Telework, and New Director

[ndrosen]

I applied for part-time telework Thursday morning. I’m teleworking now, but I’m an ad-hod teleworker due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and once the Patent Office moves to the next phase of reopening in late May, my authorization to telework expires. I wanted to make sure that the upload and download speeds of my home Internet connection were sufficient, so I called Xfinity. The voicemail system interpreted what I said as indicating that there was a problem requiring my modem to be restarted before I could speak with a human being, and would not accept my explanation to the contrary, nor let me speak with an agent.

I finally managed to obtain the information I needed from the Xfinity website, but dealing with voicemail was frustrating. I understand that businesses want to save money by having automated responses, but I wish Xfinity made it easier to communicate with a human about a non-standard problem. By the way, this month’s bill was forty dollars higher than before.

Also on Thursday, there was an online Town Hall at which the newly sworn in Director, Kathi Vidal, spoke and answered some questions. She was a Navy brat who started college at the age of sixteen, got an engineering degree, worked as an engineer, and later went to law school. She had had an interest in law, and as a child once asked her mother to get some law books from the library, so that she could read the cases, and have a leg up studying law.

She seems to be quite an impressive lady.

Comments

[selenite0]

Good luck on your telework authorization. I'm on permanent work from home and loving it.

Okay, technically my status is ">50% in office" as a political move to let the department hold on to its cubicles. But they're not making me show up.

[thewayne]

There is an FCC WiFi speed test app for smart phones that logs the speed of your connection with the FCC for them to build a more realistic map of the USA for study. It also gives you a good overview of how your connection is performing. I don't know whether you have a smart phone, but you can also find speed test web sites that will perform the same function.

I was very happy a while back. We have fiber to the wall up here, the local ISP installed it all over the town - if you want it, they'll light it up, otherwise it just sits there. We finally dumped our cable internet provider many years ago and got a 25 megabit connection up/down. A couple of years ago my wife was having a problem getting a VPN connection to work, and while trying to troubleshoot it, we learned that they had silently upgraded our connection to 50/50 with no increase in fee!