Studio711.com – Ben Martens

We’ve had our Escape for over a year now and we have just over 11,000 miles on it. I thought it was time for an update on our experiences.

The more I drive the car, the more I like it. Maybe it’s because I drive an economy car but I’m regularly impressed by the smooth and quiet ride of the Escape. The car had a bunch of features on it that I never would have thought I’d really want but some of them have grown on me. The biggest one is probably the memory seats and mirrors. I’m so much taller than Tyla that switching drivers takes quite a while. For a family vehicle that we both drive regularly, this feature is awesome. The power lift gate has been very handy too. With one arm full of baby and the other carrying bags, we just swipe our foot under the back bumper and the rear hatch opens automatically. That hands free goodness also lets us unlock the doors and start the car, all without digging out a key.

I put our Ford My Touch/Sync/Navigation in the “meh” category. It’s nice to have it all integrated and the big touch screen is good for displaying lots of info. The audio system has a bunch of inputs (radio, Sirius, USB, SD, etc) which is nice, but the actual user interface of the whole thing feels sluggish. Why can’t we just have a head unit that is basically an Android/Apple/Windows tablet? This interface already feels a big sluggish and out-of-date. What’s it going to feel like in 10 years? While I love having a nav system built-in to the car, I don’t know if I’d shell out the extra wad of cash to get this whole system again, especially when I think how it could be done better with a tablet at a fraction of the cost.

It has been in the shop for one issue which was covered under warranty. The coolant bypass valve failed which made the check engine light come on. They diagnosed that quickly and while it was in the shop, the parts came in for a recall. We had them keep the car and do it all at once. Our car was the first time they had run through the fairly involved recall repair and they ended up a part short which added more time. Once it was all done, they had kept our car for a week but they gave us a loaner so it wasn’t a huge issue.

I’m biased because my uncle works for Ford and pretty much everyone in my family drives a Ford. I was one of the oddballs who stepped out of the Ford family and went for a Subaru. But after driving this car, and after reading about what Alan Mulally has done at Ford in the past years, I’m pretty confident that our next purchase will be a Ford. The Subaru has just over 100K on it and is still going strong so if all goes well it will be a few years before we have to buy something new. But if I was buying a new car today, I’d probably go for a Focus as my commuter car for work. I’d love to get a big F150 but it’s hard to justify the cost at this point.

Last September, I didn’t step foot in the office. I was on paternity leave the whole month. It was a wonderful time to spend at home with my family and connect with Tyla and Elijah. When I got back to work, I took stock of the changes. There was a long list of work that I had been doing on a regular basis that hadn’t happened for a month… and for many of those things, nobody cared! It was a big revelation for me. As I spend time in the same job, my list of tasks is always finding new additions. I rarely cull the list so it just grows. But does it all really need to be done? Obviously not if nobody cared that it hadn’t happened in a long tie. Some things, of course, need to happen whether people care or not but that’s an exception to the rule.

As my free time at home gets squeezed more and more (parenting takes a lot of time!), I’ve been trying hard to apply this at home too. I regularly ask myself “What if I don’t do X?” What if I don’t mow the lawn or clean the furnace filter? Well that’s clearly not good. But what if I don’t watch that television series or watch that movie or spend a day doing a hobby? It takes some practice to answer that question honestly because there are many activities that I think make me who I am. But once I forced myself to find a good answer, I’ve been able to remove a ton of old habits from my life. And you know what? I don’t miss them! In fact, it feels liberating to have all this time handed back to me.

Having a child was a forcing function to make this happen since it put such a huge constraint on my available free time, but it feels like a very healthy experience. Instead of trying to schedule in a bunch of habits, I now schedule in time to just “veg” and do some random activity that used to be a time-sucking habit. It’s a good balance for me right now and lets me focus on things that I really do consider important and high priority.

It seems like a short chunk of time
Since I married my partner in crime
But now there’s a son
Who can nearly run
And my thoughts are all metered and rhymed

I can’t end a line with your name
No rhyme exists I claim
Four years ago
You married your beau
And my heart is still aflame

Did you know that you can download a report of your Amazon orders? I pulled all that data into Excel and started playing with our Power BI toolset even though it was a pretty simple scenario. Here are some of the facts I discovered:

• First order: Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, January 11, 2001. This would have been my Junior year at Purdue. I discovered that some books were cheaper on Amazon than our bookstore. Strangely they didn’t have many of my textbooks and even then, they weren’t always cheaper. Times have changed!
• Most popular item category: Health & Beauty
• In our current home, we order 3.3 times more items per year than we did in our last home.
• There is an average of 1.7 days between ordering and shipping. The median is 1. There are some outliers when I made orders that weren’t fulfilled by Amazon and they can take forever to ship.
• Item purchased most often: Purina Pro Plan Dry Adult Dog Food, Large Breed Formula, 34-Pound Bag
• 804 total items ordered

Here are some graphs over the data. It will be pretty obvious that I signed up for Amazon Prime in June of 2008. On a side note, the recent Amazon Prime price increase doesn’t bother me at all. It’s still one of the best deals in online shopping, not to mention that I also get some free Kindle books, and a pretty good collection of streaming video for free. They could charge a lot more and I’d still pay for it.

I’ve written many times about how I believe it’s a lot more useful to be involved in local politics than national politics. Here’s a good example about how much more responsive your local government can be.

