Paperboy

I got up this morning and looked out my front door to see if anything had been delivered. Upon doing so, I was greeted by the sight of no newspaper on the porch, and no newspaper further down at the edge of the driveway. This, curiously, is actually correct behavior, though you wouldn't know it if you had driven by any morning since Monday.

I should probably explain. For something like twenty weeks now, we've been signed up for Sunday only newspaper service. Before that we were getting Friday-Sunday service as there is no weekend only for whatever reason. Before that, for years, we were on daily service, which is the last time they got it consistently right. Shortly after downgrading to the three day service, we noticed that we would get the newspaper on seemingly random days. No two consecutive weeks would pass with exactly six papers delivered on the correct three days. This probably shouldn't be rocket science, but somehow they just couldn't get it right. Almost every time the deliveryman failed to deliver on a day he was supposed to, Mom called to complain about it. The dispatcher always had some excuse about a new deliveryman or that the regular one was sick for months at a time which caused a substitute or something else asinine and pathetic of that sort. Finally she was fed up and canceled the service entirely.

This should probably offend most of you, as newspapers for years were delivered by young children on bicycles with a far higher success rate than this. In fact they made a video game about it, sharing a name with this entry in fact. Of course, that was not unintentional. I was never particularly good at this game, truth be told, though I never really played it on anything but somebody else's Game Boy, so I never really had the time to get good. It occurred to me for a moment that perhaps I'm being too hard on the deliveryman as a result, but I quickly dismissed that as terribly stupid of me. For starters, newspapers are now mostly delivered by grown men in cars, not young boys on bicycles. Furthermore Paperboy, like all video games based on mundane activities, is full of artificial challenge boosts because if it were particularly realistic it would be a horribly boring game.

No, whoever was responsible for this mistake was a moron of the highest order. However, Mom quickly missed the paper, and the paper itself missed our money, so they offered to give her 13 weeks without payment, and if she was still dissatisfied no payment would be necessary. At some point during this mess, the deliveryman decided (though he is not alone from what I've heard) that the Sunday paper was getting too large with all the inserts and the added bulk of the paper itself, so he was going to add those to the thinner Saturday paper instead. Of course, this meant if he failed to deliver on Saturday (as he was wont to do) we wouldn't get them even if he did deliver a Sunday paper. Also this seemed problematic as this latest attempt at service (the free 13 weeks) was Sunday only. How would he accomplish this? Wouldn't that mean stuffing some papers with the inserts and some without? How does that help the overall problem? Wouldn't that actually be more work and make things more confusing? There are answers to these questions, and all of them are what you'd expect if you assume this was a stupid idea. Well, behold and lo, at the end of 13 weeks we probably had 13 papers delivered, but not all of them were on Sunday nor were all the Sundays covered. Not even close actually.

The dispatcher begged Mom over the phone for one last chance, and for some reason she gave it to them. Well somehow the moron managed to get it right, delivering a full paper between the storm door and main front wooden door on our porch. He also delivered the thinner paper-only bit to the porch, but not between the doors. Strange, but at least we got what we ordered. Well despite this not even bringing their accuracy to 50% she decided to pay up for the next cycle (thinking back I'm not sure if we had to pay for the previous weeks after deciding they were not worthless [though they were] or if they were completely free). Since then we've gotten the paper every Sunday but one, usually with the inserts on Saturday, and Sunday, and occasionally with an insert-free copy also on Sunday anyway, and usually on the porch despite there never being a request to do that. Also of course they would often deliver on various days that are not Sunday or even Saturday but not for the entire week as you expect of the promotional free weeks newspaper companies enjoy doing in vain.

I cannot understand how these buffoons fail so utterly at such a simple concept week in and week out, but I don't really care; it isn't my money paying for their mistakes, and frankly they're actually losing money on us due to their incompetence so I at least get a smile of schadenfreude. Perhaps we should actually return to the age of small children delivering papers from their bikes, or at least require some sort of test before allowing someone to take on this seemingly difficult job. Perhaps set a benchmark score in Paperboy for job acceptance. Can't make things any worse than they are right now.

Update: An unfamiliar newspaper on the sewing machine in my garage (don't ask) found when getting the mail leads me to believe I may have been premature in suggesting they got something right.  It's more likely he simply didn't deliver to the door for no good reason this time, but still delivered erroneously.

Climate Change

The modern world is full of wonderful technology to make our lives easier or better. The automobile allows us to travel long distances without exerting any significant physical effort. The computer allows us to automate menial tasks in order to exert less effort in our jobs. The internet allows us to view drawings of girls that have been horribly mutilated in a vain attempt to get sexually aroused. The list goes on and on. These technologies may or may not be leading to global climate change. None of these are relevant to this discussion though, as I am choosing to discuss a more insidious technology that is causing climate change right at this second: the thermostat.

