The Blogg

Friday after a long series of bus rides I visited the La Brea Tar Pits — a place where asphalt and oil have been bubbling out of the ground for thousands of years. Throughout that time many plants, animals, and even some humans have entered the pits, been trapped, and eventually fossilized as they sank through the tar. The Page museum on the site displays many of the fossils that have been excavated so far, including many of species that are now extinct. Did you know that there was once a creature roaming North America whose closest living relative is the African Lion? You will have to wait a few days for my pictures.

Next I walked down the Hollywood Walk Of Fame for a while, taking pictures of the ones I thought were interesting. Note to anyone who is planning to see all of it: there are stars on both sides of the street, so if you want to see all of them you should start and end at the same place. I was unprepared for this and had to keep doubling back. After an hour detour at Amoeba Music, where I bought half a dozen old LPs for my collection, I realized I was only going to have time for 2/3 of the Walk Of Fame.

Then I went to the Grammy Museum, which I would definitely recommend to any music lover. In addition to lots of information and memorabilia — clothing, handbills, instruments, hand-written lyrics, correspondence, etc — there was a surprisingly in-depth hands-on set of exhibits on the various procedures of recording and mastering an album. I spent 3 or 4 hours here, but unfortunately photography was not allowed.

My final sight-seeing of the day was supposed to be the Sunset Strip, where I would see historic rock venues such as the Whisky A Go-Go and actually take in.a show at the Roxy Theatre. A series of difficulties with the transit system conspired against this, so I eventually returned to Pasadena. This may have been for the best, since I still did not arrive back to my hotel room until 11:00.

I had thought about swimming in the Pacific Ocean on Saturday, but since I was still tired from my very long previous day and had never been sure what I would do with my keys / Metro pass / etc while in the water, I decided to stay at the hotel and get some work done. I did visit the Pasadena Convention Center to make sure I knew how to get there and bought some more albums at Penny Lane Records (they sure know how to build music stores out here), but the day was otherwise uneventful.

There are a few strange things about the Metro system here. When getting on a train, there are some places to tap your RFID card, but no turnstiles or gates or signage to require you to do so, or even to make it clear that you are supposed to. Thus, I took my first ride unintentionally as a fare jumper (not that it cost them anything, since I had purchased an unlimited day pass). On the busses there is a recording informing you when it arrives at each stop, but in most cases it is inaudible. There is also a textual display, but strangely it almost never gives you this extremely useful information. Rather, it usually displays the date and time. It might show the location when you arrive at a stop, but if someone has requested a stop (which almost always happens), then it only shows again and again “Please use rear exit.”. Thus, if you do not actually know the city it is very difficult to know when your stop is coming up. The Metro system is far.too vast to fit on a map with enough detail, so they have not even tried. Without the Internet I do not think it would be possible to plan a route. Note: Los Angeles has the highest number of very strange people per square mile of any place I have been.

As with my first round-trip flight, I was struck by several interesting things:

• It is remarkable how slowly you appear to be moving when there is a great distance between you and the objects that give you a frame of reference.
• There is a ton of farmland in Pennsylvania. Around Williamsport especially I expected to see more forest than cultivated land, but this was not even close to true. Also, the patterns thatb farmers cut from the forest look very random from above.
• I have always imagined deserts to be uniform and featureless. Rather, what I think were deserts were shot through with what looked like tons of dried-up river deltas.
• It is difficult to appreciate the greenness of Pennsylvania until you see other states. Steinbeck portrayed California as a land of milk and honey, but all of the non-urban parts of it that I saw were brown and seemingly lifeless (and Arizona and Colorado, etc.).

The flight was pleasant enough, except that a baby spent most of the 6 hour leg screaming, and my neighbor tried to convince me that mathematicians had just discovered the 40th prime number. I think I managed to sleep about 2 hours. Then I had a 2 hour trip on various parts of public transportation from LAX to walking distance from my hotel. LA’s Union Station is quite pathetic compared to Chicago’s. LA is famous for gridlock, but on the freeways I saw from the air and buses, traffic was flowing much more smoothly than it usually is on the Schyullkill Expressway.

I have tried a cheesesteak from three different vendors in Williamsport, and they have all been no better than what I could make myself from Minutesteaks. So when I saw that the cafe near my hotel had “Philly cheesesteak” on the menu, I had to try it. They got it right here, so why can’t they 2000 miles closer to the source?

I have an idea for a product: a guided tour of the cities, geologic features, and other landmarks that you are seeing from an airplane. All you would need is an MP3 player with recorded snippets and a GPS system to account for delays and detours. Perhaps no one else would appreciate such a thing, but I definitely would.

My thumbs and neck are tiring from typing this on my BlackBerry on a bus to the La Brea Tar Pits, so I’ll sign off for now.

