The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

0111 1101 1110

Welcome to your new year.

Last year I totted up a bunch of numbers from 2012; here's the update. In 2013:

  • I took only 9 trips, visiting 4½ countries (Canada, England, Scotland, South Korea, and North Korea—the last one for only 4 minutes) and 4 states (New York, California, Washington, and Texas). I probably visited Indiana and Wisconsin in there too, but only incidentally.
  • I flew 77,610 km and drove only about 3,000 km. This is why I love living in a city.
  • As I mentioned yesterday, I wrote 537 Daily Parker posts, only 2 more than in 2012, keeping up the average of 1.48 per day for the second straight year.
  • I changed timekeeping systems in August, moving from Fogbugz to JIRA, so it's too much of a bother to calculate how much time I spent doing what. I can say, however, that I had 2,197 chargeable* hours at work, but I can't say (in public) how many were billable.
  • I took more photos than last year: 4,197. This was still fewer than 2011, 2010, or 2009.
  • For some reason, I only started 28 books in 2013, but I finished 30.
  • The really sad number, though, is that I only went to movie theaters 3 times, once to see a TV show (Doctor Who's 50th anniversary special) and once to see a movie I'd already seen (High Fidelity). So, really, I only saw one movie in a theater. On the other hand, I went to 13 baseball games and 5 concerts, and I did manage to watch 50 movies at home. Still, I need to go to more theater, clearly.

A mixed review, then. In 2014, travel will probably go up; so will seeing movies in theaters; so will reading books and taking photos. I'm looking forward to finding out.

* All time doing anything for my employer, not including vacation, PTO, or holidays.

Let me end the year here

My evening is kicking off soon. It will be relatively low-key: GMT New Year at O'Shaughnessey's (mostly because I'm curious about the neighborhood), back home for a quick bite, thence my remote office where all us regulars will talk quietly until about 12:30 when Eddie calls last orders. We might even notice when it's midnight. (We missed it in 2011 and 2013, and awkwardly made festive noises when someone called out, "Hey, it's 12:05 already!")

This is the 537th Daily Parker post of 2013, the 3,907th since its launch in November 2005, and the 4,104th since the proto-www.thedailyparker.com kicked off in May 1998. Sometime in 2014 I'll post for the 4,000th time in this iteration; move to a different part of Chicago; watch my nephews turn 2 and my dad turn redacted; visit five or six states and three or four countries (including Canada); and maybe rewrite the UI for Weather Now and finish the 30-Park Geas.

For the next 16 hours, though, I'll be offline.

Happy new year, З Новим Роком, bonne année, cheers, 謹賀新年, and नया साल मुबारक हो, y'all.

Whole Foods responds

WFM Lincoln Park Store Team Leader Rich Howley responded to my complaint right away:

We are really sorry for the inconvenience in our garage this afternoon, we realized immediately that we were over-whelmed and brought in additional security, they unfortunately had not yet arrived.

They are doing exactly what you had suggested.

I walked the entire area around the store, and what exacerbated the situation was traffic on North Ave was bumper to bumper in both directions, and this gridlocked traffic trying to get from Kingsbury/Sheffield Sts onto North, which in turn backed up the traffic directly in front of the store, in clogged up people trying to get out of the lot.

We are terribly sorry that you got hung up in our garage.

My response:

Thank you for your prompt reply. I have to disagree with you about the timing, however. There was a traffic jam on North Avenue around 12:30, true; but I didn't leave the store until almost 1:15. By that time the traffic on Sheffield going north and Kingsbury south of the store had thinned out to a still-heavy but more-common level for holidays.

However, by 1:30, when I finally got out of the parking structure, there was no traffic on Kingsbury south of Blackhawk. Had your team directed third-floor exiting traffic out the southeast exit and then south on Kingsbury, cars would have fanned out along Blackhawk, Fremont, and Eastman, reducing pressure on the Sheffield/Weed/Kingsbury intersection. Anyone observing the situation at the southeast exit would have seen this; but your security team didn't have anyone standing there, didn't have anyone on the third floor, and didn't appear to have radios.

