Tag: Texas

Long Distance – My Short Story

Helaine went to place a call to Hartford a few minutes ago. Instead of connecting, she heard a message saying our number had been disconnected. You read right – not the number we were calling – our number had been disconnected!

I tried by placing a call to my cell phone. No problem. Then I called my folks in Florida. Again, without problem. So I called the area code 860 number Helaine had tried and sure enough, there was the announcement.

It didn’t take me long to realize intrastate and interstate long distance are treated differently and maybe there was a screw up with ours. Between cell phones and Steffie’s VOIP&#185 service, and our really large local calling area, we hardly ever call long distance in the state.

Our long distance service has been handled for years by GTC Telecommunications. Who knows who they are? I had never heard of them. But for years we had been getting our long distance for 4.9&#162, painlessly.

Then, one day while looking at their website I noticed they were advertising long distance for 2.9&#162 per minute. I called, asked to be switched, and I assume the problem started then.

After waiting on hold for about 5-10 minutes Keith answered. I asked at the end of the call, but guessed from his first words, that Keith was in India. Though he was able to take care of the problem, and he did speak English perfectly, there were communications problems because he doesn’t speak American English.

There are phrases and ironic statements that we all use all the time which were… well, they were foreign to Keith.

At the end of the conversation he told me I’d have to call my local phone company and tell them I needed my intrastate carrier changed to ‘pic code 0333.’

No sweat.

I picked up the phone and called SBC, my ‘local’ phone company. I have accented ‘local’ because, until recently, we had our own lovely, local, responsive phone company – SNET.

SNET was the classic non-Bell local phone company, covering the vast majority of Connecticut. A few years ago, in a deal that richly rewarded their top management, SNET was sold to SBC. My phone still works, but now I’m a little jerkwater customer far away from SBC’s Texas home office. Before Connecticut was SNET’s only business.

SNET was sold, we were told, because they couldn’t compete in this increasingly complex world of telecommunications. Now, if business is bad somewhere else in SBC’s system, our bill goes up here.

After working through the voice mail tree (some options have recently changed – right) a pleasant woman with a Texas accent picked up the phone. I assume that used to be a Connecticut job. I explained my problem and read her the pic code – 0333.

“We use codes with letters” she responded.

Luckily, the carrier for my intrastate service was the same as the working carrier for my interstate service. She says it will be fixed before the close of business today. There was a $2.60 charge for switching, but considering someone dropped the ball in this mess, she waived the fee.

She couldn’t have been nicer… even though she tried to upsell me some services before I could hang up.

The sad part is, years ago this was a big deal. Long distance was a much larger line item. Now, with cell phones and Steffie’s VOIP service, we make many fewer long distance calls with our wired phones. Most months we’re under $20 – closer to $10, for long distance.

There are people at work who don’t have wired phones at all. Maybe someday soon, we’ll join them.

&#185 – VOIP is Voice Over Internet Protocol. Instead of having a real connection between two phones having a conversation, the phone call is digitized and sent as packets through the Internet or other data network. It is much cheaper to provide that standard phone circuits (called POTS for Plain Old Telephone Service). Steffie’s phone has unlimited calling in Connecticut for $10 a month – with voice mail, caller ID and anything else you could imagine in a phone. It is why GTC can afford to route customer service calls to India and what SBC’s executives have nightmares about every night.

Stay Safe… Except Me

Hurricane Alex has just left the East Coast. Within days it will be a memory, absorbed into the normal flow of extra-tropical weather. As hurricanes go, it was small and its impact to the Carolina’s will be discernible, but small.

Since Alex was never thought to be a huge storm, I didn’t get to cringe at the sight of TV reporters, and weather people, standing in the thick of it all – all the while telling others to stay inside where it’s safe.

I think this is right up there with tobacco companies telling me not to smoke. Where’s the credibility.

I know where this came from. Dan Rather got his TV chops covering a hurricane in Texas. It was because of that very gritty series of on-location reports that he was plucked from obscurity. Good for Dan.

