insightful observations and cogent commentary on all the really important things in life ... and some of the less important things
Friday, March 15, 2019
Don't Believe It
It ain't so.
Spectrum Mobile shipped me two new LG phones, with software that made it fairly easy to transfer info from our old phones to the new ones. Service here in town was not noticeably different.
Then I went on a trip to Florida. Once I passed out of the city, I had, essentially, no service of any kind. I had no phone signal almost the entire way. Occasionally I would have one or two bars, in cities like Houston and New Orleans -- not enough, I learned, to actually make a call. For data, I could get no 4G signal, and usually couldn't even get a 3G signal. Mostly I had no signal whatsoever, though occasionally I'd have a 1G signal. Which is very close to no signal whatsoever.
As I got almost to Tampa I finally had enough of a signal to enable me to use GPS navigation to my hotel ... sort of. At critical moments it would cut out, so I would hear instructions such as "In one mile." That's it, just "In one mile." Not very helpful. (And I still had no phone signal.)
While I was in Tampa I had spotty SMS service. For example, I could send a text from Row M at Raymond James Stadium, but not from Row F. (My seat was in Row F.) I would try to send texts from all over town, but usually got the message "Text not sent; tap message to try again." Sometimes it'd go through on the second try; sometimes it'd go through twice. Usually it didn't go through at all.
The only time the cellphone worked reliably was when I was connected to the wi-fi network at my hotel. That's not acceptable. The fundamental purpose of a cellphone is to have access to help should something bad happen, like if the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, or if you're using GPS to get somewhere. If there's a wireless network available, there's probably someone with a working telephone within a hundred yards.
I tried calling Spectrum Mobile while in Tampa, to see if there was something they could do about the pisspoor quality of service. I couldn't get a signal for long enough to get past the first item on their call menu. And by then I had decided that this was not a service I wished to continue with. It was worse than when I had T-Mobile, years ago.
So when I got back home I called Spectrum to tell them I wanted to discontinue the service and send the phone back. They tried to tell me there was a $35 per-phone restocking fee, but I told them I wasn't going to pay that because I'd been told when I signed up for the service that there was a 30-day risk-free trial period, and that if I didn't like it all I had to do was send the phones back. When I threatened to find myself a new internet-and-cable provider, the woman on the phone finally told me I could take the phones to the local Spectrum store.
I looked the Spectrum store location up on the Internet. It's just off the Interstate, about 6 miles from my house. So this morning I went there to return the phones. The guy there told me that he couldn't take the phones, because that location was a Spectrum Cable store and they don't handle the mobile side of the business. He played on his computer for a while and then told me that I could take the phones to Fed-Ex and they would ship them back to the location they need to get to. "They'll be able to print the label there," he said, apparently reading it off his computer screen.
So I went to Fed-Ex. They couldn't print a label because they didn't know where the phones were supposed to go. So: back to the Spectrum store to find out where the Spectrum Mobile store was. Then I went there and they insisted they couldn't take the phones back because they had been shipped to me, and not bought in the store. (Is this crazy?) But they couldn't tell me where to ship them. So I started making a loud fuss about wanting to get rid of these phones and get rid of their crappy cellphone service, and they swung into action. A guy comes out from the back and says he will get me the address of where to send the phones. He got on the phone and called the same people I'd been on the phone with for an hour the previous evening, and got put on hold. While he was on hold, though, the Fed-Ex guy came in with some boxes that had the address on them, so he copied the address down. Upshot is, I ended up paying about $12 to send those damn phones back. Good riddance.
I understand that Spectrum Mobile is presently available only to Spectrum cable customers. I've been pretty happy with my cable service, but now I'm having second thoughts about that, too. If their new mobile business represents the kind of service I can expect going forward, I'd better start looking at alternatives.
Thursday, July 31, 2014
A Nice Place to Live, But I Wouldn't Want to Visit There
for maximum coherence, read all the posts from this trip in order, starting with THIS ONE.
