Loathing Houston

My Home internet access is being updated today and tomorrow I will be updating Wordpress, so we will be without updates for 2 days. I am sorry for the delays but they will be over soon.

For some unknown reason the city of Houston seems fascinated by bulldozing things and replacing them with newer things. It seems that very little of this town is over ten years old. This is because this city suffers from a major case of multiple personality disorder. We are called the “Space city” and the “Energy capital of the world”. The truth is we are the “Whatever name sounds catchy and will trick people into thinking we matter” capital of the world. Houston will jump on any bandwagon it can just to get a little press in the real world. This place will never give up it’s wildcatting ways, thus insuring nobody will ever take anything from Houston seriously.

I am taking leave of Loathing Houston for a week to pursue a new opportunity that has presented itself. I will be back shortly.

What’s that you say? You drive a WHAT!?! A CAR!! Well then you are not a Houstonian. After all, to be a Houstonian you need to drive BIG trucks and litter the streets with your fumes, broken beer bottles and crushed cans. Your wife has to drive a MASSIVE gas-chugging SUV packed with kids that throw their garbage out the window rather than in the trash. All other Houstonians must throw their empty Starbucks cups out the window of their Mercedes-Benz SUV’s as they nearly run you over in a race to get to a sale at Neiman Marcus. What’s that? What about the price of gas? That’s what Visa and Master Card are for!! HAHAHA!

-If you are remotely concerned with the environment this is not the town for you. If you love the planet we call earth and recycle, you may be seen as a domestic terrorist. If you have an I.Q. over 15…..Well you get the idea.

I am a geek. A computer/science/technology enthusiast. As such, living in Houston Texas, I constantly fell like nobody understands me or what I do. Allow me to explain. Recently I discovered that one of our neighbors two doors down from us had access to AT&T’s new “UVERSE” service. This would mean faster fiber optic to the node internet access, cable TV and a Tivo like DVR. After comparing the price of that service to what we already pay for DSL and cable we decided to jump on it. We were then informed we were not in the coverage area. My first thought was that perhaps our neighbors house was the last one in the coverage area, but I could not let it go to idle speculation. Nobody stands between a geek and fiber optics. I decided to conduct my own tests.

I located the local VRAD/DSLAM (the big telephone box at the end of the street.) and measured the distance to our house. I found that we were well inside the coverage area. We then called AT&T who repeated “You are outside the coverage area”. Someone I know who thinks she is a computer genius (I have to clean out the spyware on her hard drive monthly and she only left AOL a year ago.) tells me that I obviously don’t know what I am talking about. She was neither the first nor last to say that. This is the kind of thing I get told almost daily. People in this place cannot admit that they do not know the answer to everything. I took the proverbial “red pill” years ago, in the pre-internet era. (Remember BBS?) Computers are my realm and technology is my world. If I did not know what I was talking about, I would have not said anything. I now knew what I had to do, for every geek stuck in Houston. I must prove both AT&T and all the stupid Houstonians wrong.

I proceeded to create a massive map, canvassing an area of over a quarter mile in every direction. I manually plugged in every address within this area into AT&T’s site to check “UVERSE” availability. We were the only house not showing it available. The homes in front, to the sides and in rear of us were all in the coverage area. So either we are in a Bermuda triangle-esque anomaly, or AT&T is wrong. I presented my evidence to AT&T over the phone. After over two months of arguing with them and their “engineers”, technicians will be out on the ninth of next month to give us access. As I was telling this to a few friends they found it impressive. However when I told them how they would probably install UVERSE in the house they told me I did not know what I was talking about. The people in this town never change. Now, if I was a real jerk I would set out on a quest to prove them wrong again. Instead I will leave you with this:

If you want to read how they install UVERSE in a home, you can do so here.

Frequently when I call or visit outside the state I am treated like an imbecile. Once someone discovers you are from Houston they immediately start dumbing everything they tell you down to an insulting level. The assumption is that nobody born and raised in Houston could have the mental capacity to understand anything remotely complicated. While this is true in some (Ok, who am I kidding, Most) cases it is not law. Most times when talking to people I say that I am from Austin, and they speak to me as if I were more than a half-witted orangutan. They speak to me as if I were normal. Thank you Houston, I have to lie about where I am from to be taken seriously. Bravo.

Pop Quiz: You live in Houston and need to get from one side of town to the other. You don’t have a car because you can’t afford the gas. What do you do? Answer: Nothing. The public transit system in Houston is an elaborate joke. Busses are few, METRO Rail (a.k.a. the Wham-bam-tram) is useless and taxi cabs are hard to find and outrageously priced. Until I took a trip to Seattle a few years ago I had not seen cabs driving the streets, I did not even know you could hail one. That is right, you can’t hail a cab in Houston, you must phone it in. I was also shocked when I could travel a short distance in a cab and not be charged over $40. However this is Houston, thinking you can make sense of anything here is like living in a delusion.