. It seems the City really wants to incentivize participation as much as possible.

Fortunate for me, I am an employee of California, so there’s absolutely zero issues with taking time off for public service. Because I’m already a public servant.

The Hall of Justice in San Francisco is a really old building. Though since it withstood the 1989 earthquake, citizens inside the building should be safe for the next “big one” that’s supposedly coming soon for the past two decades. I’m old enough to also remember when the jury reporting room had tiny CRT televisions showing a VHS copy of the narrated jury duty guide. It’s good to see it’s now large LCD units with an updated digital copy.

I wonder: the fact they make potential jurors sit through half an hour of seminar before anything fun begins, there’s no reason to show up on time, is there? The punctuality stickler like me can afford to be leisurely with the bus schedule when deciding on a departure time. A tacit accommodation for unforeseen commute issues? Again, the City really wants to maximize the number of people for jury selection.

More fortune for me: I didn’t even get selected to go into the court room. The clerk called the names of about 50 people, leaving about a dozen behind to be dismissed. I was amongst that dozen. Some of us even cheered as we heard the new that we’re done with this civic duty for at least one calendar year. I really wouldn't mind serving on a trial, though getting to the Hall of Justice, when I live on the other side of the city, is indeed a pain.

Until next year?

Shut it down!

You know what’s a surprisingly good cleaner? Baby wipes. If it’s gentle enough for sensitive baby skin, it’s gentle enough for your most prized delicate surfaces. If it’s good enough to clean poop, it’s good enough to clean whatever common messes you’ve got. Baby wipes are PH-balanced and far less harsh than the equivalent Lysol stuff. I keep a pack of them in the car for any spillage emergencies.

The United States government shut down just as my passport renewal was submitted for processing. Fortunate for me, I don’t need to travel anytime soon so the fine folks over at the State Department can take their sweet time. Even better: I received the new passport in the mail but a few days after the shutdown began. Another case of in before the lock, but in real life.

My sympathies to all people who are relying on a functional and operational federal government for their livelihood. It cannot be an easy pill to swallowing knowing the very people (read: the United States Congress) who are messing with your money are, by law, still getting paid during the shutdown. The utter lack of skin in the game should be infuriating for all Americans.

In fact, new rule: if a shutdown happens during a congressmen’s term, they should not be allowed to run for reelection. By shutting down the federal government, congress essentially caused a failed State. Unduly causing harm towards the citizenry over ego, and the inability to compromised, is inexcusable. School children have better diplomacy and discipline than our current members of Congress.

And don’t you dare jack yourself off to the American armed forces when your very action caused them to miss paychecks.