The problem is, all the warnings we give on TV are correct. Hurricanes are dangerous storms. Being in the midst of an open area, adjacent to open water, with a hurricane coming on shore, is going to get someone killed.

I have watched live shots as reporters tilted off vertical, into the wind, in order to stand. In the background of those shots I’ve also seen debris and building materials turned into missiles. That they didn’t find a reporter is only luck.

In a larger sense, aren’t we sending the wrong signal to viewers? It’s a ‘do as I say’ mentality that will entice others into harm’s way.

You might be saying, “But Geoff, you’ve flown through the eye of two hurricanes. Isn’t that a little crazier and a lot more dangerous?”

Thanks. I’m glad I asked that.

Flying through a hurricane is totally different. The planes are specifically outfitted to withstand the buffeting they get. The planes are flown at an altitude where there is no solid debris to run into. And the well trained crews have the benefit of radar and other instrumentation to know where, and where not, to go.&#185

I also won’t criticize tornado chasers. As far as I can tell, no one has ever been hurt while chasing a tornado. These are compact systems with reasonably predictable paths. It is quite reasonable to watch a tornado safely from a distance, if you know what you’re doing.

Back when I did PM Magazine/Buffalo I used to joke around about the fact that you can’t get hurt if you’re in front of a camera and tape’s rolling. Of course that’s just not so. Unfortunately, it looks like a lot of the reporters in big storms feel just that way.

I hope this isn’t the year when something tragic happens. That time is coming. It’s not a question of if, but when.

&#185 – Hurricane Hunter planes never fly directly into the eye. They always turn into the wind and cut diagonally to the eye. This makes some of the terrible force near the center nothing more than a ferocious headwind.

It Takes Good Cards to Lose Big

Saturday was another beautiful day. Hot and dry. I think the dry is starting to take a toll. More than once I started to feel a little weak or light headed. I’m attributing it to dehydration and am going to ramp up the water intake.

I have to remember that even inside the dew point is low. Outside, the difference between the temperature and dew point encourages the rapid loss of body fluid. You DO perspire in Las Vegas. It just evaporates so quickly that you never notice.

I played some poker Saturday. So far I had won at every non-tournament session and lost in every tournament. I’ll explain why I’m separating those two when I summarize the trip from Connecticut.

I lost $307 – and lost it in a hurry. I didn’t play bad. I was attacked by a long string of unlikely occurrences. Someone who wouldn’t lay down a 10-J off suit to my Kings – even when the bet had been raised 4 times. Of course, in the end, she caught a straight.

If you calculated the odds for that happening, it was quite unlikely. But even an 80% probability is wrong 1 in 5 times.

This happened time-after-time-after-time. My Jacks with a King kicker lost to an Ace kicker.

Anyway, I watched $307 disappear as if the chips were evaporating like sweat in the Vegas sunshine. I’m not happy about what happened, but my play was fine. This kind of setback is absolutely expected, just as incredible hot nights are expected every once in a while.

I didn’t go on tilt. I didn’t try and chase my money. I stayed calm.

For at least five years, maybe longer, Helaine and I had talked about seeing Mac King at Harrah’s. Mac King performs twice daily at 1 and 3 PM. It is a family oriented comedy magic show.

As many times as we’d said, “This year for sure,” we’d never crossed the street to see him. On Saturday, with Steffie, Melissa, Michael and Max in tow, we did.

The show is dirt cheap to see. Helaine had 3 – 2 free ticket coupons. Our only obligation was to buy a $7 drink. With tax, 6 of us went to see Mac King for $49.20.

Playing off his Kentucky hayseed upbringing, he is very funny. The magic is simple, yet effective. The tricks are well done and folksy. There are no live animals, no expensive props. The charm of the show is, he’s charming.

I watched Max and Steffie, both laughing – Max on the level of a 6 year old and Steffie as a late teen. Seeing them smiling was part of my fun.

