Really stupid business practices

Okay, so it's been a while since I posted. I've been a wee bit busy with the real world.

Why am I bothering to post today? What motivated me out of a non-posting funk? Dumb business practices. Today's target of wrath is SBC AT&T Wireless Cingular AT&T Wireless. Sorry, they keep changing the name. (That's a separate rant.) For the record, I've had an account with them since they were named SBC. It's not so much a matter of customer loyalty as laziness, actually.

Back to today's troubles: my wife needs a new phone. Her Motorola no longer has any video at all, which makes it a less than useful device. She's had the phone quite a while, so it's not really unexpected for a semi-disposable consumer device to simply die. This seems easy enough to remedy - just go to your local AT&T store and get a replacement. Piece of cake, right? After all, companies pretty much always take a loss on the hardware, so it should be pretty cheap.

Yeah, right.

AT&T has a semi-reasonable policy of not giving "replacement pricing" too early in a contract period. They do something like no discount for the first 18 months, and then offer a substantial discount (to match their new account pricing) if you need a replacement phone. For the company, this seems pretty wise, as it keeps Joe Consumer from coming in every month and getting a very highly subsidized phone.

There's a few problems with this, however. The dates reset whenever you mess with the contract. My wife's phone is actually several years old, but the current contract started more recently when we added a line for one of the kids. So, we don't qualify for the discount, even though the phone is, in phone years, decrepit.

I can replace her phone with an equivalent newer model for the grand sum of $330. Yup, you read that right. It would literally be cheaper to cancel the contract, go to a competitor, get a new phone and contract, and use number portability to keep the number.

When I noted this fact to the happy customer rep who pounced on me as I came in the door to the place...well, let's just say he looked really unhappy. So much for corporate loyalty to customers. It's actually a penalty for loyalty, which strikes me as really really broken.

I think there's certainly a better way for this to work. Some sort of pro rated system, for example.... In any case, I'm going to call their happy customer support folks and see if they can find a way to avoid losing a customer.

Why Caltrain is utterly broken

Or, more specifically, why the Tamien station is utterly useless.

I ride the train to work as much as possible. This is a complete waste of my time. Can you see that I have a love/hate relationship with my commute?

Here's the deal. I commute from roughly Hwy-85 and Cottle in south San Jose (which seems to be officially named San José...maybe...but that's another rant entirely) to near the Mountain View Caltrain station. If I drive, it's about 25 minutes to get there in the morning (a bit after peak traffic), and about 50-60 minutes to get home. Rush hour sucks.

If I take the train, I drive to the Tamien station, 'cause there's no way I'm going to get to the (closer) Blossom Hill station in time for one of the trains from Gilroy. (The last northbound train is at 7:33am. I can't make this stuff up...who's on a train at that time?) Getting to the Tamien station takes about 15-20 minutes, depending on the traffic signals. I then hop on a train, spend 30 minutes in transit to Mountain View, and then walk for 10 minutes. Total elapsed time is right about 1:15. The reverse trip is almost identical.

So, we have a total round trip time of 1:20 for the car, and 2:30 for the train. It's worth noting that it takes almost as long to drive to the train as it does to drive to work, despite the nearly 15 mile difference in distance.

So, there's the time difference. Let's talk money.

If I drive, it costs me something like 2.5 gallons of gas. At the going rate of about $2.85 this week, that's a bit above $7 for the round-trip. Toss in some costs for wear and tear (brakes, tires, iol changes, etc.), and it's probably about $10. Insurance doesn't count - I pay that for owning the car, regardless of use. For the train, a round trip ticket is $8. A monthly pass is $106. Assuming 20 working days a month, that $106 compares with the $200 in car costs. But wait...I drive to the train station. That's about $6 a day, which tacks on an extra $120 to the train cost, so it's $226 versus $200 even with the high gas prices we now enjoy.

The only reason I take the train at all at this point is because my employer offers a $65 subsidy every month. That cuts the cost for the train down to $161. The ~$40 difference isn't exactly compelling, especially in light of the time differences.

