After resigning myself to the chaos of daily existence, an interesting turn of events played out this morning, including thinking I had failed to connect the car or start the changing properly. I drove the BMW down to address the issue. The first thing I did was remove, reseat and restart the changing. Then I set about ensuring I might have an edge on resolving any future scenario wherein the connection was proper so starting the charging could be handled remotely. It was how I had managed it previously. You can enter the 8--digit QR code number from anywhere. But you need to know if for each unit, it's not a data point stored in the applications charge history. The solution was simple. Map each changer's position to their respective QR code. I methodically took photos of each in a pattern that made it reasonably straightforward to organize them as rows, poles, and relative positions on a clock, with the school being 12 and Leigh Ave being 6. After taking dozens of photos and preparing to head home, I sanity-cheeked and found that my car was STILL not charging. I suddenly realized none of the charges were working. At that exact moment, I heard the echo of the barista at Starbucks as I was leaving with a refill of coffee some 20 minutes prior in response to my comment about how suddenly packed the place had become. "The power is out for a lot of people, so they're all coming here," she had replied. Although my power was on at my home, I saw the dots were connecting, Leigh's was out. At about that exact moment, I noticed another driver in their car nearby. He pointed towards the nearby corner interestion where a power pole was leading over the crushed frontportion of a car that had run into it earlier that morning. Mark and Wendy coincidently arrived a moment later as I was taking the car to charge elsewhere. I conveyed the power outage situation. Apparently, they, too, were out of power, and the accident had occurred before I'd picked up Tommy's car earlier that morning; I didn't notice it at all! This is the sound of assumptions shattering. It proved to be a good test of and reminder that if and when I do pay for charging, the nearby fast changers run at 8 times the speed and cost consistently less than my home rates. I addressed "refilling" in 20 minutes while knocking some shopping tasks off my list. We ended the day with a trip to Santa Cruz to attend "An Evening with John Cleese" with Matt B. He (Cleese) was engaging, funny, and impressively sharp and articulate. (As was Matt too of course). The seats were uncomfortable, though, and for me, the interviewer and the questions posed by attendees were mostly inane, trite, and wasted opportunities to get more substantive insight and relative wisdom for someone of notoriety. Instead, it was lost to inane inquiries about silly walks and the fish-slapping dance. Sigh.
