Yesterday's movie:
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Sometimes you're just having a day...
8am: Wednesdays I have to be in the SF office by 9am to do my weekly phone meeting with Sheila. After being late 2 weeks in a row, I make sure to be out the door by 8am. The average time to the office is 50 minutes, with a standard deviation of about 4 minutes, so I have a better than 95% probability of making it to the SF office on time. And that includes having inclement weather, which there's been a lot of recently, and which is in full force today.
To get to SF from HMB, I take the PCH along the cliffs, which is 1 lane each direction, through the Devil's Slide area and down into Pacifica, where it turns into 2 lanes each way and goes around another set of cliffs before depositing you onto the 280 and a clear path to the city.
815am: Despite the pouring rain, I am making pretty good time. I'm still easily projecting a 50 minute trip time when I come around a bend and see that a pickup truck has skidded, lost control, and t-boned the side of the hill, thus blocking the other direction of traffic completely. Traffic is already pretty backed up on our side.
For the next 30 minutes, I slowly inch forward until I get to the place where it becomes 2 lanes in each direction. CHP has shut down the southbound road from there, and is turning everyone around and sending them back north. Thus, our northbound lanes are having to accommodate twice the usual amount of rush-hour traffic, and they're not doing an especially efficient job of that accommodation.
845am: I finally make it past the slowdown, and gun it for the Daly City BART station.
855am: I arrive at the BART station, but now if I get on the train, I'll be WAY late to the meeting with Sheila, so I decide that I'll have to call Sheila from the car. That's what the magic of cell phone technology allows you to do, after all. With the 5 minutes I still have before our scheduled time, I decide to drive down John Daly Blvd and look for a coffee shop or something where I can grab a pastry.
Sadly, I have a 50-50 shot as to which way leads to the coffee shops and restaurants, and I of course choose wrong, as I do approximately 99% of the time when faced with a 50-50 shot of getting something right. So, I end up having to pull over and park at a meter so I can call Sheila.
9am: Upon opening my phone, I realize that I forgot to put it on the charger at work yesterday, and I am down to one bar of juice. Not enough to do a 1-hour phonecall. So I call Sheila and explain, and while explaining this to her, my phone changes from 1 bar of juice to "low battery", meaning maybe 5 minutes of talktime left, tops.
Sheila generously agrees that if I can get myself to the SF office in half an hour, she'll do our phone session in full then. So I start up the car to head back to the BART station. Now, in the 5 minutes it has taken me to make the call to Sheila, a Comcast van has pulled into the meter ahead of me, and a pickup truck has pulled into the meter behind me, and BOTH of them have left about an inch between my vehicle and theirs.
909am: After a 100,000 point maneuver to get out from between these two imbeciles, I am headed back to the BART station. It is still pouring rain.
914am: I pull into the surface lot at BART. No spots. No problem, I'll head for the GIGANTIC parking structure.
916am: I enter the parking structure. No spots on the first level.
917am: No spots on the second level.
918am: No spots on the roof. I have shown up here as late as 10am and still been able to at least get a spot on the roof. No problem, there is a secret area behind the parking structure, that I found once only by mistakenly heading down a service road- I'll check that out.
920am: Secret back area is totally full. No problem, there is a secret small overflow lot down the tiny unmarked, unsigned back road behind the parking structure. I'll use that.
922am: The secret areas, it turns out, cannot actually be said to be secret in the generally accepted sense of "other people not knowing about them." No spots.
923am: I consider heading back home; I could make it there in 25 minutes. On the other hand, the direct route is southbound on the PCH, which I happen to know is currently shut down. Therefore, I have to chance driving all the way into the city. On the other hand, it's technically past the peak of morning rush, and apparently everyone has decided to BART in, so hopefully the 280 is not too back up.
930am: The 280 is totally backed up.
955am: I arrive in Chinatown. I'm in such a hurry, I forget that the cheap garage is on Pacific, not Jackson, so I inadvertently park in the Hilton parking garage, where I will ultimately pay about a billion dollars to park.
1005am: I finally arrive at the office. It has taken over 2 hours to get the lousy 23 miles from my house to here. And because Joe Fucktard couldn't control his fucking pickup truck and drive competently in the rain, literally hundreds of people, including me, had more than an hour tacked onto their commute, and in addition to that, his incompetence will cost me an extra $200 in compensating Sheila for an additional hour of time (which she did not ask for, because she is very kind like that, but which I will pay because it's fair), plus the marginal cost of paying to park at the Hilton rather than paying $3 at BART. And the additional wear-and-tear on my car, and an additional fraction of a barrel of oil from some godforsaken bullshit country in the Middle East that one or both of my brothers could end up doing another tour in. And the additional carbon impact. So thank you, Joe Fucktard- heckuva job you've done today.