Okay, there's the simple economic truth. Here's the rant....

Between really really really stupid freeway design and a half-assed sense of commitment, the Tamien station is fundamentally useless to people not in it's immediate neighborhood. Tamien sits adjacent to Highway-87 and is co-located with a VTA light rail station. (Oh dear, there's another rant topic.) You would think that being adjacent to a freeway would make the station convenient. You'd be utterly wrong. Actually, you'd be half wrong. If you are coming from the north on highway 87, there's an exit that basically dumps you into the parking lot of the station. of course, all of the trains are heading north, so this is mostly useless. Why would anyone go south to catch a train to go north? Especially since the downtown station is fairly near and has far better service? If you are heading north on hwy-87, which is the obvious direction for people heading to Tamien (since it's the southernmost terminus of Caltrain with the exception of those ridiculously early trains out of Gilroy), you have to get off at Curtner, which is a couple of miles to the south of Tamien. You then get the joy of surface streets and traffic signals. Seven lights and multiple turns later, you get to the train station.

On your way home, you get the same treatment. You can go north from Tamien trivially, but heading south requires a lovely journey along the Guadalupe River before you can hop on a freeway.

Is it just me, or is this incredibly stupid? To be fair, this isn't really the fault of Caltrain, but is much more the responsibility of Caltrans.

Not to worry - Caltrain has its own issues. Roughly half of the trains go to Tamien. The rest stop at Diridion in downtown San Jose. This basically means that there are trains hourly, at best, outside of the peak times. And, during the peak period, many of the trains just don't stop at all stops, so it's a crap shoot to get on a train to Tamien. Have a look at the schedule, and notice how much fun it is to get to Tamien from Mountain View in the evening. I often have to be creative and switch trains in order to get to my stop, and several trains go through Mountain View during the peak 5-7pm period that are essentially useless. I have the urge to send something like this:

Dear Caltrain,

Please decide if you are going to support the Tamien station or not. Then, do or do not support it. This half-assed business is tiresome.

Sincerely,

Annoyed citizen

P.S. Give my love to Caltrans.

On a related note, the high gas prices have driven a lot of people to actually take the train, which has led to a shortage of parking at Tamien. There's a nice big lot full of weeds next to the driveway. Much as I hate to suggest more concrete on the planet, that lot is really ugly and would look much better with asphalt and parking spaces on it. And don't tell me to go park in the VTA lot on the other side of the freeway. By the time you drive over there, you've probably missed the train, and there won't be another for an hour...and there's no way I'm taking 2:15 just to get to work...when I can drive there in 25 minutes. That's just stupid.

Bottom line - taking the train is stupid, but I seem to admire Sisyphus. Ugh.

Boredom, redux

I was wrong yesterday. New employee training for managers is more boring than the regular sessions.

Boredom

Is there anything as boring as new employee orientation?

Daily scary driving experiences

After years of experience, I've come to the conclusion that parents driving their children to school are the worst drivers on the planet. Crazed taxi drivers have nothing on these people.

Over the years, I've seen innumerable near accidents and a few solid hits. I once saw a parent so desperate to get their child to school on time that she jumped a curb and drove at quite a nice clip across the schoolyard to get her child to the door. I'm stunned that no one was killed in that incident.

I now drive our youngest one to high school. That's my daily excitement, and it's usually a great substitute for morning caffeine. Nothing like a little adrenaline poisoning to wake you up! On the rare occasion that there is any enforcement around the high school, they're always forcing people to not stop in what is technically a no parking/no stopping zone to drop their kids off. Instead, they force people to drive into the student parking lot, which just makes the jam and people's nerves that much worse. Thanks, guys. Part of the fun is having drivers with less than a year of experience and cars with waaaaaaay too much power driving in the same lot as parents. Mix in some pedestrians and you have my idea of the fourth circle of hell.

