What Are You Doing Right Now
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@Dashrender said:
LOL - you must never fly. I have cell service way below 99% of the time because of things like flying, and being in basements with no service, etc... but I also generally don't have any other service at those times either.
Great examples. I get email in airports, on planes, on ferries, but not calls or texts. Amtrak too, they have wifi that is more reliable than the cell service (just because of the speed of the trains.)
I get wifi in basements and stuff when I own the home. Only have issues with that when we rent houses and they have equipment problems.
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@DustinB3403 said:
@scottalanmiller and @coliver try calling me any time you want, my phone will ring.
I haven't had a cell phone issue in a very long time.
Do you never drive? You can't go anywhere around Rochester without the calls dropping. Even Dallas has no Verizon coverage in the middle of the city.
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I drive constantly, and haven't experienced any issues.
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When I attended RIT and commuted I would generally lose signal around the Strong Memorial Hospital. All signal not just data. Couldn't be on a call when I was commuting or it would drop.
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@DustinB3403 said:
I drive constantly, and haven't experienced any issues.
Is that because you don't know that you miss calls or you are on calls while driving? I've had a lot of Android users tell me they don't have problems with calls and then it turns out that they just didn't check that they were missing them, for example.
Everyone I talk to in Rochester complains about how they can't get calls still. It's a very current issue.
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I have bluetooth and haven't had any dropped calls.
Maybe I'm the exception but my service has been more the good. What does the OS matter of the phone?
It would be the carrier that has the issue.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I suppose I could set my device to ring when I get a text message, not sure though if I can set text messages to continue to ring until I actually look at them though - or email notices (But, damn, can you imagine having your phone ring all the bloody time until you actually look at incoming email?)
You can't do that with your phone either. It rings only as long as they sit on the phone - not something you can do for hours during an emergency. A phone call requires the caller to sit and wait hoping that you pick up, requires you to drop what you are doing and make it to the phone, requires the phone to be working, requires the service to be working and requires all of those things to happen in the same thirty second interval and if they don't the communications doesn't happen.
But the point I'm making is that that caller then knows that you are unreachable - unavailable and is now forced to move onto the next person or simply deal with the situation on their own. This is a social norm.
And does this mean that you believe that all people should keep phones on during movies, plays, meetings, etc.? Or do you feel that IT people cannot attend those things? How do you combine situations where you cannot be interrupted with a belief that you should always be able to be interrupted?
I feel that if that IT person needs to be reachable 24x7 with no exceptions, then yes, they can't do those things.
Do you believe that if you are on call 24x7 and expected to drop whatever you are doing that you should be in a movie theater reading email that's flowing into your phone? If that was the case, I would get no sleep at all. Nearly not an hour goes by that an email doesn't trickle into my inbox, do you feel that I should be reading those within mins of their arrival?
Also email and texts are not guaranteed delivery mechanisms. The sender has no idea when you will receive either. It frustrates the shit out of me when someone gets pissy that I didn't respond to a text message in near real time, or an email for that matter. Sure 99% or more of the time they are near instantly delivered, but those times when you're away from a computer and don't have service - you don't get jack and now you're the bad guy for not responding immediately.
If Dustin's boss really expected Dustin to go to work early, he should have continued communication attempts until he received confirmation that Dustin would be going in early. A simple text asking/telling him to do so and no confirmation is crap.
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Don't get me stated on cell availability around here (Western NY). Buffalo/Rochester area is the worst, regardless of carrier or technology. 4G? I'm lucky if I can get CDMA 1X in my building, and I"m only a mile from a tower! Now, in the "boonies" I would expect that but not in a relative major suburban area. I've literally gone up into less populated areas of New England or the middle of Pennsylvania expecting little to no service, and get not just 4G, but full on XLTE with measured 20 Mbit down!
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@jt1001001 Yep, mountainous/hilly terrain is almost impossible to get good radio coverage for. You'd have to have a tower on top of every single hilltop to get full coverage. We've got the same sort of issue in Holmes County Ohio.
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@jt1001001 What's amazing is that except for that one uninhabited valley in Nicaragua, I've been all over Central America, Canada, most of Europe, some of north Africa, even an island in the Med and all of them have cell service to a degree that I know of no place, including Manhattan, in the US that is as good. Although I have made it from the Altantic ocean, across Virginia on the south edge and to the far side of the Smokies once without dropping a call. Big parts of the US have good coverage too... although it normally requires having multiple carriers for it to work. Everyone else, just one carrier is all that you need.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@DustinB3403 said:
@scottalanmiller I completely understand the situation here, as this clearly isn't an emergency.