We had dinner at the Mirage buffet again. My capacity for ‘buffeting’ is rapidly diminishing. I worry about how much diet reversal has taken place in this week.

With time running out, I decided to play poker again. The losses from the afternoon continued. Before long I had lost another $175. With $25 left in my chip rack I started to recover and left the table, after four hours, with a $32 loss.

This late night $6/$12 table was one of the most lively and fun tables I had played at. A dealer from Imperial Palace sat at my right. A few seats farther was Lance from Texas. He reminded me of Rock Hudson in a Doris Day movie.

Lance was countrified and over-the-top Texas at the same time he was sophisticated. He was the grease that kept the table laughing and moving along.

In one hand, where the two of us were heads up, I felt guilty beating him and extracting extra chips. He had that kind of charm.

Blogger’s note: I continue to add photos to the gallery for this trip. You can see them by clicking here. The whole Vegas trip has its own category, which means you can link to these stories specifically by clicking here or read about the 2003 Vegas trip here.

The Real Meaning of Internet Access

If you’re clever, you can find nearly anyone on the net. Early on, at least 8-9 years ago, Steffie was writing a school report on penguins. She wanted to know more about the sleeping habits of the Emperor penguin. I was lost.

Back then I probably reached for Yahoo and looked around. There were a few citations, and I found a website that was close, but didn’t really have what she wanted.

Actually, by this time we had gone way beyond what she wanted. I was now doing this research for me.

I wrote to the website’s owner, and he wrote back that night. Yes, he knew about the Emperor penguin – in fact he was considered an expert on the Emperor. And then, he proceeded to explain their sleep patterns (very light sleepers).

It didn’t impress Steffie, but it did me, that he was from a university in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. And he was totally available.

Since then I have found a way to contact the head of programming at NBC, when they were considering a reality show which would have put a ‘contestant’ on the Russian MIR space station – which, I argued, was a death trap. More recently I wrote to a Nobel Prize winner at the University of Texas and got a pretty funny reply.

Until her accelerated departure last week, I had been writing to Shelley Ross, executive producer at Good Morning America – a show I used to do weather fill-in for – and would move heaven and Earth to do weather fill-in for again. I wrote her more than she wrote me… but she did reply, and even told me I was funny.

A few years ago I wrote the late Jack Paar, who had a very interesting website, but he never wrote back. I was always worried he had seen me (our station can be viewed in Greenwich, though residents there tend to believe they’re actually in New York and primarily watch New York City TV), not approved, and decided to snub me. I hope I’m wrong.

Tonight I wrote Shelley Berman.

In the 60’s Shelley Berman was as big as a comedian could be. A 1963 documentary was his undoing. He still plays Vegas, travels around the country, and teaches at USC, but he should have had more for the last 40 years.

He is extremely active on his website, and I assume I’ll get a response… or maybe he’s seen me… or Paar tipped him off before he died. Who can tell?

Meanwhile, it’s just cool to know I have this access.

When It Comes To Men In Space, I’m Not Alone

I have written, more than a few times, about the U.S. manned space program. It’s a good idea on paper, or maybe it was thirty years ago. There’s little reason anymore to send men into space as explorers in the 21st Century.

Advances in remote sensing and robotics in general (and for these purposes I consider vehicles like the Mars rovers to be robotic) now allow machines to do more than humans, in harsh environments, without the life support costs and without the devastating downside of failure that humans bring.

More than once, on the news set, after a story about the space program has run, my colleagues have turned to me and said, “I bet you’d really like to do that.” It would make sense. I’m a science kind of guy. My answer is always, no. It always has been.

I just finished an article from the New York Review of Books by Dr. Steven Weinberg, the University of Texas/Austin Nobel Prize winning physicist and am amazed that he and I agree so fully about sending men to space. We both say, “no.”

His well documented essay goes point by point to show that we send men into space because of our emotion – not for the sake of science. He points out, as I did earlier, that the tragic Columbia disaster was a mission with minimal science, in a program with little purpose or hope of ever fulfilling its original reason for existing.