Safeway is a little less than a mile down the road from our house so we frequently take walks down there. Tyla also runs along that sidewalk sometimes. There was one stretch that was getting destroyed by tree roots. It was so bad you almost couldn’t push a stroller over it anymore. It’s right on the boundary between cities so it took a while to figure out who owned the sidewalk, but after I found the right government, it was fixed in less than a month!

The end result looks a lot nicer and is much safer! You can see the before and after photos below. Thanks to the Woodinville maintenance crew for such a prompt response! I’ve had a similarly positive response with them for some traffic light maintenance. In that case they were out the SAME DAY to fix it.

Tyla has a Christmas village from the Thomas Kinkade collection. She feels like she has enough big pieces but was interested in a couple accessories so back I decided to order her something for the Christmas of 2012. There’s only one website where you can get this stuff (other than used on eBay.) I placed my order and was told it would be 6-8 weeks. Oops. Well that’s ok, I’ll wait. After 3-4 months and a couple postcards with status updates, I was told that they would never ship my order. Ugh. For the Christmas of 2013, my mom decided to order Tyla some little accessories. The exact same thing happened to her!

I was really frustrated at this point so I emailed customer service. I tried to be very nice in explaining my situation and asking what we’re doing wrong. Is there a better time of year to order? The reply was “We regret to inform you that the item has been retired.” Huh? I didn’t mention any item in my email. It was a general question. I replied “Did you even read my email?” The second email was a bit longer but it was still a canned response that didn’t answer my email. In the vain hope that a human who cared was actually reading, I replied once more and ended it with “You don’t need to reply to this. You’ve lost me as a customer.”

I’ve been reading the Ford book about Alan Mulally so I guess I have CEO on the brain. I believed that there must be somebody in the company who cared about treating customers properly and would want to know about an experience like mine so it could be corrected. A little searching revealed the CEO’s name. I guessed what his email address probably was and forwarded my customer service chat to him along with a note. I said that if I was in his shoes, I’d want to know about something like this. I wasn’t looking for any retribution. It was simply for his information. I figured that would be the end of it (whether he actually received the email or not.)

The next morning, my phone rang and it was someone from the company! I guess they looked up my number from my previous order. She said the CEO had forwarded my note on to her and she apologized for my situation. She then stated a couple things she had done to get some fixes started (removing retired items from the website, scheduling a meeting with the manager of the email customer service group, etc.) She thanked me multiple times for emailing and I apologized for ruining her day by getting the CEO involved. She insisted on giving us something for our trouble so if it all works out, Tyla should have a small gift arriving in the mail.

It was a wild story but I’m happy to know that the senior management does seem to care. This isn’t how I normally recommend lodging complaints against a company, but in this modern world, there are some extremely affective tools available if you choose to use them. They did regain my business and I’ll give them another shot.

A couple years ago, TimS and AndyD convinced me that I need to try wool socks. It sounds silly, but it was a life-changing discussion. Since that first purchase, I have worn wool socks almost exclusively. In the winter they keep my feet warm and in the summer they keep my feet from getting sweaty and wet. They’re brilliant! You can get them fairly cheaply in big bundles at Costco. Unfortunately they only sell them during the winter so I like to stock up and have a few bundles in the closet in case I wear some out.

I love that everything around us is becoming a gadget. The buzzword/phrase is the “internet of things.” Add our printer at work to the list. It has always had capabilities like scanning and emailing documents, but it was also a huge paper waster and logging in for advanced features was a pain. People would print stuff and then forget to pick it up. The default setting is that when you print something, it sits in the printer’s queue but doesn’t actually print until you walk up to it. At that point you swipe your badge over the card reader, it brings up all your jobs and ask which ones you want to print. At this point you’re also logged in so scanning and emailing is very simple too. It’s one of those seemingly obvious “why didn’t we do this before” inventions.

Microsoft has a new CEO! I’m sure it’s a bit intimidating to be on a list of three CEOs with the other two being Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, but I’m really happy with the choice of Satya. He’s probably not a household name (yet) outside of the company, but internally he has been doing a fantastic job.

I’ve been in his org for quite a while, and I’m particularly happy that they picked someone who is so familiar with our cloud and enterprise offerings. When you hear analysts talking about Microsoft and they only mention Xbox, Windows Phone, Bing, etc, you can mostly dismiss them because they’re missing the biggest moneymakers for the company. Satya’s org was one of the three main pillars of Microsoft’s revenue (Windows, Office and he ran cloud/enterprise offerings.) It might not be a flashy org, but we crank out around $20 BILLION a year. That’s about 25% of the entire company’s revenue and this org has seen double digit year over year growth for more quarters than I can count.

So while it would be fun to have a flashy, public figure as CEO, I’m happy that we have Satya who intimately understands the core businesses of our company. (And it doesn’t hurt that he loves the product I’m working on too!)

I’m no psychologist, but I’ve found that if I really want to change something in my life, writing it down is a big motivator. I’ve been eating pretty poorly for the past couple months, so I decided to write down everything that I eat for one week.

Wow. It worked even better than I thought. Even though I’m not planning to show the list to anyone else, it’s embarrassing to write down a handful of chips, a candybar or two, or a morning piece of pie.

Writing it down on a piece of paper would probably have been good enough, but I took it one step further and tracked it in the Fitbit website. They have a huge food database so I just enter in what I ate and it adds up the carbs, etc.

I probably won’t keep this up for a long time, but it has been a good exercise and it’s one that I’ll revisit if I find myself snacking a lot again. Let me know how it works for you if you try it too!