On my way into work today I saw a car that had broken down on the shoulder of the road, and behind it, stopped to help was a full tractor trailer. It reminded me of my issues I had a few weeks ago, and that I hadn’t taken the time to post about it.

It was the week that I started my new hire training with Sprint and was commuting into the twin cities, which is between an hour to an hour and a half commute. I had known that my tires were in need replacements because one just kept losing air. 

I had given myself an hour and 45 minutes to get there that morning, just to make sure I could find the place and get myself settled in for the week. I was driving along, like normal, going 5 to 8 miles per hour over the speed limit, which would make my speed 75 to 78, and I felt a vibration in the steering wheel. My initial reaction was to take my foot off the gas and slow down. A second later I felt the tire blow, and the car started to shake really bad. I hit the brakes hard, looked over my shoulded and made an instant lane change from the center lane to the shoulder.

So there I sit, on the shoulder, with no idea of what happened.  I peeked out and saw that it was the tire that was giving me issues before. The front drivers tire had blown out.  In order to change it I was going to have to get further off the road, so I inched over so that I was way off the road, then proceeded to change the tire.

As I was fighting with getting the lug nuts I glanced up and saw that an SUV had stopped in front of me.  Between the 2 of us we got the lug nuts loosened and started jacking.  We soon realized that the jack was too short.  The guy who had stopped went and got his jack and we got the spare tire on. I couldn’t thank him enough.  He said that he thought that 2 cars were safer by the side of the road than 1, especially in  rush hour traffic. I don’t remember his name (Brandon?) but I remember that he was the General Manager of Papa John’s Pizza in Maple Grove.  Without him stopping I wouldn’t have been able to get back on the road.

So I started off again.  I called my manager to update him that I was back on the road and the GPS said I still may make it in time.  I fought through the traffic and arrived at the office with a few minutes to spare.  Made it up to the classroom 4 minutes before class started.  It all worked out in the end, aside from the $500 price tag on the new set of tires, but the car drives great now…

I recently discovered that I still owned OpenSourcePalm.com because I received an email to renew it.

I went to their login page and couldn’t log in.  I ended up putting in a trouble ticket to get it resolved, so hopefully I will be up and running by this weekend.

As far as I know the regular view is working, but the mobile site isn’t working. Probably my fault. I might switch addons to another one or double check my settings. 

The moral of the post is that if you are reading this you should go check out opensourcepalm.com and let me know what you think!

Back in the day when I had a handful of websites that I was running I always used ipower.com to purchase the .com domain name.  Any time I have had a question I have had amazing luck with their service. If I submit a ticket I get a quick
response, or if I do the live chat they take care of it on the spot.

For example: I had forgotten that I owned the domain name opensourcepalm.com up until I received the alert that it was going to expire. The only issue was that I didn’t know my username or password. Within 5 minutes of going to ipower.com my password was reset and the rep was checking everything out to make sure their were no issues.

I am just impressed that the rep would go above and beyond to make sure everything was right. That’s what is missing in most companies customer service model. it’s making sure the customer doesn’t have to come back again and again when it could have been fixed on the first visit.

In short, if you are looking for a domain name check out ipower.com.

Training went well for day one, now onto day 2. Just a bunch of independent work and a 60 minute check in. On a side note: It looks like today is going to be a nice day out. Maybe it’s good I’ll be in a windowless room…

I begin an exciting 3rd week of training this week, but it is different from a conventional training in the fact that it is taken virtually with people across the country.  There is a virtual classroom application and I have a VOIP headset so I can hear and interact.

It will be an interesting week.