If Verizon Math was not bad enough, I now have my own horror story with the company. It does not reach the same level of idiocy, but similarly displays a shocking level of incompetence.

I have very recently become a Verizon customer through the account my wife started for her work. (See Taking The Smartphone Plunge.) I would like to use the same telephone number that I have had for years on an AT&T family plan that I shared with my parents with my new account. So far, here have been my efforts to accomplish this:

Phone Call #1: 2009/07/02, 18:00. We had to go through some rigmarole of typing in the last four digits of the SSN of the account holder when starting the call for security purposes (fine). But then when I say who they are I have to hand off the telephone to the account holder in order to verify that I should be allowed to make changes to the account. There is no verification that you are who you say you are, so I am sure I could have avoided this simply by claiming to be Rachel Hogg.

Anyway, the second time that I explained what I wanted to do, the representative understood me. I gave her the telephone number to transfer, the AT&T account number with which it is currently associated, and the last four digits of the SSN of the holder of that account (my father) as requested. She confirmed that this was all she needed, informed me that the transfer would go through within 3-24 hours, and told me to have a nice day.

Phone Call #2: 2009/07/07, 19:10. Five days later (including a weekend and national holiday), the transfer had still not been completed. I called the national number again to see if I could hurry along the process. After I got through the call tree I could hear someone pick up the telephone, and then I could hear faint conversation and keyboard clicking in the background, but no one ever spoke to me. After tentatively saying “Hello” several times and waiting a few minutes, I decided that whomever was supposed to be helping me had instead decided to set the handset on his desk.

Phone Call #3: 2009/07/07, 19:20. This time I managed to reach a human being. After I explained the situation to them, they said that they would transfer me to the porting department. After about 3 minutes of on-hold music, I got “Your call could not be completed. Please hang up and dial again.”

Phone Call #4: 2009/07/07, 19:30. This representative yet again would not allow me to do anything without putting my wife on the line to give explicit permission. Note that this should have been taken care of once-and-for-all at call #1, and that the representative in call #3 did not mention it.

When I explained what I was trying to do, this representative responded that it was not possible through national customer support, and that I would need to go to a retail location. When I informed her that two other representatives thought I could do so, and that the last time they tried to transfer me I was disconnected, she said she would take a look at my file. After a few minutes she transferred me, without saying a word, and after several more minutes of holding I was disconnected again.

Phone Call #5: 2009/07/07, 19:40. Extremely frustrated with the national customer service line, I tried calling the store where we had signed our contract. The automated answering machine offered me the following four options: Store Hours & Directions, Sales, Equipment Issues, and National Customer Support. None really matched what I needed, so I tried “Equipment Issues”. After a minute of hold, the automated system told me that all available representatives were busy, suggested I call again at my earliest convenience, and then hung up on me.

Phone Call #6: 2009/07/07, 19:45. I now tried the “Sales” department of the local store, but none of those type of representatives were available either, and I was again not offered the option of waiting on the line until one became available.

Phone Call #7: 2009/07/07, 19:50. I decided to go back to the national hotline. This time when I explained everything to a representative, he asked if I had gone through the automated Terms & Conditions system during call #1. I had no idea what he was talking about, so he prepared to have me do this. First he needed the AT&T account number. I had, of course, destroyed the paper that contained this information after call #1. I suggested that it should be in my file, since I had given it to her then. The representative told me that she had not bothered to record it.

Phone Call #8: 2009/07/07, 20:25. After getting the AT&T account information from my father again, I tried once more through the national customer service number. This time when I explained my situation to the representative, she seemed to understand exactly what was going on. She stayed on the line with me as I went through an automated system to officially give my consent to the port request (something that had never been mentioned in call #1), and then even repeated some information from the automated system in case I had missed it.

We will see if this works, but I am finally feeling optimistic. Hey Verizon quality assurance, can you hear me now? You should fire the people I talked to in calls #1 and #4 and the person I did not talk to in call #2, get rid of this silly security theater, fix your system for transferring calls between departments, make the answering system at your retail stores more user-friendly, and give Jessica a raise. You may have “the network”, but with service like this you won’t have me as a customer after our current contract expires.

Update: 2009/07/08, 12:35. I was told by either Jessica or the automated system that both my old AT&T number (new Verizon number) and old Verizon number would continue to function throughout the porting process. Neither works. I was supposed to be in a teleconference this morning, and when my advisor called either number he was told that it had been disconnected. I cannot make outgoing calls either.

Update: 2009/07/08, 17:20. When my wife came home from work I was able to use her telephone to call a number I had been given to check the status of the port request. It informed me that the request had completed. I was supposed to be waiting for a message on my device letting me know that I could now reprogram it for the new telephone number. It never arrived, but I did so anyway and my phone is now working with the proper number.