Tag: Misc

I heard back from the W Hotel today regarding my post about it’s complimentary Acura car service. Apparently someone forgot to tell the concierge how it works. It is available on a first come, first served basis, so when I asked for it the following day, the concierge was happy to arrange a limo for us for the $78 fee. I specifically said Acura and pointed at the sign on the desk. A simple, “it is available on a first come, first served basis; just goto the front door to see if it is there” would have stopped this nonsense and made complete sense to me.

If the W wants to stop nasty email messages from ticked off guests, it would make sense to put a sign at the entrance as normally people going to just hail a cab instead of go to the concierge to arrange transportation that is needed right at that moment.

While I guess the W is off my “bad” list, that concierge ranked a zero in my book.

I do contend, however, that the Web site is misleading as there is no asterisk next to this feature indicating that there are conditions for its use.

For our trip to New York, we stayed at the W Hotel in Union Square. We got a “special” rate for the room (I almost need to take out a loan to pay for it!) and the room was not bad. The W is supposed to be a boutique hotel that offers “Whatever/Whenever” service where the concierge can arrange almost anything. Of course, everything comes at a price.

One of the features that the W advertises is complimentary rides in an Acura MDX. I thought that was pretty cool as we had to get to the wedding one day. Not only would it save us a cab ride, I’d be able to ride in an Acura MDX which I hope to get someday (once the gas mileage gets up and I save up my pennies). I asked at the concierge desk to arrange the car and the concierge said, sure, but there will be a $78 one way drop fee and she suggested taking a $7 cab ride instead. Wow, so for a ride that was less than 2 miles, the W wanted to charge us $78 for a complimentary service.

I looked up complimentary on dictionary.com and here’s what it said (in this case, the W site uses it as an adjective):

given free as a gift or courtesy: a complimentary ticket.

There is no disclaimer on the site saying that there were restrictions and other fees associated with it. Is this just a misunderstanding or is it frankly false advertising? Considering each hotel has a limited number of cars (maybe even 1), they either don’t expect people to use the service or they add these charges so that no one uses it and it looks good on their site.

I went ahead and submitted a false advertising complaint on the FTC’s Web site. While I don’t really expect anything to come of this, it makes me feel better knowing that I at least made an effort to get this changed. I also sent email to the W Hotel; we’ll see what happens.

This past weekend, my wife and I were in New York City (Manhattan) for my cousin’s wedding. I’ve been to NYC a number of times and frankly, I’m not a big city kind of person. After being in the city for less than hour, I started complaining to my wife. She didn’t want to hear it, so I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the trip. We got back to San Diego on Monday and I was back in my element.

On Wednesday, I took a nice stroll (1.5 mile walk) from our office to the San Diego Convention Center for CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment. This walk took me through downtown San Diego and so many things struck me as different from New York. First off, the weather. I realize that the city can’t control the weather, but it does have an effect. One day in New York, it was pretty nice, but then got cloudy and rained one day. Second, the streets were much cleaner in San Diego. Third, the city seemed to run at a much slower pace; in New York (in all areas except Little Italy), people were moving so quickly to get from point A to point B.

For some people, NYC is a great place to live; for me, it isn’t. San Diego has a lot of people, but it isn’t as dense. Up until I started my job 11 months ago, I really didn’t explore downtown San Diego. Since then, I’ve walked a bit around downtown and it isn’t that bad of a city. There has been a lot of revitalization and it really shows. If you’re willing to walk, parking isn’t all that bad, either.

I was in Chicago this week for 4GWorld and saw this sign at Starbucks at the convention center. I’m sure that Starbucks headquarters would be quite proud of their employees promoting their seasonal latte.

What’s even funnier is that not only did I see this on one sign, I saw it on two and the printed sign no more than 10 feet from this had things spelled correctly.

A colleague of mine flew from our main office to the east coast to run a test. As part of the test, he needed a large battery to power some equipment. He had no problems taking the battery on the plane to his destination, but on the way back, the battery not only couldn’t be carried on, it was pulled off the plane when it was checked as the TSA wouldn’t let it fly. There are 2 issues here; one is that we can’t find any regulations prohibiting the battery from flying and second, why was it allowed one way, but not the other?

This kind of inconsistency between airports must drive people crazy. When I travel, I travel with the same set of “gear” and haven’t had a problem going through any airport (knock on wood). Now if I had to bring more and varied equipment on different types of trips, this would frustrate me to no end. Years ago when I worked for QUALCOMM, I travelled to a conference and had to take a box of cables with me. This was way before tightened security, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I got there early, had QUALCOMM stickers put on the non-descript box and had no problems getting through security. Now, if I did that today, would I get searched and extra scrutinized? I guess it would depend on the airport.

I’m so glad that all the money we’ve spent on protecting our airports by standardizing procedures has helped.

