Category: Quote

One of my favorite error messages

We are temporarily unable to process your purchase, so we’d like to offer you access to Gogo free of charge for the duration of your flight. Lucky You. Enjoy!

This made my day, and is an excellent lesson in customer service. Something was wrong with Gogo’s service, and they had the choice between frustrating me or making me happy. One of the easiest ways to annoy me is to mess with my Internet access, so it’s quite possible that if I wasn’t able to get online I’d refuse to pay for Gogo in the future. (Remember I’m the guy who refuses to sign up for Netflix because they buy popup ads.) But since Gogo decided to throw me an hour of free Wi-Fi instead (short flight), I’m now using my time to blog about how great they are.

The Storm

Lately I’ve refrained from constantly making fun of California, even as Nelson has recently become quite the little jokester when it comes to talking about the East Coast. He has the great bit about how the East Coast would react to sunshine.

But today something happened that I felt like sharing. Note that the exchange below is paraphrased and did not actually include a hyperlink.

Nelson: You added a question to the Moderator page for today’s presentation, right?
Me: Well, I had, but I deleted it since it’s no longer relevant. I posted it a few weeks ago before the meeting was postponed. Remember they rescheduled it?
Erin: Oh, yeah, on the day of the storm.

“The Storm?” I wondered to myself as I tried to think back to that day and figure out what she meant. Was it a sporting event that I was unaware of? The name of a Google event I forgot to attend?

Then, I remembered something about that day.

Me: You mean the time that it rained?

We had a good laugh as she confirmed my assumption. I then had one more question:

Me: But we didn’t cancel the meeting because of the rain, right?

Wrong.

If you’ve watched Conan recently, you may have seen him make fun of how Californians react to the rain. It’s not far from the truth:

To those of you who are trying to watch the clips outside of the US or after they expire, I apologize for using Hulu.

P.S. I like California.

Zing!

I was totally burned by Matt today in a meeting.

We started the day with an 8 AM meeting together (video conference with Europe), and I thought I was going to get through the day with the upper hand when Matt went to the wrong room (he blamed the early time), using state-of-the-art technology to connect two Mountain View rooms that were only separated by the floor/ceiling as his room was directly below mine. Man, he must have felt pretty silly for those 30 seconds before he came upstairs.

As the meeting went on, my phone started beeping loudly on I believe three different occasions, even prompting Matthew to send me snarky trans-Atlantic comments about the disturbances via IM. Each time it started beeping I scrambled to turn it off, but wasn’t able to silence it quickly since I’m still not an Android ninja (I haven’t switched back to my iPhone). So there I was, spending most of the hour looking like a bumbling technologically illiterate fool who doesn’t know how to put his phone on vibrate at work.

What had happened was that since I use my phone as my alarm clock, and I’m usually not at work (and often not out of bed) during the hour of the meeting, my alarms were going off, which logically isn’t subject to the restrictions of “silent mode.” And it wasn’t just a single disturbance because I’m so not a morning person that I have five alarms set on my phone: 5:00, 6:00, 7:00, 8:30, and 9:00. I think we heard the 8:30 and 9:00 alarms, and I may have accidentally snoozed one making it go off twice. Why starting at 5 AM? Because as much as I’m not a morning person, I want to get into work early. It hardly ever happens.

Anyway, in a later meeting, Matt was the last to arrive. I thought it would be hilarious to bring back an old team tradition where the last arrival had to tell a joke. Just as I called him out, someone else’s phone rang. Without missing a beat, Matt asked, “Wysz, is that your phone?” The rest of the group looked at him, confused. He simply said, “That’s my joke,” and sat down.

Humor is in the genes

Here’s a snippet of our dinner conversation when I went home for Easter.

My grandmother was telling us about a recent exchange on a bus:

Bus Driver: [talking about his job] It keeps me out of my wife’s hair.
My grandfather: But it doesn’t keep you off the streets.

Zing! My grandmother said that the driver probably went home and told his wife about a funny old man on his bus.

“What old man?” my grandfather interjected.

We all laughed. My grandfather held up his hands and said, “No charge.”

Why do people think I’m incapable of embarrassment?

A few minutes ago, I was trying to get some information out of Nelson, but he said he was too embarrassed and wouldn’t reveal the info. I respected that, but as a final attempt to get it out of him, I offered:

“I’ll tell you something embarrassing about me.”

But Matt immediately took the value out of this offer:

“Yeah, but you’d probably just blog about it if we waited long enough.”

True.