Dear Verizon Wireless...

Are we having some capacity difficulties these days?

I’ve noticed that nearly the entire time I was in the greater San Francisco area, my connectivity was iffy at best.

Where I live in DC, it’s a rare moment when I pick up my phone and don’t have constant 4GLTE access; at no point have I ever had a dropped call or absolutely no voice connectivity. Sure, I might get only three bars from time to time, but 95% of the time I get a full five and unless I’m in motion and drop into a dark spot somewhere, I’m in constant contact. Not so in the bay area!

I sat in my office in Foster City and my hotel next door, watching my phone occasionally latch onto a 4G signal for a few minutes, then lose the connection. This was especially frustrating when I was actively using the data services, either web browsing, composing email, reading Twitter or using my wifi hotspot functionality. I noticed the same behavior in my travels in Belmont, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Fremont and San Francisco Airport.

More than once, I was entirely blocked from making voice calls for lack of any connectivity. I wait 5-10 minutes without moving from my seat and suddenly I get all my bars back. A few minutes later, they’re all gone again. This shouldn’t happen.

It’s made even more aggravating because my Droid Bionic phone (purchased 10 months ago) is utterly useless when it attempts to lock onto a data signal. It freezes for approximately 60-90 seconds until the connection is established. Even if I have voice service, the Contacts function freezes so I can’t locate a telephone number in my directory even though I know it is resident in the phone’s memory. This phone works very well when it has a continuous connection but it is graceless and ungainly when dealing with an intermittent signal to the point it makes me wonder question the state of the technology.

BTW, your latest software update for the Droid Bionic was a huge mistake. As near as I can tell, it gained me nothing. The GPS now take several times longer to pinpoint my location. The user interface seems to stutter, acting as though some other operation was chewing up all memory & cpu power at unpredictable intervals. I wish I could figure out the pattern or determine which app might be offending the operating system but I haven’t had any luck yet and you don’t have any tools to help me or your store tech support figure it out.

The Bionic used to be a delight to use but I now sometimes regret retiring my old Blackberry Storm. If you’d finally let me have Ice Cream Sandwich, all would be forgiven, but you’re not going to do that any time soon, are you?

As I write this, I'm in my way back to Washington DC where my phone is typically much better behaved. If I start to see any similar issues at home, however, I will be looking for a different service. Just sayin'.

Car Review: Volkswagen Beetle

The nice thing about traveling is that it’s the perfect opportunity to test drive cars you might not have previously considered. Even better, when they suck out loud, you can return them with no shame.

This trip, I had a Volkswagen Beetle. I give it a so-so rating.

On the good side, the seats were comfortable, the engine had great acceleration and the fuel consumption wasn’t horrid. It had a nice feel while driving in both city and highway conditions and handled very well. And who could resist its iconic profile?

On the bad side, it made me constantly and uncomfortably paranoid about my surroundings because nearly all of my lines of sight were blocked in some fashion. The rear view mirror was much too small to show what was happening behind me IMHO, although perhaps a larger one wouldn’t have been utterly defeated anyway by the four headrests. Even when I swiveled in the driver seat to look behind me while reversing, my field of vision was limited on both sides by the rear headrests. The roof struts on each side created enormous blind spots which scared the hell out of me while changing lanes and parallel parking. Even the windshield was less than it could be as my seat sat physically so high in the chassis that I was looking through the top two inches of the windshield rather than a preferred 1/3 vertical down the height of the windshield.

The steering wheel seemed designed to block my view of the dashboard. I could find no position which didn’t obscure some portion of the dash or controls. I had a choice of aggravating my carpal tunnel syndrome or seeing the speedometer and ultimately chose the speedometer for fear of local speed traps and radar cameras.

Trunk storage was OK. The two passenger rear seats were a token effort at best: only the smallest of people could get into & out of those without acrobatics or sit with comfortable foot & leg space.

My ultimately love/hate metric for a rental car is whether or not I'd swap my 2001 Honda Civic for the car I'm test driving. In this match-up, my Civic wins in nearly every category which matters to me. Your mileage may literally vary.

In short, it was a cute & snappy little beastie, but I couldn’t drive one for more than a few days without going insane. Road rage is supposed to come from other people on the road, not inflicted by your own vehicle.

Travel Misadventure

This trip nearly ended in tears.

I left the office around noon, had a quick lunch, refilled the gasoline in the car, drove to SFO airport and dropped off the vehicle, then caught the airport rail service to my terminal. All went smoothly!

Then I discovered my driver’s license was missing. My only form of government-issued photo ID since my passport(s) is/are in the process of being issued/renewed.

I quickly checked the shirt pockets in my luggage: nothing. I checked my backpack: nothing. Mentally retracing my steps, I contact a co-worker to see if he had a telephone number for the Santa Clara data center since I remembered using my license there to sign in. While he didn’t have a number, he was close by so he diverted himself to the SC4 facility while I hopped on a train back to the rental car agency.

The Volkswagen Beetle I had rented was already out for cleaning and being sent to the floor for rental, but the desk folks phoned around to see if the staff had found my license. Nope. They sent another person to inspect the vehicle on the chance it had fallen somewhere truly obscure but no dice.

And just then, my co-worker Allan confirmed my license was indeed at the SC4 data center. I needed to send an email to the Savvis staff asking them to give the license to Allan and absolve them of all responsibility.

Sadly, Verizon Wireless isn’t especially reliable in the greater San Francisco Bay area: their network appears to be severely oversubscribed so my phone has been constantly in & out of service every few minutes, especially data service. Sending an email from my phone was damn near an impossibility but I eventually managed to eke it out.

Even so, there was no way Allan could get my license from Santa Clara to SFO in time for my flight so I went with Plan B: going to the Virgin America desk and asking for their advice. They assured me this wasn’t a big deal, I could present a mittful of other identifiers, typically credit cards, and go through additional security checks but I could board. Thus comforted, I checked my single suitcase and proceeded to security.

Alas, the TSA would let me through but they really, really wanted something with my photo. I had nothing --until I suddenly remembered my data center badge was in my backpack and it has my photo. That and three credit cards got me an escorted express trip past the usual security lines to have a full patdown for myself and a thorough inspection for my backpack. And thus, I made it to my gate with 20 minutes to spare before the regular boarding time.

I almost had yet another anxiety attack when the gate staff announced on the public address system that everyone needed to show their ID again because this is a flight to the DC area. Figures.

Expressing my concern to the desk staff, they recommended I include myself in the group of travelers who infamously need extra time to board, just in case the TSA people at the ramp needed more time to re-check me. I put on my data center badge as a pre-emptive measure and approached the ramp guards, explained I didn’t have any other picture ID but could offer this photo badge and the non-gov’t ID in my wallet. They waived me through immediately.

In the end, I not only made my flight, I bypassed long security lines and was the fourth person to board my plane despite being nominally in boarding group “E”. While I don’t recommend ever taking this procedural path, it has so far ended well.

Allan is going to Fed-Ex my license to me in DC; I’ll breathe easier when it is back in my wallet where it belongs. In the interim, I should investigate some other form of alternate gov’t photo ID to have as a backup.