I’m on my way back from a trip to Kansas City and as I approached security, I saw that the guy checking IDs was private security and not TSA like I’d seen at every airport I’ve been to in awhile. As I walk past the ID checker, I see that every security person was from a private company. Well, it looks like in the government’s efforts to standardize security at airports, they left gaping holes. The The Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001 (ATSA) left the option open for airports, like Kansas City to use First Line Security. This seems like such a waste as the government spent a lot of money to get away from private, inconsistent security at airports.

While I can’t say that I feel more or less secure going through Kansas City, I think that the inconsistency sends a very wrong message to the flying public.

On the news the other night, we saw a story about how the stimulus package is providing jobs for some teenagers. The teenagers get paid $10 to work in different office capacities. In order to qualify, the teenagers must come from families that live below the poverty line. I’m not going to argue the merits of this program. They interviewed a few of the kids in the program and one kid said that he’d use some of the money to help out his mother, but then said that he was going to spend some money on himself to get a new cell phone. First off, is a cell phone necessary for everyone? I don’t know and don’t have to deal with that, yet. (My 2 year old son plays with our cell phones, but he doesn’t have his own plan and doesn’t actually make calls.) Second, the kid pulls out his brand new iPhone. Let’s do a little math. With Apple’s new pricing, the lowest priced iPhone is $99. AT&T puts every iPhone on a minimum $30/month data plan in addition to at least the lowest priced voice plan which is $39.99. Let’s also assume that the kid doesn’t do any text messaging. For a 2 year contract, that is $70/month * 24 = $1680 + $99 for the initial cost of the phone. I’ve excluded taxes for this example. So at $10/hour, this kid has to work 180 hours or effectively one month full time to pay for this gadget.

It would seem to me that somewhere kids need to be taught fiscal responsibility and save money for college, a rainy day, or something else. If the parents can’t help, maybe it should be a mandatory class in high school. During the summer when I was in college, I worked full time and pretty much saved every penny I earned in order to pay for my half of college (my parents made a deal with me that they’d pay for half of my college and I had to figure out how to pay for the other half). I worked with my father to come up with a budget, put in a few things I wanted to buy including a road bike, and figure out how to pay for everything by working and taking out loans.

I know that I’m quite lucky that my father made me fiscally responsible at a young age (I started saving for retirement when I was 12). Actually, maybe I’m a bit too responsible as I’m always concerned about money when sometimes I don’t need to; however, I believe that I’ll be able to meet all my financial goals.

This past weekend, I was in Santa Cruz with my family for my in-law’s 40th anniversary. While we were sitting in traffic, I saw the passenger of a car get out (traffic was stopped), goto the trunk, open it, open a cooler and pull out what must have been a beer and then got back in the car. That was the first time I’d ever seen anything like that, but it didn’t stop there. A few minutes later, the passenger of the car in front of the cooler car, got out, went to the trunk of the cooler car, got something out of the cooler and walked back to his car.

My wife said “only in Santa Cruz”. I’ve only been to Santa Cruz once before, so I don’t know if other people do this. It seemed quite strange and depending on if the beverage in question was the alcohol variety and was opened, it could have been illegal.

The other day I saw a sign in front of a house advertising the company that was putting the new coating on a house. The sign said “woman owned business”. That kind of sign irks me because I’d hope that a company can compete on the quality of its product, the price, and the service it provides. I don’t really care if a business is minority owned or woman owned; if two products or services were identical, maybe I’d go with a minority owned business, but why advertise this on a sign?

Years ago I read an article about a husband and wife company (the husband was African-American) who did work for the government. As a minority owned or woman owned business, they would have potentially been awarded more government contracts. The husband and wife would not shift ownership the 1 percent needed to qualify for either minority owned or woman owned. To me, that shows great ethics and I have a lot of respect for them.

While I’m ranting about this, it also reminds me of my #1 choice for colleges. I applied to Rice University and really wanted to go (not sure why now that I look back at it), but was denied admission because they “wanted more women in engineering”. There are a few ways to interpret this; the first is that they gave women a head start on whatever scale they used or that if women had equal qualifications as men, the women would get the spots. I have no problems with the latter interpretation, but I really suspect the former. I ended up going to Harvey Mudd College which, at the time, was rated as the top engineering school in the country. I’m pretty sure that they didn’t accept more women into the engineering program to even out the program as my class was 1/3 female.

I’m all about competing based on merits and if 2 companies or people have the same qualifications, use whatever method you want to decide who gets the job or position in college.

On Saturday I was driving down interstate 8 and noticed in my rear view mirror, a car that was swerving across all the lanes. As the car was heading back towards the number 1 lane, I saw the logo on the side of the car. It was a CHP officer doing a traffic break.

I expected to see something in the road or an accident up ahead, but saw nothing except for some appliance on the side of the road with no one around. Why was the officer doing a traffic break? I don’t know, maybe he was bored or his information was old. In any case, if you’ve never seen a traffic break, it’s kind of odd the first time seeing the officer go across all the lanes of traffic.