Is there anything we can do about this? Not really. Parents are all convinced that their 'precious cargo' is far more important the the 'precious cargo' of the person in front of them. The only real hope is to reinstate a school busing system. That would be expensive, so it won't happen here. This is one of the few cases where good weather all the time is a serious curse. When I grew up in the upper Midwest, school buses were always available. Indeed, at one point I lived in a place where riding the bus was mandatory, as walking to school, even across a couple of yards, might be deadly.

Perhaps global warming will fix that problem....

Update: It saddens me to see that there was an incident at a nearby school today, just hours after I wrote the above rant. While the circumstances of that specific incident are still unclear, traffic around most schools in this area is a major tragedy just waiting to happen.

How to fix the traffic problem

Polls of people living in Silicon Valley show that the top two problems are the cost of housing and traffic. The former is a simple problem of supply and demand - too many people want to live here and mountains and water hem in the available space.

Traffic, on the other hand, is a messier problem. In part, it's simple: too many cars in not enough road. Here's the crux of my hypothesis - too many cars isn't the problem...it's too little decent public transportation. If anything, the California car culture makes it harder to fix this. This will anger a bunch of people that I know, but I think we're just propping up a failed freeway system with the network of carpool lanes and metering lights. If I had my way, we'd remove the carpool lanes and turn off the metering lights. I used to be a big fan of them, but I've come to the conclusion that they simply prolong the agony of our traffic issues. Perhaps removing them will force the issue a bit sooner.

One of the problems we have is the state of public transportation in silicon valley. Frankly, it stinks. There's not enough of it, and it runs along less than useful routes. My favorite example is Caltrain. I like taking Caltrain, but it's not a substantial time saver for me. In particular, the Tamien station may be the stupidest place for a train station on the planet. It's the southern terminus for most trains in the system, so most riders would be coming from farther south. The way Highway 87 is setup, on the other hand, makes it trivial to get to the station from the north, but it's a real pain from the south. On most days, it takes me about five minutes less to get to the Caltrain station than it does for me to get to work in Mountain View. That's crazy.

To be fair, Caltrain follows a historic route along the old Camino Real that originally connected the California missions together 200 years ago. That route has nothing to do with the modern freeway system.

The station placement problem could be alleviated by making other public transportation work with Caltrain. Indeed, the Tamien station is located alongside a VTA light-rail station, and I live within walking distance of a light-rail station. Of course, it takes even longer for the light-rail to deliver me to the train station than it does for me to drive all the way to work.

What we really need is a more coordinated transportation system. Frankly, that's going to be expensive. Of course, it's no more than the cost of all of the wasted gas from people idling in traffic everyday. It's mostly a matter of political and popular will, which, alas, means it isn't going to get solved anytime soon.

I'll make another unpopular suggestion. The gas tax in California should get raised $0.50 per gallon. There is a caveat on that - the income derived from that tax should get pumped directly into public transportation issues. (At present, it just goes into the general fund, which is just crazy, in my opinion.) I'm a huge fan of usage taxes. If you chose to drive a low-mileage vehicle, you would end up paying a larger proportion of the cost to support the road network. Perhaps that would be an encouragement to get on a bus or train instead.

In any case, I've blathered on for long enough on this topic. I hate the traffic here. It's the one thing that makes me want to leave...and I don't think anything we're presently doing is going to help the situation at all!

A modest proposal

Those of you who live in the Bay Area are certainly familiar with the major issues that seem to trouble people around here. Polls consistently say that the worst problem is the cost of living. Second to that is traffic. I know my commute sucks. It's not that far by local standards (about 23 miles), and I usually get to work in about 30 minutes, but the drive home takes about an hour. public transportation is a disaster, but that's another rant for another day.

For today, I simply want to provide a modest proposal for curing our traffic ills. I need to acknowledge the source of this idea - my wife's uncle was a source of inspiration for this. He once came to visit and expressed his thought that women simply shouldn't be allowed to drive. He's got a point...that would take half the traffic off the road, more or less. Clearly, this isn't a workable idea. I don't think such a law would pass constitutional review!

