Another trip to SoCal

October 16, 2019, 6:27 PM PDT by Parkzer • 2018 GMC Canyon, Tempo, Travel

This post is over 6 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.

As the hunt for another property continues, I made my way back to SoCal—this time by driving—and met up with reynad to do some more property tours. Last month, I hit 8888 miles on my odometer, and on my way from Las Vegas to SoCal for this travel session, I dinged 10,000:

I bought my truck new on July 30, 2018, so it took right around 14 and a half months to hit 10,000 miles. Most people hit 10,000 right around the one-year mark because they commute back and forth from work. I have the luxury of working remote and not needing to commute daily, but I also do quite a bit of road travel with my truck for business purposes going back and forth between Las Vegas and SoCal and driving all over SoCal, so I guess that’s comparable to most people’s daily commute.

We’ve more-or-less secured the new property in the Hills for Tempo Storm, so I don’t want to give too many additional details in order to maintain confidentiality, but I do have a few photos that I took from the Hills when we were on the way back down to Beach Cities after our tours:

I’m pretty excited for this new property (to be clear, it’s not the white house pictured above), as I feel like the one we picked is a unicorn house, in that it’s particularly stellar for its price point. It has a huge “wow” factor, the architecture is amazing, and it has a lot of innate features that make it extremely convenient for our purposes.

After wrapping everything up, I headed back east and visited my aunt and uncle’s home up in the Santa Ana Mountains on my way back to Las Vegas. Of course, a visit to the mountains wouldn’t be complete without yet again another small photo shoot with my truck.

I have family visiting this coming weekend, then I’ll have about a week and a half of time to myself before even more travel—I’ll be headed to the Anaheim Convention Center for BlizzCon 2019 as my next trip.

Introduction to private blog posts

October 10, 2019, 5:31 PM PDT by Parkzer • Private

About a decade ago, I followed an RSS feed (yes, remember those?) called “The customer is not always right.” It was about the stupid situations and stupid people that customer service representatives would encounter on a daily basis. People who work in an industry that has a lot of human-to-human interaction are always bound to have some good stories of interactions gone terribly wrong.

I personally am terrible with human interaction. I intentionally go out of my way to do my own thing without having to deal with others. When I worked at the police department when I was younger, I was not a sworn peace officer so I had no obligation to interface directly with the public—a majority of my work involved staying in the office, then going to the dollar store with my sergeant to get candy and snacks. Even with my job now at Tempo Storm, I stay almost exclusively behind-the-scenes, and when someone needs something from me, I reroute them to someone who is better with human interaction. In fact, I am so well-hidden that most people don’t even actually know how to effectively reach out to me, so they don’t even have an opportunity to directly interact with me in the first place.

However, there is one particular situation where I do need to get involved in some direct human-to-human contact. Seeing as I’ve been with Tempo Storm since 2015 and I’m the longest-standing full-time employee, I tend to have some of the soundest judgment when it comes to company-related matters. I also oversee a lot of departments in a managerial sense, so the most extreme of situations generally tend to get escalated to me, no matter how hard I try to dodge them.

This means that, even though I don’t have a lot of “the customer (or employee) is not always right” kind of stories, the ones that I do have are on the utter extreme end. The stories that I do have are so far-fetched and so unbelievable that I feel like I’m doing the world a disservice by not telling them and sharing the absurdity and humor. Unfortunately, I obviously can’t publicly share these stories to the public because almost all of them involve confidential personnel matters, but I still feel like I’m committing a disservice by just keeping them to myself.

Because of this, I spent some time looking into WordPress’ private post feature and realized that it would be a good outlet for me to document these stories—not only so I can look back several years from now on the “good times” I’ve had, but also because a lot of them actually teach good lessons that future employees with appropriate security clearance can read and learn from.