I found Dr. Weinberg’s email address and sent him a note – as if a Nobel laureate needs my reassurance that his ideas are sound. Maybe the note really wasn’t meant to benefit him. Looking back, it was reassurance to me that I’m not a Luddite… at least as far as space is concerned.

Blogger’s addendum – After writing to Dr. Weinberg and telling him “It is good to see I’m not some lone Luddite fruitcake sniping at the manned space program (or, if I am, that there are two Luddite fruitcakes out there),” he responded “One good thing about fruitcakes – they stick together. SW.”

He deserves another Nobel for that line alone!.

Kennedy Assassination As a Universal Experience

I remember, with vivid clarity, the moment I found out about John Kennedy’s assassination. I am not alone. It has been said that no one who lived through November 22, 1963 will ever forget where they were, what they were doing, when they found out.

For me, it was a sunny, late fall day, in Mr. Friend’s classroom on the back side of the first floor at Harold G. Campbell Junior High school. In New York City school names are ceremonial, at best. It was JHS 218 or JHS 218Q (for Queens).

Mr. Friend was told first and he relayed to the class that Kennedy had been shot. That’s all we knew. I can’t speak for the class, but I can tell you that whatever I thought at that moment, I wasn’t grasping the significance of the moment or that anything more could happen.

It was a time when TV news was much less crime and picture oriented. The grit and grime of violence may have been played out every day in the Daily News or Mirror (in 1963 the New York Post was a liberal newspaper which tended to play toward organized labor and its causes, not crime and debauchery)… but I read The Long Island Press, published in Jamaica, Queens. Violence outside of war didn’t exist as far as I was concerned.

November 22, 1963 was the day newspapers lost their position as ‘news of record’ for most Americans to television.

The windows from our classroom faced east, across open space and toward Queens College. Within a few minutes, someone in the class noticed a flag at Queens College being lowered to half staff. That’s when it hit me.

We were dismissed early and I began to walk home. I know I was with friends… maybe Dennis Westler, possibly Marty Ingber. I’m not really sure but I know I wasn’t alone. We discussed the fact that the president was dead and Lyndon Johnson, the vice president, had suffered a heart attack. I know now that was wrong – I didn’t then. We speculated what would happen. I was 13.

Still, we were discussing facts and the emotion had still not hit me. We were cavalier.

As I came home and turned on the TV, I realized this was major. All regular programming was gone. News, in a somber manner, was on all channels. Slowly, from the adults around me, I began to become aware of the gravity of the situation. We all sat, glued to the television.

Though I was born during the Truman administration and remember Eisenhower in a sketchy sort of way, Kennedy was the first president that I really knew. My parents were good Democrats in a lower middle class area of trade unionists who were also Democrats. The huge apartment complex we lived in, made up of dozens of three and six story buildings, was financed and built by the Electrical Workers Union Local 3 and called Electchester. Our friend Morris Scott, on the first floor of our six story 72 unit building, was a Transport Workers Union and Democratic functionary. He was not an exception in Electchester. The two went together.

During the campaign for the 1960 presidential election, Kennedy spoke at a campaign rally at Parsons Boulevard and Jewel Avenue, a block from our apartment. I found the photo on the left at an NYU site – amazing it’s preserved on the net. The facade of the building behind Kennedy is from the Pomonok Housing Project, which was across the street from us. The camera is shooting from the SE to the NW, across the intersection. My memory is of a huge crowd, but I was 10 at the time. This busy intersection was closed and a wooden platform was built.

Richard Nixon had nothing to gain by coming to my neighborhood. He was everything we weren’t, Kennedy was like us, though nothing could be further from the truth.

Anything I thought or felt about Kennedy during the campaign was based on those things that affect a ten year old; my parents, grandparents and the folks we lived around. I knew nothing about his policies, politics, social standing or any of the things we know today… and there’s no doubt we know a hell of a lot more today.

