There’s an App for that.

I just finished my first week. I have to say that I quite enjoyed it. The work is a good mix of steady and slow with bursts of holy heck where did all this come from?!? My boss is good, both as an employer and as a man, and my co-workers are excellent although one has some issues and may not be there much longer. Patience with him has run thin, deservedly so.

I think the job is going to provide a lot of blog fodder, although the most common topic may be how to communicate your location effectively to the dispatch. Where are you? Across the street from the old Save-u. Okay, what road are you on? On the road that runs in front of the old Save-u, isn’t really helpful, but in the fairgrounds parking lot across the street from Walmart is. They’re the same location.

I’ll get started with the topic that the title references.

I’m not going to use a Motor Club unless I’m in absolute dire straights and have no other option. Let me step aside for a moment and explain something about motor clubs that a lot of people don’t realize. Many people have motor clubs/road side service through their insurance, groups they may be members of, their banks, credit cards, cell phone providers, I think I saw a thing for road side assistance attached to a grocery store membership card and I’m pretty sure you can get one with a cup of coffee these days. The vast majority of these services contract with one of a handful of companies to handle the calls for them. One of the major players in the field covers Progressive, USAA, Nationwide, State Farm, Travellers. and many other accounts. Geico and Allstate have their own motor clubs, Allstate also accepts some accounts (they just got GM away from the aforementioned major service provider) but Geico is pretty much just for Geico customers.

We use an app that one of the major contractors (see above) has developed that sends job orders straight to our smart phones. We can take in the job order on their app, open the app that our dispatch software comes with and dispatch to the driver on the fly. Very handy for middle of the night dispatching from home. Often the job order arrives in the app while we’re still on the phone with the company. It supports multiple logins, which is very handy since we have 9 drivers, 3 dispatchers, and a couple of other people that get pressed into service when needed. Unfortunately it doesn’t give us any information about how many people are logged in to our account. It stores all the job orders we have received, although it tends to only show fifty or so at a time. I paged back a few months and could have loaded more but my finger got tired.

The nature of the information on the job orders is quite personal but it’s necessary. Vehicle owners name, policy holders name, telephone numbers, location of the car (complete with mapping service), year/make/model/vin/plates of the car (the vin is necessary, we have to verify it against the one on the car to make sure the vehicle is the one covered by the job order otherwise we don’t get paid), nature of the problem, whether or not the car is attended, location of the key, what the policy holder is covered for, what charges the company has approved, how many passengers the tow driver will have, and the destination of the tow.

All of this is vital information for us. The app really helps us do our job more efficiently and to help make the process less stressful for the customer. However, I’m not necessarily comfortable with it. I just opened it to see if I could find an example of why. A lady is on the interstate east bound at mile marker XX with her check engine light on. One passenger for the wrecker, which means that she’s alone in the car. Anybody want a victim and a 2012 Toyota? Yesterday we had a lawyer with a flat on a $50k SUV in the parking lot at the court house. He needed it towed because the tires have locking hubcaps and he didn’t have the key with him. The app told us “Cust left keys on r front tire, do not call!” We had his key location, his vehicle location, his swanky home address, and we knew he’d be tied up and wouldn’t be answering his phone. Jackpot!

There are less than scrupulous local guys with minimally functioning equipment that want to do nothing but run motor club roadside service calls. They accept any and all jobs they’re called for, call and change their original ETA to something ridiculously long, then show up to the calls with the wrong equipment to handle the problem. If the customer is still there they’ll mess around for a few minutes, tell the customer the motor club sent the wrong information, vehicle needs a tow not a jump, some other excuse, and go home with their $15 consolation prize. I’ve met a few of them and there’s a reason why they’re known in the industry as bottom feeders. They also tend to do a lot of abandoned vehicle pick ups for businesses, booting cars in pay lots and the like. One of them lines the roads in his neighborhood with vehicles he’s “impounded.” Classy. If they have a smart phone they have access to the app. So does anyone they’ve chosen to share their login with.

My boss runs a good shop with very little employee turnover, but he had a driver who moved on to a different industry last year and his replacement is skating on thin ice. If the boss does wind up letting him go we’ll get another login, but it will mean going without motor club calls for anywhere between 1 and 24 hours while their system updates. I don’t know if many of those bottom feeders would be willing to go through the process, or even care, when their newest “business partner” flakes off with the app.