Instead, I propose something simple: men cannot drive on odd numbered days, and women cannot drive on even numbered days. That's still a bit unfair, due to the quirks of our calendar system, so we'll even it out by forbidding anyone to drive on the 31st of any month with that many days. (Feb. 29th would be another qualifying day for the complete ban.)

In order for this to be workable, we'll need exceptions for a few critical folks that provide key services: policeman, fireman, doctors, trash collectors, and taxi drivers. The DMV will need to provide special license plates for people who are in these professions to allow them to drive on any day that they are on duty.

Even with that, I estimate that we'd take 35-40% of the traffic off of our roads on a given day. Think of the financial implications, too: we'd be much less dependent on foreign oil, our roads would take a lot less abuse, and productivity would skyrocket from people not sitting around in traffic. We'd have some interesting tax troubles due to the loss of sales and gas tax revenues. We'd also have to increase spending for public transportation, although the sudden surge in bus/train/ferry/trolley ridership should counter that significantly. The oil companies would take a serious hit, although I don't think anyone is really going to shed a tear for them.

I don't really see a downside here. Do your part - send this post to your local government officials, and tell them that Jonathon Swift sent you.

(Anyone not getting this needs to go read this page. Oh, and look at a calendar.)

For sale: Madison Avenue

Okay, so we all know that marketing and advertising have become so omnipresent in our society that it's actually difficult to find someplace to escape from all of it.

The question this poses is simple enough: how do we, as a society, fix this?

This problem is in my mind right now because I encountered a new form of media today. I went to get gas for my minivan ($3.209 a gallon, thanks) at a local Shell station. Above the pumps, they've installed a lovely video screen and speakers. I was treated to a slew of infotainment as soon as I picked up the pump handle. I saw the same Jack in the Box ad three times, along with the weather forecast, a trailer or two, and some NBC late night ads. I was fortunate enough to get the entire show - the minivan was thirsty enough to take longer than the entire loop.

That's not really the worst possible example, but it's a new one for me. (The worst one, so far, may be the quick service restaurant I visited that had ads in the urinals. Above them is one thing, but c'mon!)

It's not a real surprise that we're all such good consumers. We've been conditioned for it from birth, more or less. Breaking out of that pattern is something that individuals can do, but people, on the average, are sheep, so we're all pretty much stuck with all of this. Call me pessimistic, but the people that put ads on the 'up' escalators are the same people that would put advertising over our beds if they could figure out a way to pull it off for a profit.

How depressing.

(This post brought to you by.......)

Mergers and Acquisitions...tips from the real world

So, my company was acquired by a large corporation last week. These things happen, and it's usually a bit traumatic, but it doesn't need to be! I've now been through several of these types of business events, and from both sides. Based on that experience, I have some tips for people involved in this sort of thing.

If you are the acquiring company:

• Be aware that the people you deal with in the acquired organization are under immense stress. Give them a break!
• Have a plan. Better yet, have a team dedicated to helping everyone (on both sides) through the transition.
• Communicate early and often. Make sure everyone who is doing that communicating has the same message. Confusion is your enemy.
• Don't blow smoke...if there's bad news, share it. No matter what, don't make promises that can't be kept.

If you are in the acquired company:

• You've been acquired - accept that change is going to happen. Some of that change is likely to be unpalatable.
• Frankly, get over yourself! There are going to be new processes that are different from what you are used to. Many things will be different!
• If you don't want to have everything dictated to you, have a plan! It is often the case that the purchasing company will be happy to work with you to meet in the middle.
• Communicate early and often, both internally an with the acquisition team. Again, confusion will lead to failure.

To some extent, this is all Business 101 stuff. Still, it's important that people handle the basics before they try to do anything fancier. (That's true in almost any field or topic!)

I'm happy to report that the acquisition I'm in the middle of is going fairly smoothly. The acquiring company has got it together, and is acting like they've actually read the first section above. (Hooray!)