mcinerney

You place a call and the person you are calling does not answer. You know what you need to do, which is leave a message. However, before you can do that you hear, “To page this person, press 5 now. At the tone, please record your message. When you are finished recording you may hang up or press 1 for more options.” [12 seconds]

I don’t know about you, but I have a better way to spend 12 seconds of my life. Cell phones have been around for a long time and voicemail systems and answering machines have been around for close to 30 years. We know how these things work. Have you ever used the “more options” feature? And more strange than the more options feature is the “paging” option. When is the last time you paged someone? I’d guess the last time I paged someone was 1997. We are passed this. Let me just hear the recipient’s voice and then hear the beep. I can take it from there.

I have an iPhone and played around with it to see if I could remove the AT&T voice after my greeting, but did not have any luck. I called AT&T to see if they could simply disable this for me. It took a few phone calls and I received a few different answers. Answers ranged from “We have no way to turn it off.” to “The AT&T voice prompt is different based on the voicemail system you are using.” Hmm. Ages ago I was involved in implementing a new phone system for my employer. I remember there being a simple check box to ENABLE the automated attendant or DISABLE automated attendant. That was about eight years ago. There is no way this is not an option on current voicemail systems (wireless or corporate systems).

After three or four phone calls (and a small threat to “look for another carrier for all of our corporate accounts”) you will no longer need to listen to the 12 seconds of Miss AT&T after my voice to leave me a message. Rather, you can just start recording after my last words and the immediate beep. It is worth mentioning, in my current role I have no authority over which cell phone carrier we use, but after getting nowhere on an issue that I knew could be solved, I decided the exaggeration was necessary.

How much time is wasted? It depends on your carrier and apparently the voicemail server you are utilizing. Depending on the source you use, there are about 270 million cell phone subscribers in the United States (Verizon has more than 80 million subscribers, AT&T is just short of 80 million subscribers, Sprint has roughly 50 million subscribers and T-Mobile 30+ million subscribers). If one phone call was made to every cell phone in the U.S., and that call is not answered, a total of 37,500 days / 900,000 hours / 54,000,000 minutes / 3,240,000,000 seconds are wasted every day on these “auto attendants.”
Do everyone a favor and call your cell phone company and demand they remove their auto attendant message so we can all add time back to our lives. Threaten the fact that you will move your entire corporation, consisting of 4,000 – 5,000 users to a new carrier if you must, to get them to make the change. You don’t even have to say where you work.

For AT&T call: 1-800-331-0500

I was absolutely shocked that the Wolves did not move up in the NBA lottery. Just shocked. The Wolves have been around since 1989. They have never moved UP in the draft. They have always drafted where their record dictates they should draft or lower. That is hard to do. Good things simply don’t happen to the Wolves. I mentioned something similar two years ago.

Even as an unbiased fan I think the lottery system is broken. The NBA has changed the rules of the lottery multiple times, can’t they do it again? What if they had four pools of teams? Right now 14 teams are in the lottery. Here is my suggestion.
• Teams 13 and 14 simply draft in those positions. This year, that would be Indiana who finished 36-46 (missed the playoffs by three games) and Phoenix, who finished 46-36 (winning record, would have been the 5th seed in the East, missed the playoffs by two games in the West).
• Teams 9, 10, 11 and 12 pull names out of a hat to draft in those positions
• Teams 5, 6, 7 and 8 pull names out of a hat to draft in those positions
• Teams 1, 2, 3 and 4 pull names out of a hat to draft in those positions
Why doesn’t that work? Teams sandbag at the end of the year now hoping for one more ping pong ball. You could still technically have a weighted lottery in each group. Or just give each team an equal chance within that group. That would give a 25% chance for each team in each group to get the highest pick in that group. That has to be better than the current system.

The lottery clearly isn’t the only reason the Wolves are terrible, but a little luck can’t hurt.

Let’s recap the past few years.