Now, the information isn’t randomly broadcast to every company in the area. It’s only sent to the company who accepts the job, but if we weren’t diligent about our login a smart criminal could watch for road side service on unattended vehicles and beat us there and we wouldn’t know. It’s pretty common to show up for a jump or a lockout to find the customer figured out a way to fix the problem and left without bothering to call. Especially if you give a ridiculously long ETA like the less reputable people do.

There are reasons to have and use a motor club, I’m sure, but if I need assistance I plan on finding my own tow service and submitting the bill for reimbursement. I really don’t want that kind of information being broadcast to anyone not of my choosing but I will freely admit that I’m paranoid.

I have a J-O-B

Starting tomorrow (Monday) I will be working as a part-time dispatcher for a local wrecker service. 

Poor Rhye will have to get used to spending his days in his crate. I think he’ll adjust eventually, although I do anticipate my name will be mud until the kids are out of school and can supervise him while I’m at work.

They wanted a minimum of a year of dispatching experience, which I do not have, so I asked what software they use and found a “getting started” manual and a set of training videos online and made a book length study guide for myself, adding in notes from the videos. A poor substitute for experience but the boss was impressed. He kept me in his office talking for an hour and a half during the interview on Wednesday and they called Thursday to offer me the position. The children and I did a happy dance and a celebratory Kermit flail for good measure. I went outside to clear more weed trees out of the azalea bushes and Monster Girl surprised me by making dinner. She opened a jar of my sweet and sour pork and served it over rice, for dessert she made mint chocolate chip ice cream (from a mix) and chocolate cake made from scratch. She also made a tremendous mess in the kitchen, but I didn’t mind.

This is the first paying job I’ve had outside of the home since NAFTA allowed Motorola to send my division overseas 12 years ago. I’m so excited!

DrJim

DrJim's step-grandchild appears to be fading. I'm very sad to hear it, and my thoughts and prayers go out to he and his family at this time.
To the young man, I ask for peace, light, and freedom.

DrJim blogs at Every Blade Of Grass.
http://every-blade-of-grass.blogspot.com

Phooey again

The new cord arrived today (YAY!!!) but the video card is still wigging out (Boo!!!) and I had to reboot the computer twice while trying to answer comments (Hiss!!!) (to the reboots, not the comments!!!!) so I'm resorting to posting on my phone again. I can post from the phone but I haven't been able to figure how to see comments, much less reply to them. Guess it's going to be a weird hybrid thing until stuff gets figured out. Yay for technology?

Dr Jim. I have had the jack pull off the motherboard before and it's definitely something that takes a skilled hand to repair. This time it was just the cord. I figured it was on its way out when I noticed cracks up and down its length about a month ago.

Laura, yes the dogs often do accompany my into the ladies, but our master bathroom has an attached walk-on closet that they like to lay in so they're not quite as up in the business as that sounds lol

The kids started a three day weekend today so when they got home I put them to work instead of chaining them to their books. The car was cleaned out and vacuumed, meat was thawed and browned, onions were chopped, beans were rinsed and drained, laundry was folded and dishes were washed while Silly E and I sawed some double wide pallets in half lengthwise to make a fence for my front bed. I'm planning on painting them and filling them with soil to make a vertical garden. Even in its raw state it looks better than the rolls of wire and picket fence we have had for the past few years. I took that fence apart and plan on using the pickets for a hugelkulture bed and having Cave use the wire to build a trellis for grapevines.

Rhye starts his puppy training class tomorrow and I have a full day planned around chauffeuring kids, dogs, and digging through the shed for paint for the fence. Hope you have a great weekend!

Well Phooey

My laptop is barely hanging in there. The power cord is on the fritz so it cuts off if I do something so dastardly as pick it up and move it and a gentle bump, sometimes just typing too hard, sends the video chip into fits that often require a series of reboots to get it to settle down and run right. I have a new cord on the way but the video card means it's going to have to be replaced sooner than we had budgeted for.

In the meantime it's set up in a puppy/kid bump-free location that also happens to be inconvenient and as far away from daily life (and the router) as physically possible. Using it right now is about as enjoyable as listening to Feinstein speak at an Occupy gathering without the pleasure of decking myself out in all my NRA and gun positive gear.

I was able to find a blogging app for my phone that works but it's not without its own issues. Blogging will continue, and the pace may even pick up, but content will probably be light.

Speaking of blogging, Google is retiring their rss reader. I managed to export my list to the laptop, hopefully I'll be able to get it set up with a different service when I'm more reliably online. In the meantime I miss y'all.

