wellswriting

When customer service becomes customer no service February 14, 2012

Have you seen this man? He goes by the name, Dima.

As I’ve mentioned before, I write on the go (See This).  My mobile options have evolved from laptops to Palm Pilots with an infra-red keyboard back to a net-book to my current use of an Android phone that connects to a lap dock.  I work in Microsoft Word on my PC’s so for the Android phone (I would have referred to this as a “Smartphone” before this problem reminded me the thing was is dumb as a nail when you get down to it) I was using the Microsoft Quickoffice application.  It worked great for 6 months but something has happened and it affects 4 chapters from my latest novel in the works and the short story I have going for my next Writers of the Future submission.

 I discovered the problem when I synced my thumb drive with my home PC after traveling at the beginning of the month.  I had been stuck in lovely John Wayne Airport in Orange County,California for several hours and I took the opportunity to work on the files I mentioned.  Then returning home I updated my home files as usual and then tried to open one and discovered that something has gone south with the system.  None of the files I was working on open on a PC anymore.  I can open them on my phone using Quick-office but that isn’t worth poop if I can’t print it or send it out to publishers.   I tried cutting the text and pasting it into an e-mail to myself, but the paste removes all returns along with all of the paragraph indents.  When you consider that my chapters are running the 40 to 60 page range or more, that is a lot of paragraphs to have to go and re-insert.  This now happens with any file I open with my phone, not just the ones I was editing when the problem arose.

Which brings me to the customer service part of this post.  I can recover my work the hard way, or as an alternative, I have been trying to work with a service technician with Quickoffice to resolve the issue because my phone is useless as an editing tool right now and that means having to revive my old net-book with all of it’s issues.  I was asked to send copies of the files and explain the situation as expected and after all of that, the reply was, “lets start with removing your application and re-installing it” along with a long bit of instructions for this.  Well, I had tried this already, but I did it again just to say I did it and the result is the same.  New install and I open a new unaffected file from a different source and I still get the same unreadable saved file after opening it on the phone.  That’s frustrating, but now it goes to infuriating when I try replying to the technician’s e-mail and I now get an “undeliverable” message.  WTF?!?  Where did my friend Dima go?   He seemed like a nice enough photo.  His e-mails come with a little picture of him as an amiable Caucasian fellow with a suspiciously eastern asian name, but he is a Customer Cars Specialist, so he can’t have disappeared, right?  But I have tried repeated reply e-mails and they are all undeliverable now.

So I have had to go to the Quickoffice Support Center on-line and thankfully they had a place to give my reply directly for my trouble ticket, which I hope either Dima will see or I if I have to call, I can show that I have had the ball dropped on the service.  Either way, I’m going to have to change what I use to edit document files on my phone, but I still hope I can find the one real technician genius at Quickoffice who can save me from having to re-type all of my lost files.

Unfortunately this also goes to prove that we are nowhere near being paperless.  At least I have my hard copies printed (minus the edits from the airport).

Sunset over the Pacific February 2, 2012

Flying out of Orange County in Southern California took me over the Pacific for a brief time.  That’s Santa Catalina Island below.

On edit, little did I know that I had just lost 4 novel chapters and one short story on this trip.

Fly Me To The Moon – Prepping for Re-entry January 13, 2012

It’s early.  Before the sun rises early.  I was up only an hour and a half after the bars closed.  Why? Because my choices for a direct flight back to Sacramento are to leave at 5:17 am or wait until 630 pm and it has been two full days since I saw my wife and kids so I picked the 13 hours earlier option.

My time on the moon has been good.  I grew up in a very similar small coastal community 300 miles to the south of here, so this place reminds me of my home town in many ways.  The biggest difference between here and there is that my home town was connected to San Francisco and Los Angeles with 4 lane freeways.  So the isolation isn’t what it is here, but then I found out this morning that as remote as this place feels, even here I could discover  surprise connections.

My wife’s best friend from high school went to Spain after college and married there and raised her children abroad.  We had assumed she was still there, but as you can see from the comments from my first post, she’s not only back in the States, but living here in the town I have been pining on over its remoteness.  Go figure.  Even though I have been feeling far removed from home, this phenomenon we call the “world-wide web” has reminded me that I would need to take a literal trip to the Moon to escape our connections here on Earth.

So now I wait for my chance to board the plane and return to my poor wife who has had to deal with a dry well water system at home, the grind of daily work, and the engine of her car seizing up on her return home from work last night. I will return to mend pipes and help decide how dead is dead for our 224,000 mile engine. I’ll be returning to the trappings of home life, and loving every moment of it.