People might have been annoyed had they wanted to go north on Sheffield, but at least they'd be moving. And--more to the point--people would have *seen your guys keeping traffic moving*. Instead of 30-40 seconds per car getting onto Kingsbury, you could have gotten maybe 3-4 seconds per car, and cleared the upper deck within five minutes.

Ask any airline: keeping customers informed, and keeping up the appearance of trying to solve the problem (even if it's truly insoluble), makes people less likely to fire off notes to Customer Service--or worse.

Sorry if this seems like a rant; I'm trying to help. I've seen the store handle huge surges of traffic before, so today's failure was really surprising. I think you need to have a serious talk with your security team about it.

Kudos to Howley for responding so quickly. And he's mostly right. But someone on his security team screwed the pooch on this one, whether by not thinking or by not acting, and a lot of people were inconvenienced.

How I lost an hour of my life because of incompetence

I go to Whole Foods Market twice a week or more, almost always the Lincoln Park, Chicago store. Even when they have lots of customers, they have plenty of space and plenty of parking, so I didn't worry about ducking out of my house this afternoon to pick up lunch and dog food.

Here's the result. Don't let the international units confuse you; that's an hour and 13 minutes to go about 4 miles:

Here's the situation when I arrived, which looked remarkably like the situation when I left:

Here's the store layout from Google Earth; the red arrow points to the south exit ramp (click for full size):

Now that you have the visuals, here's the note I just dashed off to Whole Foods Customer Service:

Your response to a traffic surge this afternoon made a bad situation worse, and created a safety hazard even as it inconvenienced dozens of customers.

In short, dozens of cars were trapped on the third floor of your parking structure for more than an hour because your security team were unable or unwilling to take the simple, necessary actions to alleviate the problem.

I arrived at the store around 12:40 this afternoon. Because it appeared busy on the second floor parking area, I headed straight up to the third. Even before going up the ramp, however, I noticed cars having difficulty coming down the ramp because of snow. It was difficult for cars coming down the ramp to negotiate the tight turn, and they were slipping into the other lane. That, while dangerous and creating unknown liability for the store, wasn't the worst part, as I discovered when I finally got to the third floor and got stuck in a total gridlock.

No one could leave the third floor parking area. It took me twenty minutes to get into a parking space because of this. But that's still not the worst part. No, twenty minutes later, when I tried to leave, cars were still unable to leave the third floor, even though the parking area was nearly empty, and even though a CSR had told me that you had actually stopped people coming up the ramp.

When I finally got onto the ramp and arrived at the second floor, I discovered three security guards directing one car at a time up, down, or across. This was actually no help as drivers are perfectly capable of zippering together as long as the cars are moving. No, it wasn't until I got to the Kingsbury exit that it became obvious how the situation had become so grim. With no one directing traffic out of the parking structure at Kingsbury, cars could only exit singly and about every 30-40 seconds.

It's irrelevant that you may have needed Chicago Police permission to direct traffic onto Kingsbury. Given the traffic load and safety hazard it posed, you would have had no trouble getting permission--if it were even required. Regardless, anyone who observed and thought about the traffic situation would have seen this obvious bottleneck.

Here are a number of concrete suggestions to prevent this kind of unsafe and inconvenient situation from recurring in times of high traffic load:

  1. Station a security guard at the south exit onto Kingsbury to halt southbound traffic on Kingsbury while directing exiting traffic south on the same street. This will avoid the bottlenecks at Weed and North, alleviate pressure on the exit ramp, and give the security team better visibility of the entire traffic situation.
  2. Station a security guard at the top of the third floor ramp to keep all traffic on the third floor moving only clockwise. Cars should move only along the outside (south and east) walls before splitting into two streams by the third-floor main entrance near the air conditioning units. Cars that can't find parking moving south in the second and third rows can go around the outside again. But the security guard will have visibility into the parking situation and can let others know when the third floor is full.
  3. Station a security guard at the second-floor junction of the third-floor ramp to keep cars moving clockwise on that level, too. When the Kingsbury guard allows a stream of traffic to leave, the second-floor guard should halt all traffic except those cars spiraling down to Kingsbury from the third floor.