There really hasn't been a whole lot of interest going on lately. We've been working on cleaning up the yard, weeding and pulling out saplings that have sprung up everywhere. Rhye accompanied me to a local botanical park that offers free composted wood chips and didn't get freaked out when they bellied up the front loader and filled the bed. Even at just Four months he's turning into quite the truck dog. Roxy tries but she gets freaked by the way the truck sounds and how it's old suspension jolts around so she curls up tight on the seat next to me and refuses to move. She's just too big to fit there and interferes with the shifter so she'll have to stick to car rides. Rhye lays his head on my purse, puts his back against the seat and lets those big paws dangle.

Rhye is pretty much my constant companion, meaning he is ALL up in my business just like a good doberman thinks they should be. It reminds me of having toddlers again. We planted some trees, a peach and a plum and he thought the digging was so much fun he kept on, even after we filled the hole.

This morning I futzed with a come-along and the miniature compressor to try to convince the bead to seat on the wheelbarrow tire, and he thought that was great fun too until the air shot out the side right into his nose.

With the barrow out of commission I backed the truck right up the the bed and started unloading. He cavorted around scratching, digging his snout in and flinging it everywhere. He didn't even mind when the forks full landed on him, but after a while his attention finally wandered and we were able to unload mostly in peace.

I'm doing the back to Eden deep mulching again this year so this truck load was enough to fill the bed i have earmarked doe peppers/beans to the 8 inches I wanted with just enough left over to mulch around the blueberries. I'll need another two loads to do the rest of the beds and trees that I already have, and I want another two to make a new bed or two. Hopefully they have enough compost and I have enough gas. Either way, There will be lots of busy in the next few weeks!

On the plus side I discovered that a weed I've been battling for years, Florida Betony, aka rattlesnake weed, has edible tubers and its prime harvesting time for them right now. I think I'll be slicing and frying some for lunch today.

We have a new family member

 

He’d look good with his ears cropped, wouldn’t he? Oh well.

His registered name will be Valentino, but we’ve been calling him Rhye. We brought him home on Valentines Day, just in time for the entire family to be laid flat out with the flu. We’re just now getting over it.

Rhye, on the other hand, has had two clean bills of health from our vet clinic. I took him in the day after he arrived because I’m paranoid and then again yesterday for booster shots and he’s gained three whole pounds between visits. He’s also eaten his way through 2/3 of the bag of puppy chow we have, but judging by the thigh friction Roxy Rotunda has recently developed I think we all know where a good portion of that puppy chow has been going.

He’s a good boy. A bit stubborn about some things, he is determined to have his way with any and every tissue he sees, but he learns quickly and willingly. It took him all of one afternoon to learn that if he slapped the floor with his butt good things happened, and he’s proud to show that skill off. Fortunately he enjoys ear rubs and chest scritches and willingly accepts them as his reward a good portion of the time. Before I was stricken with the flu he was getting the concept of down but studiously ignoring No. I was able to do a little work with him tonight and he showed that he’d retained a good amount of what he’d learned before I got ill, and he was even able to learn to focus (make and hold eye contact with me) within ten minutes, and that’s something I hadn’t worked on with him before.

It took Rhye a while to decide that this was home. He is older, a few days shy of 12 weeks when we got him, so he was with his mom for longer than I would have preferred and the whole new people new house thing confused him at first. The breeder is also in the process of moving and was unable to socialize with him as much as he normally does older puppies. He had been handled twice a day at inspection times but other than that he wasn’t really played with or worked with. He quickly discovered the joys of the easy chair and his spiffy new jacket but it took a few days and a couple of dehydrated chicken gizzard noms before he decided people are where it’s at.

And possibly a smidge of whipped cream from the ladies at Starbucks helped too

I was hesitant to get another puppy so soon after Hag passed. I was concerned that he would be compared to Hag and found wanting. Comparisons have been made, it’s inevitable and would have happened regardless of how much time had passed, but they haven’t been unfair or negative. More observations than anything else. He’s more clutzy, he has the same scampery trot, his paws aren’t as big, no, they’re bigger, nah, they’re the same size as Hag’s were at his age. He likes being petted and snuggled more, he chews more, he squeaks when he yawns, he’s learned to drift when he corners at full speed on linoleum. He isn’t sick. That’s the big one. He isn’t sick. Silly E came to me after a day of hurling and headaches and said if I have to choose between the family getting sick and the puppy getting sick, I’d much rather we get sick!

Me too.

*Headdesk*