Hot Tub, Dinner, and Taking it Easy in Palmdale

High Desert Weekend Trip-log #6
Palmdale, CA - Sat, 26 Mar, 2002. 9:30pm

We arrived in Palmdale, back in Antelope Valley, around 3 this afternoon and checked into our hotel. Apparently hiking and shopping both are hard because all we did the rest of the day was hang out at the hot tub. We met another couple down there who were also on a weekend getaway from work and talked for 3 hours. Mostly about... work. 😂 It didn't really feel like 3 hours, but by the time we got back up to our room it was already 6. We changed back into our clothes and headed out for dinner.

For dinner we found an old favorite restaurant in town, El Torito. It's a sit-down Mexican chain restaurant. The one near our home that we used to eat at twice a month or so closed down several years ago. Others in the area closed, too, leaving only one nearby— and it's not that good.  Would this one be better? We hoped so.

Hawk enjoyed her dinner. I found mine kind of "meh". The food was decent but the menu has been the same for years. None of it jumps out at me anymore and hasn't for year. At least the service was good, so it felt like we were treating ourselves to a nice evening out.

After dinner we stopped by a grocery store for desserts and drinks for the room. We've been taking it easy for the rest of the evening.

I think I'll go to bed soon as it's been a long day for me after a late night driving last night. I drove 250 miles Friday night and 190 during the day today. Tomorrow, though... tomorrow could be as many miles as both days put together! And a few hours of hiking! So I'd like to get some rest.

Fuck T-Mobile

The short version:

I've spent most of the day today without working Internet from my ISP, T-Mobile. Fuck T-Mobile. I literally started subscribing to a competitor while one of their techs wasted our time not fixing the problem before hanging up on us.

The long version:

Several months ago we subscribed to T-Mobile for 5G home internet. They offered a great monthly price with a rate lock-in, and their service was way faster than the DSL we'd been limping along with for years.

Unfortunately their service has always been glitchy. Sometimes we get massive bandwidth through the system, occasionally it chokes down to zero or near zero for minutes at a time. And even when it works, the latency is poor. Network speed tests show they're routing us through a private network to cities like Sacramento and Fresno, over 100 miles away. Latency problems make a real-world difference in things like videoconferencing— which I do hours a day as a remote worker.

The final straw came today when our T-Mobile service disappeared in the morning and worked only sporadically through lunch. Hawk called customer service. After wasting minutes going through an IVR to get to a tech, the tech wasted minutes insulting her intelligence with "Have you plugged it in?" type skeptical questions.

At that point I started looking at pricing from one of their competitors. We now have home Internet service from Verizon. Too bad it'll take a while before the equipment arrives; I'm ready to drop T-Mobile's equipment out the 3rd floor window right now.

UPDATE: At 9pm the service is still down. It's been down most of the past 12 hours. On sites like downdetector there's indication this is an area outage. Yet when we called customer support a second time this evening they insisted (again) on diagnosing our problem as if it's just us and ignored everything we pointed out about this being an area-wide problem.