Jay Furr's Dreamwidth Blog

Three and a half weeks ago the screen on my Google Pixel 5a phone conked out — I could call my phone and it would ring and I could even get in my car and make calls using my car’s dash screen and my previously paired phone. After lengthy calls with Google product support, they eventually decided that I should send it in for warranty repair. Google sent me an RMA shipping label and form and I promptly sent it off.

It was received three weeks ago. Google’s tracking page showed it being received, inspected, and returned all on the same day, and I was watching the tracking site — it went from “on the way to Google” to “received, inspected, and shipped back” all in under an hour. It doesn’t take rocket science to realize that there must have been some kind of glitch on their end… first, because there’s no way it could have been received at their loading dock, opened and routed to a technician for an inspection, inspected, and returned in that short an amount of time, and second, if they actually had inspected it, they would have noticed the screen wasn’t working at all.

I never did get a tracking number for the allegedly on-its-way-back-to-me package. I wrote Google and asked “what’s going on” and for three weeks now I’ve been getting one email after another saying “we’re investigating, please be patient, we’re closely monitoring this, we’ve escalated it to a dedicated team, we’re closely monitoring this, we understand that this is frustrating, please give us 2-3 more days, please give us 2-3 more days, please give us 2-3 more days” ad nauseam.

If Google product support had determined that my phone was hopelessly bricked they’d have had me send it in and they’d just have sent me a replacement phone. But because the phone is lost in their system and from all evidence they’re never going to find it, I am out one phone and am continuing to pay Verizon for service I can’t use. One would think they’d just close out the case and send me a replacement phone, but apparently they’re happier endlessly stalling me and making excuses and doing absolutely nothing at all.

I had been dutifully buying a new Google Pixel phone every two or three years and had been generally happy… but now I’m seeing the legendary “other side of Google” — the part that ignores the old “don’t be evil” mandate Google used to follow. There’s no way in hell that I’m ever buying another Google product.

Does anyone reading this have any advice about how to light a fire under them? I could try taking them to small claims court but that would drag on for quite a while. Are there websites or publications that investigate stuff like this for hapless consumers like me — the kind that the manufacturer knuckles under to in order to avoid bad publicity?

Back in the day, Carole and I loved the Discovery channel show Mythbusters, the show dedicated to testing the veracity and/or plausibility of various urban myths. We found that the show got old as the years went by and the producers spent more and more time milking the humor value and trying to fit as many explosions into the show as possible (to say nothing of the way that they spent the first few minutes after each commercial break recapping what they’d shown immediately prior to the commercial break, which got truly old), but along the way there really were some absolute gems.

My favorite, for what it’s worth, was the time they demonstrated that tightly sealing the pressure release valve on an ordinary hot water heater would eventually result in an explosion that basically put said water heater into orbit:

But that’s not something I care to test or attempt to replicate. Not anytime soon, anyway.

On the other hand, there’s episode 173: “Walk A Straight Line“. The guys tested the idea that a person who couldn’t see or hear (wearing blackout goggles and noise-blocking headphones or earplugs) would be unable to walk a straight line across an open field. I wish video from that episode was available on Youtube or elsewhere, but alas, it doesn’t seem to be.

Long story short: myth confirmed. Neither Adam Savage nor Jamie Hyneman were able to walk a straight line and in fact did really, really badly — looping around and crossing their own paths but thinking they were walking straight.

And that’s something easily tested — or would be, if you had a large enough, level enough field with no barriers, cars, other humans, trees, or anything else in the way. I finally stumbled across the perfect field while on a evening walk through Burlington, Vermont’s “Intervale” the other evening: a very large open area labeled “McKenzie Park” on Google Maps.

Wide open, with eight-inch-tall grass as far as the eye could see:

I said to myself, “This would be an excellent place to walk around blindfolded.”

I am probably the first person in Burlington history to make that assertion.

But anyway.

Today was cool and overcast, but not too cool: a nice day for a walk. We’re working on getting in shape for the Twin Cities Susan G. Komen 3-Day in August and since we’ve both been in major couch potato mode for the last few months, any exercise we can get is none too much. So we made a hike out of the project, starting at the CSWD transfer station on Patchen Road in South Burlington and winding up at the Miller Community Center on Gosse Court in the New North End of Burlington.

Our route took us down Intervale Road and on to McKenzie Park, where we took time out from our exercise for my little blindfolded-walking experiment.

I put in earplugs, put on a set of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, put an airplane sleep mask on and pulled an orange Buff headwrap down over that, and found that despite all this I could still hear ambient sounds well enough that it wouldn’t have been a fair test. So I had Carole pull up “Sounds of the Ocean” on my phone and blasted that while I walked. Problem solved. I couldn’t see a damn thing and all I could hear was the surf.

And so I started walking, trusting Carole to keep an eye on where I was going and to warn me if an unanticipated hole or other obstacle lay in my path. I carried my phone in front of me as I walked, the better to record my track on a GPS app.

I walked slowly and methodically and deliberately, my feet swishing through the tall grass and finding the footing secure, confident that I was tracing a true, straight course and that in due time Carole would stop me and say “Wow!” or “You did it!” or “Amazing!”

Um.

As it turned out, I’d started off well enough — well enough that Carole had irritably said to herself “Oh, jeez, another area in which he’s superhuman” (her words, not mine), but sure enough, I’d promptly doubled back on my path without realizing it, headed back the way I’d come, then traced a large loop. What caused Carole to stop me in the end was not that I was literally crossing my path, but that I was heading straight for a good-sized puddle that I’d somehow avoided the first time around.

And yet, if you watch the short video clip Carole took, I look so purposeful, don’t I?

Hmph.

I guess the Mythbusters were right. It is pretty much impossible to walk a straight line when you can’t see or hear where you’re going. Even when you’re more or less certain that you’re doing exactly that.

If you came across a door in your house that you’d never seen before, a door that opened onto an absurdly large space that couldn’t possibly exist in your house or apartment as it currently exists — a space that resembled a very large empty warehouse with three or four locked doors (doors to which you have no key) but no windows — would you use the space beyond, since it’d amount to basically virtually unlimited free storage, or would you leave it alone and never go in there for fear that one day the force that joined the door to your dwelling would …unjoin it and take anything inside away to parts mysterious and unknown, or would you seal it shut for fear of what might come through from the other side?