This is not rocket science. It just requires that someone observe, coordinate, and above all _think_ about the problem. The security team today completely failed, costing me and dozens of other customers more than an hour of time.

I will post any response they send.

Evanston restaurants destroyed in morning fire

Two popular Evanston restaurants, Pine Yard and Taco Diablo, burned to the ground this morning:

Fire crews from several neighboring communities -- including Morton Grove, Wilmette and Skokie -- were called to the scene to assist Evanston firefighters in battling the blaze.

The fire apparently broke out sometime before 3 a.m. and fire crews were still fully engaged in battling the blaze nearly three hours later.

The bike shop next door suffered water and smoke damage. Twelve pets at the Bramer Animal Hospital (where Parker went to the vet for his first year and a half) got evacuated.

Pine Yard was Evanston's go-to Chinese restaurant. Taco Diablo also had a large following.

While my nephew gently sleeps

Nephew #1 arrived yesterday evening while I sat a mile away talking with the manager of San Benito House and, apparently, challenging people to a Scrabble game later today. Nephew #1 is a much lighter sleeper than the rest of us, which causes him frustration, and when he gets frustrated he sets out to determine how much noise is required to make everyone exactly as light a sleeper as he.

Fortunately, I'm on Chicago time, so getting up at 5am PST (7am CST) does not bother me. And it gives me some time to read the articles that crossed my inbox overnight:

It's still an hour before dawn here, so I'm rocking out the nearly-empty Peet's, about to resume some client work. I promise another photo of the ocean before I return home tomorrow.

Boxing day links for you

Check these out:

More later, including, I expect, more photos of the ocean. Why? Because ocean.

Update: Speaking of the ocean, via George Takei's Facebook feed comes this gem. Just read the product reviews.

Don't they know it's Christmas?

Not when they're 13 months old. And not when the weather looks like this.

And not when someone needs a nap:

Yes, these are the privations and suffering that my 13-month-old nephew must endure:

A little earlier, he was chasing what my sister calls "California snow:"

For those who care, it's a very un-Christmaslike 21°C here. I can see the appeal.

Eddie from Ohio

One of my favorite groups played at Evanston SPACE last night. They don't tour very often anymore, so I was glad to catch them live.

From left to right, Robbie Schaefer, Julie Murphy-Wells, and Michael Clem:

(Drummer Eddie Hartness—he's not really from Ohio—was hard to photograph from where I was sitting.)

Another shot of Murphy-Wells and Clem:

It was a fun concert. Their opener, Jake Armerding, played with the group during their entire set, and added something to what was already a pretty tight quartet. It's unusual that adding someone to a band after 22 years makes things better, but in this case, he really works.

The band had CDs of the evening's performance ready for sale 15 minutes after they finished.

The Weird Economics Behind London's Disappearing Pubs

From The Atlantic Cities blog:

Over the past decade, 1,300 London pubs have emptied their cellars and wiped down their tables for the last time. It's not just obscure, unloved bars that are dying. This winter, two well-known historic pubs, both open for over a century apiece, will likely be turned into private housing. One is the Old White Bear, a red-brick building hidden away in village-like Hampstead, a former spa town swallowed up by Victorian London. The other, just down the hill, is The Star, an inn dating back to the 1820s with a wood-lined interior (featured in this 1980s pop video) that makes drinking there feel rather like sitting inside a whiskey-soaked violin.

Under the British system, the pub "landlord" (in British pub terminology, this actually means a manager that rents a premises, rather than an owner) must buy their booze from the company they rent the pub from. With no competition, the prices they pay are generally inflated, meaning that even if landlords trim their profit margins, beer still comes out pricier than it otherwise needs to be. While pub companies turn a profit, individual landlords are pushed to the wall. The pub companies then sell off under-performing premises, even though pubs wouldn't actually be unsustainable if landlords got a better deal.

There's a silver lining, and not just from pubs like Southampton Arms: The City of London has taken steps to preserve some landmark pubs.