I’ve been in DC for about 2 weeks now and I’ve been hit a couple times with situations that caused an internal rolling of the eyes at the petty and annoying ways that business is run these days. The first is the draconian attention to one’s age when purchasing alcohol. We’ve got huge problems with alcohol in this country, with 1/3 of our road deaths caused by drunk driving not to mention the domestic abuse, health issues, and lost productivity due to alcohol abuse. But those problems aren’t what we focus on. We are instead extremely concerned that young adults (legally eligible for every right and benefit our states and nation provides as well as full accountability under our laws) might gain access to alcohol in those precious 3 years between legal adulthood and the age of 21. It’s a overcompensation for an embarrassingly paternalistic policy that doesn’t pass the “land of the free” test in my opinion.

The drinking age policy aside, I don’t understand why we legislate punishments for those who sell the alcoholic beverages. Everyone knows the rule, so why not hold those under 21 accountable for it? If you buy beer when you aren’t old enough, you should get punished. Of course sellers should be permitted to request verification of age on patrons they suspect aren’t old enough, but we are now in a state where failure to ask for ID is punishable. Grocery store checkers can’t tender the sale without checking ID. If it takes 10 seconds to check an ID, thats 1 minute of productivity for every 6 people. If a bar sees 360 people, that is an hour of labor spent checking ages. Just seems like a needless waste for a country that prides itself on liberty and personal accountability.

More than this annoyance is the “gotcha” approach to business employed by large corporations who have no need or incentive to build a quality relationship with customers. I stopped by Ruby Tuesday the other day on my way home from work only because it was between the bus stop and the hotel. I initially balked at going to a chain restaurant but since all I wanted was a beer and some chicken wings, I relented. I was there during happy hour and asked to be seated in booth. When I got my bill, I was confused to find that I hadn’t been charged happy hour prices. Turns out you only get happy hour prices if you sit in the bar area, even though all I ordered was wings and beer in the middle of the happy hour time period. Apparently where I sit determines the prices I pay these days.

Finally, I had to spend about 45 with an Avis manager to figure out why I was charged $147.xx for a car that I’d reserved and prepaid $118.xx for. He did a good job dealing with it, so I give them good grades for the point of interaction care. But I learned that my rate went up because I’d used the car for less than the reservation agreement. Yup, I paid more because I used the car less. My flight was delayed arriving so I picked it up about 3 hours later than I reserved and I returned it about 30 minutes earlier. This change in the reservation resulted in my account being charged a different (i.e. higher) rate. We got that mostly sorted out but I was still being charged more than expected. Looking closely at the taxes, the math wasn’t adding up. It looked like I was being overcharged on taxes, $11 for an 11% tax on $80 of services. Turns out that the taxes are calculated according to my “base” rate. This is the rate for the car before I got my USAA discount and then the manually adjusted discount he’d added to make up for the higher rate associated with using the car for an shorter period.

Yup, they charged taxes on a theoretical base rate that had about 20% discounts on it. I don’t know how this is legal, to be honest, as I thought taxes were assessed based in what you paid for goods and services. I paid about $100 for the car and GPS but paid taxes on $125 dollars of “base rated” before the discounts and adjustments that I actually paid for. Disappointing that there are hidden fees and charges in this kind of interaction at all, doubly so that I’m paying taxes on prices I didn’t pay.

Needless to say I no longer intend to have any commercial relationship with these companies.

I bought a 1 terabyte hard disk before I left DC in order to back up my entire desktop system and the most important of my files. I was going to send it to my dad, just to have an distal backup in case the container with all my goods got washed off the ship. In my overloaded and distracted state in my final days before leaving for Nigeria, I accidentally set up my backup program to write everything to my other terabyte drive, the mirrored drive that houses all of my digital photos.

The backup program erases the drive at the first backup and then installs everything on a clean disk. It should have take a minute or two to wipe the disk and when I noticed it had been initializing for a lot longer than that, the bottom of my stomach dropped out. I stopped it before everything was gone, but all of my pictures had been deleted. I thought that I was protected with the mirrored setup because even if one drive failed, the other had an exact copy, but in this case, the mirrored copy mirrored all the deletions as well. About 35,000 pictures, everything I’d shot since before the Eminent Child was born, was gone.

When files are deleted, they usually still exist but are just rendered invisible and the space they inhabit on the disk is opened up for new files to overwrite them. I got a file salvage program that took about 80 hours to scrape the disc and save every file that it could. It did an amazing job and found thousands of Nikon files, .jpeg files, video files, and more. A lot of it was corrupted and garbage, though, and none of it had any identifying data like a file name or anything. I barely had enough time to salvage everything and get it copied to a few different discs before I had to pack everything up. I knew that thousands of files had been salvaged, but I didn’t know how many would prove to be usable.

My stuff arrived in Abuja about 2 months after I did but I wasn’t able to set up my computer for another 6 weeks or so because of problems with the UPS battery backups. Without those, I couldn’t use the computer due to the intermittent power fluctuations that pervade life here. I finally got my UPS, but a friend from Poland was assigned here on temporary duty for a few weeks and then the girls were here. I have been able to finally sit down and see what’s going on.

It looks like about 1/4 of the Nikon files recovered are garbage. I loaded them all up into Aperture and thankfully the thumbnails reveal which files are good and bad. I still have 33,000 that I have to manually go through to mark the bad ones. After I sort them out, I’ll trash the bad ones and then begin actually organizing the good ones. There is about the same number of jpegs which are all the pics I took with my Fuji cameras. I can tell that many of the jpegs are duplicates of the Nikon files, so that’s a doubly daunting task. I doubt I’ll ever sort out the duplicates.

The past week I’ve been spending an hour or two a night just scrolling through the entire archive with my arrow key. It’s slow and progress is hard to measure, but I’m just about halfway through now. It is impossible to know exactly how many I lost, but there is still a lot of good stuff that was saved, thankfully. And one other positive from the ordeal is that going through and looking at each file I still has given me a huge journey down memory lane that has been a lot of fun.