Synchronicity

Today's song is: It's a Man's  .. Christina

and Come on Over  ..

In programming, especially on the web, asynchronous calls vs synchronous calls are preferred as the program will not pause to wait for returned data from some web server or service. It is also true in my mundane world. The telephone call irritates me at most times. It is shouting paying attention, heed my call, answer immediately, no matter what you are doing!

And, invariably, I am sleeping and some sales person in Canada is calling to make sure I am happy with their web offered service, whatever that may be.  Recently I have been exploring buying or leasing a car as well as finding short term apartment rentals in Canada.

In particular I have come across Trovit who seems to data-mine as many apartment rental sites as possible and bring them up in an easy to search by location and options. It is free to signup and I am sure they make money by referrals or clicks as well as some on page ads.  When you sign up you get asked for a telephone number so I put my Canada VoIP number in.

The problem arises when some calls me, usually between 4 and 5 Canada time (to catch supper hour) which translate to 3 am to 4 am Bangkok time and they get a grumpy guy when I am pissed off enough to answer. The VoIP line also takes a message but sales people know no one ever returns a call. Wonder why?

I had a call at 3 am last night and I was grumpy and told the young lady on the phone that she was disturbing my beauty sleep and asked her why she was calling. I politely (sort of) asked her not to call, at that time but I would be happy to talk to her if she called me at 3 am her time. She declined the offer and apologized.

I hung up and then could not go back to sleep and I was surprised that I had spoken to a farang on the other line. Usually it is someone with a distinct accent similar to Russel Peters (very funny guy BTW). I finally figured out the accent and decided she was a Mormon from Utah. Some Utah companies have redefined the call center, allowing people to take the call from their house and lets them work from home. This permits a stay-at -home mom to make some money at the same time.  Nice business model and probably saves the company bricks and mortar space.

https://www.deseretnews.com/article/933138/Utahs-call-center-industry-Alive--ringing.html

Songkran starts today and Jaidan and I will stay inside the next 3 days as Jaidan is recovering form his pneumonia and I don't want to catch a cold like I did last year. I must be getting old but many expat lifers find Songkran more of a nuisance each passing year.  I suppose the novelty wears off.

This article was just posted on the Bangkok post and talks about the downside of Songkran.

Smear 'attacks' banned at Silom https://goo.gl/bYRphK #BangkokPost

Meanwhile, back in my apartment, we have 7 people living in a one room apartment for a week as all Thavorn's children plus a grandmother are here. No big deal for Thais but farangs, myself included find it a bit cramped.

I will post some pics next post.

TTYL