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long line to Moonburger
Wednesday, October 27 2021
As you may recall, some months ago I was forced by circumstances to replace the motherboard (and thus also the CPU, boot drive, and operating system) of my main computer with all new things that inclued an AMD Ryzen 1700 CPU and Windows 10. It's been a relatively painless transition, with nearly all the things I do on a daily basis working perfectly in the new environment. But there has been an irritating problem with this new setup that I have not been able to fix. If I leave the computer on for some amount of time (at least five hours, though I'm not entirely sure), it acts like it goes to sleep. This happens whether or not I have enabled going to sleep after a period of time. After that, it locks up, and the only way to get it working again is hit the power button to turn it off (all I have to do is tap it) and then power it up again. When it comes up, oddly, it doesn't act as though it was shut down unexpectedly. But looking in the system logs, there's no evidence of an orderly shutdown. I've tried various things to make this problem go away, and none of them have worked. The problem was aggravating, but I could still use the computer mostly as I had before, so I waited months before doing what it seemed I needed to do: replace the motherboard. A week or so ago I took delivery of a replacement (a B450 Aorus M), but I'd kept procrastinating the chore of replacing it. But this morning when I awoke to find Woodchuck in its stupid semi-shutdown state, I'd had enough. It took me about 45 minutes to swap in the new motherboard, which went off almost without a hitch. I say "almost," because I did have a little trouble figuring out how to reattach the cables for all five monitors so that they give me the screen arrangement I like, which looks like:
That was actually my second trouble-free tech procedure in about fifteen hours; yesterday I'd finally managed to upgrade the RAM on my work issued laptop from eight to twelve gigabytes. I'd tried several times before with RAM that proved incompatible (it had too many gigabytes) but now I know what sticks of DDR4 to buy for it. If it strikes you as odd that I pay for expansions to a computer I don't own, I should explain that this is part of my low-visibilty workplace strategy. I don't want to draw attention to myself with annoying demands. And should the time come when I have to surrender my laptop (which, at three years of age, is deeply depreciated), I'll be sure to remove the parts of it I paid for first.
This evening when Gretchen got home from her bookstore shift, she and I (and the dogs) drove into Uptown Kingston with the goal of switching her phone (as well as Powerful's, since he is on the same plan) from Spectrum (which uses Verizon towers) to Cricket (which uses AT&T towers). The main reason for this is that my Cricket phone works at our Adirondack cabin and Gretchen's Spectrum phone does not. There would also be some savings from combining all these phones onto my Cricket plan (which already includes my brother Don's flip phone).
Before doing this, though, we thought we'd try out a brand new vegetarian burger "restaurant" called Moonburger on Washington Avenue in the site of an old ice cream vendor between the two QuickCheks. I put "restaurant" in quotes, since it doesn't have a dining room and provides only drive-through service. Moonburger has achieved a fair amount of buzz (according to Gretchen) because of the long lines of cars that form at its drive-through when it is open, something Gretchen attributes to poor logistics. (Burger King has no such problem.) We got there well before 6:00pm and thought maybe the early-bird line would be a bit shorter. But it extended nearly the whole length of Powells Lane, so we immediately gave up and drove to the Cricket store (which is next to Catskill Art & Office in the Kingston Plaza, not far from the Ghettoford Hannaford).
In the Cricket store was a single employee and a person who might've been a customer who soon left, leaving us to transact our business mostly without distraction. The employee was Brandyn, the assistant manager, and he had a good, slightly-exasperated energy about him. I quickly explained our situation, mentioning also that we needed some sort of always-on internet connection for a cabin in the Adirondacks. At first I thought that this might be handled by another phone, but Brandyn convinced us we should get a mobile hotspot instead, which I thought would be more likely to work correctly when powered up via a timer (one of many possible scenarios).