Fly Me To The Moon 03 January 12, 2012

The same isolation I’ve described for getting to Eureka keeps this town feeling like a lunar base in a way.  I met with an inspection official today to talk about a project that would trigger an abundance of code upgrades in a larger city like Sacramento or San Francisco. But this is a small town a long way removed from bigger city anxieties. This official apparently hadn’t been hounded for years to “make an exception” or “cut some slack” or a million other requests from a million other contractors.  She understood that the picky code things were there before this project and they’d be there if the project didn’t happen so we focused on what needed to be done to keep things safe and that was it.  This was a refreshingly other world approach to making things happen without asking for the stars.

On another note, I returned a coworker to the airport this evening.  I am staying but he was flying back.  We left a clear and warm Eureka downtown and motored 10 miles up the coast to the airport and a mile out or so we hit the dreaded fog.  I dropped him off with low hopes for his chances to get out.  I drove to my hotel near the airport and the fog was too thick to see the hotel until I was right up on it. Half an hour later he called and said the flight might by cancelled and asked if I could come get him if it did.  Fifteen minutes later, he called back and said the connecting flight was able to land here.  I went out for dinner and sure enough the pea soup fog was gone.  Go figure.

I snapped a photo as we were landing Wednesday morning. This is a view of the fickle way the fog washes ashore in some areas while leaving others clear.

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Fly Me To The Moon 02 January 11, 2012

We nearly our entire lives tethered to the ground.  For me there is something magical when I fly.  There is that otherworldly sensation when a plan lifts from the runway.  It doesn’t take long to gain altitude beyond the terrestrial frame of reference.  I especially like take-off when you are higher than the tallest buildings but close enough to the ground to really have that sensation that you are suspended in mid-air.  This morning is especially poignant with a clear view of the mood out of my seat window as the sun rises from our take-off direction.  How cool is this?

Tom

Fly Me To The Moon 01 January 11, 2012

I’m embarking on a trip to Eureka, California traveling from Sacramento.  Most causal web observers may not realize how isolated Eureka is from the rest of the continental United States.  The California coast rises dramatically from the beach up to a coastal range of mountains formed by the continental plate intersection.  What that means is the land route to the Northern coast has no alternative but to wind through the mountain ranges of the coastal range and the CA central valley ranges.  There are no rail services to the area so the only land based option is to drive seven hours on winding single lane each way highways.  The airport in Eureka is small so the flying option can be likened to flying to the moon, but for a three-day business trip, that sadly is the best option to get me there and back on a family friendly timescale.

The first obstacle to the travel is the available flights straight from Sacramento to Eureka, namely one.  One flight leaving Sacramento at 6:30 am as long as obstacle number two doesn’t pop up.

Obstacle number two is the Eureka fog.  The locals tell me a story and it is too amusing to verify, so as the story goes, the army aircorps was supposed to have installed an airstrip in Eureka in the nicest, most level area that just happened to get the most fog to obscure enemy bombing.  After WWII, the airport was supposed to be too developed to abandon, but everyone had forgotten that the fog was the reason for the location and new sites were never developed so now the Eureka Arcata airport is constantly under a blanket of fog that is hard to guess when it will lift.  I have arrived at the Sacramento Airport at 5:30 and not boarded the plane to Eureka until well after 10:30, which is like sitting at mission control for 5 hours waiting for the weather to lift for take-off.  The flight lasts for a brief hour so even after 5 hours in the airport and one flight air time, I still arrive an hour ahead of driving.

And that is where I am now.  The forecast is clear and the ship is a go so I board my craft in 15 minutes fog willing.  I will check back in with my moon-flight.  The one saving thing to sitting for long stretches is my chance to write.

Acorn Rockets October 27, 2011

I’ve seen spaceship designs returning to the more whimsical acorn rocket shape of the 1950’s lately and I like it.  If there is one hopeful thing that will come with the end of the NASA space shuttle program it will be that Hollywood will stop using that inelegant, low orbit-utilitarian vehicle as a basis for spacecraft.  I look forward to a return to a future full of long sleek lines with stylishly fit pieces that mold into clean, tight forms.

When I read my first book that referred to the acorn shape of a rocket, I had been stuck thinking of the cartoon acorns like the one that pre-historic squirrel, Scrat, chases around in Ice Age.It was hard to get excited about a short squat rocket with a bulbous bottom like those cartoon acorns.  That sort of acorn is really not the kind commonly found where I live by the thousands this time of year. 

With all of the oak trees around my home, there is a constant bombardment of rockets falling from the sky during the fall months. These acorns are the sleek shapes that many rocket dreams are made of.