2005: Minnesota drafts Rashad McCants (Danny Granger was selected three picks later)
2006: Minnesota drafts Brandon Roy (3rd team All-NBA this year) with the 6th overall pick and traded him for Randy Foye, the 7th overall pick.
2007: Portland and Minnesota tie for the sixth worse record in the league. There is a coin flip, which Minnesota wins so they have a slightly better chance in the lottery. BUT, Portland moves up from the 7th pick to the 1st pick and takes Greg Oden (could have had Kevin Durant). Minnesota ends up with Corey Brewer. Not a great draft overall.
2008: Minnesota gets the highest draft pick in their history (#3 – last time they had the #3 pick they took Christian Laettner after Shaq and Alonzo Mourning). They draft OJ Mayo and trade him for Kevin Love. –> I’m still holding out hope that this works out. They could have drafted Russell Westbrook or Eric Gordon….hmmm.
2009: Minnesota and Memphis tie for the fifth worse record in the league. Minnesota wins the coin flip, giving them a slightly better chance at moving up in the lottery. BUT, Memphis moves up to the #2 spot and Minnesota moves down to the 6th pick.

I want to be excited for basketball in Minnesota again. I want to root for the Wolves. It’s been tough since KG left and tougher given the decisions the front office has made and the terrible luck the franchise has had in the lottery.

For some strange reason I like the game LeBron James and Shaquille O’Neal have going with their pregame introductions.
Watch LeBron’s here:

And here is Shaq’s, which I think is hilarious. Mostly because you know these guys don’t dare say “no” to Shaq:

I love that guys like Shaq, who is 37 years old, can still laugh and have fun getting paid to play a game.

I have written about this before (The New J-Term), but let it be heard again….March is the best month of the year. I am not one to wish my life away, but I look forward to March like no other month in a calendar year. March is the pinnacle of the college basketball season. I have been watching great conference tournaments, including the six overtime game between Syracuse and UConn, over the past couple weeks. The NCAA Tournament field was selected this past Sunday and I watched it with one of my best friends Mark Gerber. We analyzed the matchups and picked our favorites as they were announced. The first round games start Thursday morning. This Thursday and Friday should be national holidays, in my opinion.

As I look at the bracket and the matchups, there are things to remember. No 16 seed has ever won a game. Only a couple 15 seeds have won. Every year at least one 12 seed beats a 5 seed and the 7 seed vs. 10 seed game is a 50/50. Last year was the first year all four #1 seeds have made it to the Final Four. How long will Ty Lawson be out for UNC? Can Marquette and UConn contend with the injuries to their key players? Who will be this year’s Stephen Curry? I get excited just thinking about all of the great basketball that will be on in the next few weeks.

You can view my bracket here.

On top of all of this, softball starts in April. March is most definitely the best month of the year.

I have needed glasses since I was about two years old. I always hated them. In the 1970’s there was only one style of glasses for kids and I had them. To be honest, I do not think “the look” is what made me hate wearing glasses though. I truly am not sure what my hang up was. I just knew I didn’t want to wear them. Every year the first day of school my parents would tell my teacher that I own glasses, but not to worry if I didn’t wear them. I guess that was my parents way of explaining that they were not neglecting their child and also making sure the teacher knew it was not his or her job to make me wear my glasses.

By the time I got in high school I was ready to try contacts. I was thinking my eyes were the reason I couldn’t shoot very well (basketball). I tried contacts for a couple of months and hated every day. I must blink slow because the sweat would burn the bejesus out of my eyes when I was wearing the contacts. That was the end of that experiment and the last effort I made to be able to see.

It was the last effort until after I graduated college. I went to the eye doctor and asked about glasses / surgery. He asked the standard “can you read the letters on the second line down?” With my left eye, I was okay. With my right eye I had no idea of there were four letters or eight letters. At the end of the appointment, he said I was fine and didn’t need glasses at all. Right or wrong, I liked the answer and left the office.

A few weeks ago I gave the eye doctor another try, and had a similar conversation (“Better #1 / #2?), and again the result was “no glasses.” Nice! I did ask for an explanation as to why I needed glasses my whole life until now. The answer was that maybe growing up my eyes were really slow to focus and as I aged and began to read more, my eyes learned how to focus quicker. – Whatever. I liked the answer.

Most surprising about the appointment was that the technology for testing a person’s eyes has not changed in seeminly 50 years. “Better #1 / Better #2?….Better #1 / Better #2?” If I heard it once, I heard it 50 times. I feel like the technology with this should have advanced by 2008. A $50 digital camera can focus in less than a second. Isn’t there something that could automate the process of bringing letters into focus for an individual at an eye exam?