We wanted to attempt to transfer service to Gretchen's existing phone (a Samsung Galaxy a10e) right there in the store, though there was some question whether it would even work on the AT&T network. To test this, Brandyn tried putting a Cricket SIM in Gretchen's phone but was greeted with a message saying that the phone would need some sort of unlocking in order to accept other SIM carts. This forced Brandyn to do some research to find out what Spectum's support phone number was (to do this, he had to use his personal phone, as the computer on his cashiering desk had a firewall preventing access to nearly all websites except Cricket's and (perhaps) Google. He eventually got a surly woman from Spectrum on the line who told us that unlocking Gretchen's phone enough to install a different SIM card required filling out a form that would have to be mailed (that is, with the postal service) and, even after that, it would take 24-48 hours for the change to kick in. Brandyn had done a lot of SIM tests and he'd never encountered such a policy in his life. There was nothing about the law or the technology that required any delay at all, but apparently Spectrum had decided to make switching out carriers on their phones such a big headache that an appreciable number of customers will grumble about it and then take no action, remaining Spectrum customers, if unhappy ones. It's of a piece with the steady crapification of all services, which is apparently perfectly legal in the American regulatory environment. But in this case, hurdles placed by Spectrum weren't going to stop them from losing a customer. Their service doesn't work on Gretchen's phone in the Adirondacks, and she needed a phone that did. What followed next was Gretchen inquiring about possible Cricket phones she could buy. Here Brandyn wasn't as helpful as he'd been for other stages of our retail adventure. I kept catching him quoting specs with confidence that later turned out not to be true. He was particularly given to misrepresenting the specs on Gretchen's existing eighteen-month-old Galaxy a10e, saying that they were lower than they actually were and then presenting phones with identical (or worse) specs as "upgrades." At first Gretchen was interested in a phone with her old phone's relatively small dimensions. But then when she learned about the bigger battery in bigger phones, she decided she might be able to adjust to having one. I told her that I myself had been initially resistant to getting a large smartphone but then, once I had one, quickly adapting. By the end there, Gretchen had picked out replacement phones for both herself and Powerful (I think they were both made by Motorola), though she didn't want to pull the trigger yet because doing so might cancel Powerful's phone service days before she could bring him a replacement. And he definitely needs to have a working phone as he continues to recover from his heart transplant, which happened only five days ago. All we ended up taking home today was a cellular-connected WiFi hotspot for the cabin.
[REDACTED]
After leaving the Cricket store, we decided to drive back to Moonburger and see what the line was like. It was about the same as it had been, but this time we decided to get to the end of it and ride the Moonburer train wherever it led. The line advanced slowly, us moving ahead by a car length maybe once every two minutes. And there were maybe fifteen cars ahead of us when we started. Eventually I had to urinate (I'd been drinking a lot of kratom tea), so I just walked to the end of Powells Lane and tried to piss discreetly, though of course a car made a U-turn near me and briefly illuminated my urine stream as if it were a fibre optic cable. Later Gretchen took the dogs for a walk along Powells Lane and Ramona managed to leave a little something brown and mushy for someone to step in. Since Moonburger doesn't have a dining room or public restrooms, I wondered where all these other people waiting a half hour for their burgers were pissing. Gretchen said that they're not like us; we're unusual in that when we have to piss, we don't mind doing it in semi-public. Nearly everyone else, she explained will hold it despite the discomfort.
We did have to wonder who all these other people were in line willing to patiently wait so long for a plant-based burger. Part of the reason was the price; a Moonburger is significantly cheaper than a Burger King Impossible Whopper. But maybe something else was afoot as well. Whatever it was, it was attracting people in all sorts of vehicles, from Jeeps to SUVs to large vans. It wasn't all just hippies in Priuses.
When we finally got to the point where we could order, Gretchen asked why the vegan version of the hamburger was a dollar more than the non-vegan version. She hates it when there's a "vegan tax," particularly at food venues that seem to get it about the value of a plant-based diet. The guy taking our order seemed a little annoyed as he explained that the non-dairy burger rolls cost more. But, as Gretchen pointed out later, it was unlikely they cost a whole $1 more each. (I was a little concerned that, after that interaction, our burgers might also contain human-based adulterants, but Gretchen was sure that the guy taking our order was not the one preparing it.)
When we finally got to the window to pick up our two burgers, two orders of fries, and a vegan milkshake for Gretchen, we could see a good half-dozen employees (all of them young white women) working away assembling burgers. The guy Gretchen had talked to looked to be some sort of manager, and he was walking around with a headset featuring a bright glowing point of blue light. For all the activity, you'd think the burgers could be assembled more quickly, but evidently it takes time to craft a Moonburger.
I drove us over to the edge of the smaller QuickChek parking lot, the one adjacent to the Olympic Diner. There we scarfed down our burgers. I'd gotten the spicy fries, which had a kind of cajun-by-way-of-old-bay seasoning, which was a bit excessive. But otherwise the fries were great. And the burgers were amazing, what with their creamy special sauce and pickle. The only real disappointment was Gretchen's milkshake, which she will not be getting again. She said it had that weird aftertaste that some vegan icecream has. But it was worth waiting in line. As Gretchen pointed out, waiting for food in the comfort of a car really isn't that unpleasant. You can pick the temperature you want and what to play on the radio. And in an electrical car, you're not wasting all that much fuel with an idling engine.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?211027 feedback
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