And thus, the “Private” category was born. Blog posts classified under this category will all be password-protected with a unique, randomized string of letters, numbers, and special characters. All the passwords will be different, so I’ll be able to grant access to particular blog posts on an individual, case-by-case basis as appropriate.

I’m excited.

My one-day trip to Beverly Hills

October 2, 2019, 6:53 PM PDT by Parkzer • Tempo, Travel

The photograph above is a picture of the sunrise at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), taken from the Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse. This is the last photo I took during my one-day trip, but I decided to lead with it because it’s the one and only photo I took on my real camera. Unfortunately, everything else I have is of potato quality from my ~6-year-old phone.

I feel like I should just go and get a real estate license at this point, because Tempo Storm is in the process of exploring other real estate options… which I am coordinating, of course. Back in November 2016, one of the first team houses that Tempo Storm set up was a group effort between me and the administrative assistant at the time. Since then, I’ve set up three more team houses, and this new property we’re looking at now will end up being the fourth that I lead myself (sixth total for the company). Each team house we’ve gotten has been an upgrade from the previous, and that trend isn’t ending anytime soon.

For this trip, I wasn’t able to spend 10 hours on the road round-trip because I was a bit too busy with other work, so I decided to fly this time. I flew out yesterday morning, making it into the airport by 5 AM, grabbing some free breakfast at the airport lounge, boarding the plane shortly after 6, and making it to Los Angeles before 8.

After arriving at Los Angeles International Airport, I realized that all the car rental companies were off-site, so I had to stand at a curb waiting for a shuttle to stop by and bring me just under three miles to Enterprise Rent-a-Car, which was where my car rental reservation was. After entering the lobby of the Exotic Car Collection by Enterprise to pick up an SUV, they queued me up to receive one of their Cadillac Escalade ESVs… except they couldn’t find the keys to any of them.

The first one that was most easily accessible in their garage was locked and just had the keys missing entirely. The second one that was behind another vehicle was unlocked and started up with its push-button start, except they couldn’t actually find the keys to this vehicle. Seeing as it started up, the key fob was definitely inside… they just couldn’t figure out where. Here is a photo of two customer service representatives flipping the interior upside-down trying to find out where the key fob was.

Eventually, they gave up and found a third Cadillac Escalade ESV that had its keys conveniently in the cup holder, and they gave me that one. It was a 2020 model, but I was able to see first-hand why Cadillac Escalades are often rated as one of the worst luxury full-size SUVs on the market today—they feel a bit dated compared to competitors. Enterprise comped me a half tank of fuel for the wait, which was nice, but I was only in town for a day and there was no way I would use 13 gallons of free fuel.

After I actually got on the road, picked up our CEO, and started going on tours, I forgot to take as many photos as I would’ve hoped, but I did take two from the Hills overlooking Los Angeles.

After wrapping up the day, I spent the night at my cousin’s house, and the following morning, I was up by 4 AM, out the door by 5, and at the airport lounge having breakfast by 6—which is where we can loop back to the first photo above. I was on my plane by 7 and back home in Las Vegas before 9, thus concluding a hectic one-day trip to Beverly Hills.

My first flat tire

September 15, 2019, 6:00 PM PDT by Parkzer • 2018 GMC Canyon

Remember how literally LESS THAN ONE WEEK AGO, I wrote a blog post about the clown fiesta that ensued when I tried to replace my broken passenger-side headlight? Where I tried a series of different configurations with two old bulbs and two new bulbs, and basically every possible configuration wasn’t working, until suddenly something randomly worked out of nowhere?

During that blog post, I pointed out how, every time I drive to California, something goes wrong and my vehicle gets damaged in one way or another. The most recent instances were how my driver-side headlight went out, and after I replaced it, my passenger-side headlight went out during my following California trip. I concluded the blog post by saying, “hopefully the California gods don’t smite one of my headlights this time around so I won’t have to go through all this all over again.”

Well, my wish came true.

My headlights are fine.

Instead, I got a nail in my tire.