After a day off from touristic pursuits (to do laundry, shop and watch a soccer match on TV), we took a day trip up to Vancouver, British Columbia. We drove inland to the border crossing north of Lynden, Washington (where there was no delay to get across) and went by the set of the current television show "Bates Motel," which airs on some cable channel. (We had thought it was the set of the movie Psycho when we planned the excursion, not having carefully read the place description on line.) Then we headed into the city.Vancouver skyline |
The bartender greeted us cheerfully, and then was never seen again. It being another gorgeous day, we wanted to sit outside, but they only had two-tops there, so we pulled up to a high table just inside the wide open doors. Naturally there were televisions all over the place, so we couldn't entirely avoid watching; but at least they were showing British sports, such as you might have to see in an Irish prison: darts on one screen, golf on the other. (Darts, it seems, is as abstruse as cricket. Scores seem to go up and down at random, and we couldn't tell just by watching whether a throw was good, or otherwise.) Our waitress brought menus and drinks quickly. So far, so good.
The menu includes such overpriced traditional Irish fare as sliders, flatbreads and nachos. These are the things we ordered. (As Hispanics have moved farther and farther north, I have more or less rescinded my rule against eating Mexican food north of Round Rock, but then, this wasn't really Mexican food. Let's call it cucina-inspired.) Church Lady and the Perfesser both went for the pulled-pork sliders. They report that the little burgers had good flavour but not a particularly good texture, neither moist nor dry, just vaguely unsatisfying: too little meat, too little slaw, too much bread. "Disappointing" was the word used twice.
Buttermilk's flatbread was better. It had a topping of pulled pork with pineapple salsa and jalapeños on a crispy layer of bread. The topping was adequate in quantity, though more meat would have been unobjectionable, and the crust maintained its integrity throughout the meal.
My nachos were interesting. They were made from a number of small tortillas, cut in half and fried, then stacked in a jumble on a plate. Toppings of meat (pulled pork again), corn, onions, peppers and jalapeños were scattered across it, then dosed with a drizzle of sour cream. The menu referred to "lots of cheese" on the dish. There was, arguably, the promised amount of cheese, but it was mostly in one part of the plate, as though the arm doing the scattering of ingredients had tired towards the end and just abandoned the effort. Because of the interlacing of the nacho chips, the dish was a little hard to eat, but that produced the rare yet desireable result of allowing me to finish lunch after the Perfesser, who is reknowned for his deliberate approach to meals.
What does that mean? |
We almost didn't learn any of this about the food at Cielli's, because the service was so very bad. (I was reminded of a rude comment of a friend, years ago in Mexico, who told a waiter that we had received lo mas pinche servicio. It would have applied here, but we were all too polite to express ourselves except through the gratuity.) We did not get our food before we had reached the point of calculating how much we should leave for the drinks if we walked out. It was easily a half hour between ordering and serving, during which time we learned nothing about darts scoring either. It would have helped our mood, to say nothing of the tip, if our waitress had come by to check on us during that long wait, or to let us know there would be a delay. Instead, she studiously avoided so much as looking in our direction; she devoted herself to the farther sides of the room, the exterior tables, and the areas behind the kitchen door. She was not a good waitress.
pretty building, not much inside |
Stanley Park is huge, and popular with locals. For tourists, it's not so great. It's so big that you can't walk from one part to another without repeatedly paying the typical exorbitant parking rates. It's so poorly marked that we didn't find the many sites we had wanted to see there, settling in the end for the wildlife of the Lost Lagoon (which we found right off; I guess it's only lost because nobody's looking for it, and I understand why), consisting of lots of racoons and ducks, a few other birds, a squirrel and -- surprisingly -- a coyote; all of whom seemed to want to be fed (except, thankfully, the coyote, which was happy to just chew on himself); and the waterfront view of the Lions Gate Bridge, mainly of interest for the forest of kelp floating along the shore. On our way out of the park, we passed Sunset Beach, which we had intended to visit later on because our guidebook called it "a less populated beach." That must mean it is less crowded than Times Square on New Year's Eve, because it was packed four hours before sunset. We quietly dropped that plan and headed on to Canada Place, which was mildly interesting and slightly informative with its postings on Canadian history; and we drove by the Gastown Steam Clock --- it was too congested to stop, but we got a good long look and a decent picture out the car window while waiting for crosstraffic; we had a stop sign, they didn't.
What does that mean? |
What's that mean? |