The IT Nerd

The reason why my updates have been all over the place this week was because I was doing jury duty. Now I get that this is your civic duty to do jury duty as everyone has a right to be judged by their peers, and they need people to allow that to happen. But for someone like me, it’s a pain as it takes me away from work and away from an income. Yes, I could argue that this is a hardship, but why bother. So I reported for jury duty at instructed by my summons on Monday morning at the courthouse at 361 University Avenue in downtown Toronto.

Now this is the third time I’ve had to do jury duty, and I haven’t been picked for a jury. Ever. So, given that there were maybe 200 people in the pool that I was in, I figured that my odds were good that I wouldn’t be picked this time. At least I was hoping that I wouldn’t. Now the last time that I did this, it was 2004 and I spent the week that I was there browsing the Internet on a flip phone. In other words, I was bored. This time I arrived on Monday to discover that the waiting area for the jury pool had WiFi. I thought that was great as that should have saved me from having to use the personal hotspot feature to get Internet access from my iPhone 6 to my MacBook Pro. But when everyone put their phones, tablets, and laptops on WiFi, the speed dropped to below dial up speeds. When everyone went to lunch and nobody was on WiFi, it was really fast. This was a classic case of underprovisioning. In other words, they didn’t allocate enough bandwidth for the maximum number of people that could possibly use it, plus a margin of 10% for extra people. In the end, I ended up using Rogers LTE to get Internet access for the three days of five that I was there to avoid being bored. I am sure Rogers will thank me for that.

Speaking of Rogers, the only thing that I accomplished besides answering e-mails from clients and trying to do blog posts was lowering my Rogers bill. Now one thing that anyone who has telco services in Canada should do is dial up their telco to see if they they have any deals that can save you money seeing as telco services (and by telco service, I mean home phone, cell phone, Internet, and cable TV) cost way more than they should here in Canada because of the lack of competition. So, my wife and I dialed up Rogers, and after waiting for 25 minutes (which is about 24 minutes way too long for the record) and we ended up speaking to a woman who was able to do the following:

• She dropped our home phone from North American wide calling, which we never use, to Canada wide calling. That dropped our home phone bill to $25 a month.
• My wife has an iPhione 6 on a plan with 1GB of data for $85 a month. The rep managed to find a “loyalty credit” that saved her $5 a month. This is just my opinion, but $5 a month does not sound like Rogers appreciates our business.
• The rep upgraded us to Rogers Ignite Gigabit Internet as it would save us about $17 a month over the next year. All we have to do is swap out the modem which we will do tonight. I’ll post a review of Rogers Ignite Gigabit Internet when I have things set up and I can do some speed tests.

Now, I’ll get the final numbers when the first bill arrives that details these changes as Rogers has a history of screwing account changes up, but any savings that my wife and I can get are welcome. The only catch is that we have to put an appointment in our calendars to remind us to do this again at this time next year.

By the time we got to Wednesday, the Court Services Officer told us that our services were no longer required as they didn’t have any cases that would need jurors this week.

Lovely.

So I’ve done my civic duty, didn’t get picked for a jury, and I am exempt from having to do this again for three years. And I helped my wife lower our Rogers bill which is a good thing. All things considered, I guess it could have been worse.