But the normal communication methods tried first would be an email or text. If there is no response a follow up call. I for one wake up (on average) 1 hour before I'm due into work.
So to have a text that I'm not looking for sitting on my phone, saying "hey can you be the early guy" is not a notification to me to update my alarm.
I happened to wake up early enough to make it in, but a call would have absolutely been the appropriate thing after there was no response via Text after a few minutes.
A call as a follow up is different than a call instead of sending the info. Those are very different concepts.
A text - then waiting 5+ mins - then a call seems like a waste of 5 mins and requires the initiator to remember do the followup.
If he skips the text, goes directly to the phone call he'll know right then and their that the person either does or doesn't have the request.
This is all the more exasperated by it being after 10 PM, the normal etiquette time for communications.
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@jt1001001 said:
Don't get me stated on cell availability around here (Western NY). Buffalo/Rochester area is the worst, regardless of carrier or technology. 4G? I'm lucky if I can get CDMA 1X in my building, and I"m only a mile from a tower! Now, in the "boonies" I would expect that but not in a relative major suburban area. I've literally gone up into less populated areas of New England or the middle of Pennsylvania expecting little to no service, and get not just 4G, but full on XLTE with measured 20 Mbit down!
I go up to my brother's in Maine he has great signal almost everywhere. I go to my in-laws in a very rural area outside of Pittsburgh and they have great signal.
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@Dashrender said:
A text - then waiting 5+ mins - then a call seems like a waste of 5 mins and requires the initiator to remember do the followup.
If he skips the text, goes directly to the phone call he'll know right then and their that the person either does or doesn't have the request.
You added in the five minute wait to make it a problem. If this is an emergency it would be email, then call. Immediately if necessary. But only for an emergency.
If non-emergency, email then wait more than five minutes, then call once it has become time sensitive.
Text is always wrong. Text then call in five minutes seems universally wrong. You are adding in factors to make good processes sound bad.
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@Dashrender said:
This is all the more exasperated by it being after 10 PM, the normal etiquette time for communications.
True, making using email more important than before.
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@Dashrender said:
If he skips the text, goes directly to the phone call he'll know right then and their that the person either does or doesn't have the request.
Except it is rude and doesn't mean that he would get through or get the details correct or have a record of it.
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@DustinB3403 said:
I drive constantly, and haven't experienced any issues.
Yeah I rarely have any issues at all with Verizon until I get in the middle of Letchworth park or down in the Southern Tier area (or Delhi NY).
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We drive pretty much everywhere (hate dealing with flying). We have a few areas where we have no Verizon service. Dallas TX, Oklahoma in a couple areas (Indian Reservations mostly), Souther Tier of NYS, Delhi NY, Major State parks you lose service in the middle usually.
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@Minion-Queen said:
@DustinB3403 said:
I drive constantly, and haven't experienced any issues.
Yeah I rarely have any issues at all with Verizon until I get in the middle of Letchworth park or down in the Southern Tier area (or Delhi NY).
That should change soon. The college here is getting a huge Verizon tower on the tallest building in town (which is near the top of a mountain as it is).
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
If he skips the text, goes directly to the phone call he'll know right then and their that the person either does or doesn't have the request.
Except it is rude and doesn't mean that he would get through or get the details correct or have a record of it.
You are the only one saying it's rude. Now I'll accept a group consensus that it's rude if we suddenly get a flood of "it's rude" posts - but other than giving me a hard time I don't see that happening.
Phone call followed by email or email followed by phone call - I really don't care the order. I agree that the email makes the otherside more responsible for providing correct details, and that by putting the email second it's likely that the sender won't feel the need to put in all the details. But if there is even a remote chance that they think they are going to be calling anyway - they won't include those details in a precall email to begin with.
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@Minion-Queen said:
We drive pretty much everywhere (hate dealing with flying). We have a few areas where we have no Verizon service. Dallas TX, Oklahoma in a couple areas (Indian Reservations mostly), Souther Tier of NYS, Delhi NY, Major State parks you lose service in the middle usually.
There is nearly zero service - definitely not reliable between Lincoln Ne and the state line on Interstate 80. You get stuck out there, you better hope for a good samaritan because you'll extremely unlikely to be calling/texting or emailing anyone.