In my sphere of influence, Kennedy was like a god. I know that sounds foolish or naive now, but that’s the truth. To me, he was much larger than life. And he was the first adult I knew of to die tragically.

I had tickets to see a Broadway show on the Saturday following the assassination. It was probably my first Broadway show. Like the NFL schedule the next day, Broadway went on. In hindsight, both football and theater performances were bad ideas. Even so, with a bunch of my classmates and Mr. Friend, we boarded the bus for Flushing and the IRT subway (actually it was mostly above ground) to Times Square to see “Enter Laughing.”

I now know, this show was an autobiographical sketch from Carl Reiner. Then, who knew who Carl Reiner was? I remember it being funny in an irreverent sort of way, but the day being gray and gloomy in every other sense.

Sunday morning we sat home in our tiny apartment, 5E. I lived in an apartment with only a northern exposure. At no time in the 16 years I lived in this apartment… and decades longer my parents lived there, did we ever see the sun!

The TV in the living room, our only TV, was tuned to CBS. Along with millions of others, I watched Lee Harvey Oswald being shot, live. Being live, coast-to-coast, from that Dallas Police Department Garage was quite a technical achievement 40 years ago. Today, we see the videotape replay as grainy, dated black and white. Back then, it was live and vivid. Grainy black and white was the norm.

I was stunned. We were all stunned. How was this humanly possible? Today’s metal detecting, secure area-ed society was light years away. I had never seen a pistol, but in Texas, they were much more the norm.

Monday was the funeral. I think my dad was home, which was not a scheduled day off from work. Certainly every school was closed and my guess is most businesses too. By this time we had a common grief and stunned disbelief in what had happened. If it is possible, I remember being a 13 year old who was depressed.

The country stopped for the funeral. It struck me then, as it does now, that there are people who actually know how to plan an event like this with the proper protocol and deference to tradition. What a morbid field of expertise.

It was an awful, rainy day in Queens on that Monday. The funeral was long and sad and more than anything else I remember the riderless horse, the muffled drums and the crying. We’ve all seen the photo of John Jr. saluting. I believe that was only seen by still photographers. I don’t think we saw that live.

People think it was live because it’s been published and seen so many times. A similar situation is the film of Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, with dust flying and the shadow of the lander on the surface. That too was never seen live on TV, though we did hear the voices of the astronauts and Mission Control.

Five or six years after the funeral I was marching down those same Washington streets, protesting the war in Vietnam. In 1963 there was no thought that you might protest what your government was doing. But after JFK’s assassination, everything changed.

Lyndon Johnson became the president and used the Kennedy aura to pass Civil Rights legislation that began to bring this country out some draconian policies that survived even the Civil War. Johnson also inherited Kennedy’s involvement in Vietnam, which would be his undoing as a president. The war accelerated, halfway around the world.

Before Kennedy’s assassination we were innocent and invulnerable. World War II had taken place without any conflict reaching America’s shores. Korea too was fought far away. The strength of our military, combined with the breadth of the ocean, protected us from harm. But now we found that harm could come from within and that nothing would ever be safe again.

A generation only knows about the assassination through Oliver Stone’s movie. Shame on him. Shame on them. Stone’s powerful use of the medium told America a lie, packaged as the truth.

Forty years ago. I remember it like it was yesterday.

(This entry originally posted November 22, 2003)

Hurricane Pissing Match

Sometime in the next day or so, I’ll write more about Isabel. But, tonight, I saw an incredible press release from AccuWeather from earlier this summer. It’s posted on the link below.

This is the kind of sniping you seldom see between government and private industry. It’s obvious, the gloves are off.

But, should anyone who forecasts for a living ask to be judged on specific individual forecasts, as opposed to forecasts over periods of time? We all make mistakes from time-to-time. Is one event’s forecast indicitave of anything?

Meanwhile, the most interesting part is that this really is a pissing match, in public.

Continue reading “Hurricane Pissing Match”