Grr.
To get to SF from HMB, I take the PCH along the cliffs, which is 1 lane each direction, through the Devil's Slide area and down into Pacifica, where it turns into 2 lanes each way and goes around another set of cliffs before depositing you onto the 280 and a clear path to the city.
815am: Despite the pouring rain, I am making pretty good time. I'm still easily projecting a 50 minute trip time when I come around a bend and see that a pickup truck has skidded, lost control, and t-boned the side of the hill, thus blocking the other direction of traffic completely. Traffic is already pretty backed up on our side.
For the next 30 minutes, I slowly inch forward until I get to the place where it becomes 2 lanes in each direction. CHP has shut down the southbound road from there, and is turning everyone around and sending them back north. Thus, our northbound lanes are having to accommodate twice the usual amount of rush-hour traffic, and they're not doing an especially efficient job of that accommodation.
845am: I finally make it past the slowdown, and gun it for the Daly City BART station.
855am: I arrive at the BART station, but now if I get on the train, I'll be WAY late to the meeting with Sheila, so I decide that I'll have to call Sheila from the car. That's what the magic of cell phone technology allows you to do, after all. With the 5 minutes I still have before our scheduled time, I decide to drive down John Daly Blvd and look for a coffee shop or something where I can grab a pastry.
Sadly, I have a 50-50 shot as to which way leads to the coffee shops and restaurants, and I of course choose wrong, as I do approximately 99% of the time when faced with a 50-50 shot of getting something right. So, I end up having to pull over and park at a meter so I can call Sheila.
9am: Upon opening my phone, I realize that I forgot to put it on the charger at work yesterday, and I am down to one bar of juice. Not enough to do a 1-hour phonecall. So I call Sheila and explain, and while explaining this to her, my phone changes from 1 bar of juice to "low battery", meaning maybe 5 minutes of talktime left, tops.
Sheila generously agrees that if I can get myself to the SF office in half an hour, she'll do our phone session in full then. So I start up the car to head back to the BART station. Now, in the 5 minutes it has taken me to make the call to Sheila, a Comcast van has pulled into the meter ahead of me, and a pickup truck has pulled into the meter behind me, and BOTH of them have left about an inch between my vehicle and theirs.
909am: After a 100,000 point maneuver to get out from between these two imbeciles, I am headed back to the BART station. It is still pouring rain.
914am: I pull into the surface lot at BART. No spots. No problem, I'll head for the GIGANTIC parking structure.
916am: I enter the parking structure. No spots on the first level.
917am: No spots on the second level.
918am: No spots on the roof. I have shown up here as late as 10am and still been able to at least get a spot on the roof. No problem, there is a secret area behind the parking structure, that I found once only by mistakenly heading down a service road- I'll check that out.
920am: Secret back area is totally full. No problem, there is a secret small overflow lot down the tiny unmarked, unsigned back road behind the parking structure. I'll use that.
922am: The secret areas, it turns out, cannot actually be said to be secret in the generally accepted sense of "other people not knowing about them." No spots.
923am: I consider heading back home; I could make it there in 25 minutes. On the other hand, the direct route is southbound on the PCH, which I happen to know is currently shut down. Therefore, I have to chance driving all the way into the city. On the other hand, it's technically past the peak of morning rush, and apparently everyone has decided to BART in, so hopefully the 280 is not too back up.
930am: The 280 is totally backed up.
955am: I arrive in Chinatown. I'm in such a hurry, I forget that the cheap garage is on Pacific, not Jackson, so I inadvertently park in the Hilton parking garage, where I will ultimately pay about a billion dollars to park.
1005am: I finally arrive at the office. It has taken over 2 hours to get the lousy 23 miles from my house to here. And because Joe Fucktard couldn't control his fucking pickup truck and drive competently in the rain, literally hundreds of people, including me, had more than an hour tacked onto their commute, and in addition to that, his incompetence will cost me an extra $200 in compensating Sheila for an additional hour of time (which she did not ask for, because she is very kind like that, but which I will pay because it's fair), plus the marginal cost of paying to park at the Hilton rather than paying $3 at BART. And the additional wear-and-tear on my car, and an additional fraction of a barrel of oil from some godforsaken bullshit country in the Middle East that one or both of my brothers could end up doing another tour in. And the additional carbon impact. So thank you, Joe Fucktard- heckuva job you've done today.
Grr.
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