Not what you were expecting? I'm not particularly surprised by that, but the thermostat does share much in common with global climate change. For example, everyone knows what they both are, but few people understand them. I'll get into the misunderstandings of the thermostat later, and I think the misunderstandings of the supposedly more important one are well documented. See also any United States government sponsored paper on the topic. More obviously, both affect the climate. This is a tautology in the case of global climate change, but I really wanted to at least get the list to two items. So there aren't all that many similarities in number perhaps, but both are very simple on a conceptual level, and they more or less intersect completely there.

They differ in several ways as well. Obviously, one is typically a smallish plastic box filled with electronics and a thermometer, and the other is a concept pertaining to a number of factors including but not limited to greenhouse gas production. Also, an informed person can trivially control a thermostat, while global climate change is not even necessarily caused directly or entirely by humans. That debate is for another time and probably another place.

The trouble for thermostats start with the fact that they're smallish boxes filled with electronics. Like most similar objects, most people simply don't know how to use them. Oh sure, they think they do, or are simply loathe to admit that they don't and attempt to squeak by anyway. The first issue people have is simply a matter of terminology: up versus down. People, not understanding exactly how a normal thermostat works, treat it like a temperature dial on their ovens or in their car. Perhaps instead they think it's something entirely different and the setting is actually an offset from some temperature. Of course it can't be offset from the external temperature or you'd typically be sweating constantly, but it's not my irrational belief so don't ask me to explain it. Turning the thermostat up usually means twisting the dial to the left or pushing an up button, which is fine if you want to heat up a room. Unfortunately, this is often uttered when the room is not being adequately cooled in the belief that cranking it will crank the air conditioning. In the winter, this particular mistake leads accidentally to the correct result. Turning the thermostat down has the opposite effect, causing the intended effect in the winter while freezing people in the summer. The worst part about this issue is that it's the sort of mistake you wouldn't expect someone to make repeatedly. After all, how many times do you typically have to get the same true/false question wrong before you figure out what the right answer is? If the current setting is wrong, the choices for correction are binary, but somehow repeating the wrong action in hopes that the degree of adjustment was just not enough yet is a common response.

That problem makes a certain degree of sense, though not how long it can persist. This next problem doesn't even warrant any acceptance. On more than one occasion, I've observed someone adjusting the programming of the heat, never the air conditioning for some reason, based on the external temperature. I don't mean the current setting, I mean the scheduled programming. For example, it was unseasonably warm a few days ago, so the weekend daytime temperature was set to 65 instead of the normal 68. When it's colder out, the programming will occasionally reach 70. Leaving out the efficiency issues of adjusting the regular program every time the temperature changes significantly, this betrays a massive lack of understanding of exactly what a thermostat does.

I may as well explain what they do if I'm going to keep demonizing people who fail to understand this. No matter what type of thermostat you use they will have a method of setting a temperature and a thermometer. When the temperature falls below the input temperature (in heating mode, the opposite is true for air conditioning), the thermostat sends a signal to the furnace to activate. When the temperature passes the set temperature by a small amount it sends another signal to deactivate the furnace. In so doing, you can set the average temperature of the room the thermostat is in, and by knowing the difference in temperature across a building affect the average temperature of an entire centrally heated structure to your taste. This is fascinating I'm sure.

Lowering the temperature setting in response to a heat wave is unnecessary. If the outside is so warm that the inside stays above your set temperature, the furnace simply will not activate. Raising the temperature setting in response to a chill is similarly unnecessary. If the external temperature is so low that the internal temperature drops rapidly, the furnace will activate more often and stay active longer to keep the temperature exactly where you wanted it. The interior air temperature of 68 degrees is the same whether it is 62 degrees outside or it is -13 degrees. The only difference is the amount of power required to maintain the 68 degrees. The only real difference anyway.

Upon asking why you'd do this, I was answered "Because it's cold outside." Obviously, I explaned what I just said in those previous two sentences, but that wasn't enough. "Well it seems colder inside." This is an entirely different matter, and one that can be easily remedied by overriding the program (in this case pushing the up button). Feeling cold in the room even at the temperature you want is possible if there's a drafty area that doesn't affect the area near the thermostat as quickly, or if you have strong somatic reactions, but if either was the case why answer how you originally did? Why not just skip the middleman and jump to "I'm not warm enough," and move on with your life? There are no good answers to that question, so I can't give you any. There are only irrational feelings causing somatic reactions and a total misunderstanding of how the whole process works. That's what I'm here for.