Markus’ Blog

Today’s commute to work was pretty much an exact repeat of yesterday’s. A few things were different:

• At 7am, a radio announcement was made on 95 Crave that Translink had kept four trolley buses running overnight to keep the wires clear and that that had worked.
• The bus was just beeping, it didn’t turn into the continous alarm heard yesterday.
• We were going faster (maybe 25 km/h as opposed to 10 km/h yesterday).
• We made it till 29^th Avenue till we were told to get off the bus (yesterday the journey was over for me as 31^st Avenue).

Without the radio announcement I probably would have checked Translink’s web-site for up-to-date information or I would have walked over to Knight street right away. With the announcement, however, I decided it would be “save” to just give it another shot. — It was not.

This is what Translink has to say this time around:

17 trolleys were kept running through the city overnight to keep the trolley wires warm, and that’s helped get our morning rush-hour service on the roads. Still some isolated instances of delays due to ice on overhead, predominantly in shaded areas.

So, yes, while it may be true that running 17 buses over night (not 4 like they said on the radio) helped, it did not make much of a difference for me. Still ended up taking #25 and #22 instead.

And the main question remains:

Why did nobody clue into this ahead of time?!

Something else is not going to change, either:

I hate incompetency, of which this is a prime example.

This is the story of my commute to work this morning. When I left the building, I could see a new trolley bus approaching my stop. Excellent! I wasn’t going to have to wait in the (below freezing) cold at all! But then I realized that the bus wasn’t moving. It was stopped and its hazard flashers were on. And I am thinking to myself: “Oh, oh. That’s not good. Doesn’t bode well.”

To my surprise, the bus started moving again only a few seconds later, and I was relieved. Way too early, as it would soon turn out. Leaving our stop, we started down Fraser Street slowly, to the noisy beeping of the bus, complaining that it couldn’t get power from the power lines. The beeping soon turned into an angry, continuous alarm. When that happened, the bus driver would go to “work the poles”: park the bus, get off, knock the ice of the poles and/or power lines and start going again. Within the next two blocks, the bus driver had to stop three times to to this. And every time, the bus would complain again pretty much immediately. So, it took about 3-4 minutes to travel a distance that normally takes 10-15 seconds.

When I saw two more buses having the exact same problems going the other way, I knew it was time for me to get off the trolley and use bus lines I know are serviced by diesel buses. All the while, I kept wondering why the old trolley buses never seemed to have this issue, but I was not going to go through any more slowly creeping down Fraser street on the #8 and follow that up by slowly creeping down Broadway on the #9. I took the #25 over to Knight, instead, and the #22 to Clark and 6^th Avenue, which is about a block from VCC-Clark Skytrain station.

That didn’t work out too badly. It took me about 50 minutes to get to work that way. It should have been more like 35 minutes going the regular way, but oh well. Could have been much worse. I am pretty sure staying on the #8 would have been.

The only thing that sucks is that I was leaving home early to make some phone calls to Austria before starting work (on my cell, not using the work line for that), but by the time I got into the office, it was past 5:00pm over there already and everybody had already gone home. Without this issue, I would have made it on time.

And this is what almighty Translink has to say about the frost disaster:

Coast Mountain Bus Co.

Trolley bus service is slowly being restored, but there are still major delays.

Diesel buses are being used on some trolley routes, and this may cause slight delays on routes normally served by diesels.

Suburban routes coming into Vancouver are picking up local customers, as well. B-Line buses are picking up at all stops for the time-being, as well.

Old trolley buses with ice cutters are being used to clear the overhead lines, thereby setting free more and more of the new trolleys.

We remind customers to please dress warmly and exercise patience on this commute.

The City of Vancouver has closed Yukon Street at West 7th Avenue, therefore 50 service will re-route via West 5th Avenue, Columbia Street, Broadway to regular route.

I “like” the “dress warmly” part the best. Fun stuff — not.

And how come the old trolleys have ice cutters and the new ones don’t? How come nobody clued into this before trolley bus service broke down this morning? Is it going to be like this for the rest of the cold season or are they going to wake up and do something to prevent this in the future?

We didn’t have any major plans for this long weekend, certainly no travel plans of any kind. And I have to say it turned out really well.

Saturday

We went grocery shopping to Granville Island Market. While the number of cars trying to get on the island was stunning (well, just regular Saturday traffic, really), it turned out to be a nice experience. After buying our food, we moved the car from the one hour spot we had been able to secure to a three hour spot and wandered around a bit. We looked at artsy and crafty stuff — and I got lucky at Granville Island Brewing. They still had their Oktoberfest special beer, and I immediately bought three bottles. lol

Sunday

We went downtown to the Circle Craft Fair, one of the biggest if not the biggest pre-Christmas craft fair in the Vancouver area. It was busy, but we saw lots of nice stuff. After we’ve had enough, we went for coffee and hot chocolate to rest our tired feet, before heading for the bus stop.

As we were standing there, waiting for the bus, directly across from Steamworks, I said: “Mmmm. Burger and beer. I’d so like to go there for dinner.” It took about 10 seconds from that moment for us to decide to do just that: go there and have dinner.

Since we couldn’t order steak till 5pm, we ordered some yummy appies (tandoori chicken skewers and edamame) to tide us over the 30 minutes till Brigette’s steak would arrive. I decided to have one of their pizzas instead of a burger.

Needless to say food and beer were yummy and we went home satisfied and happy — and just over an hour later than we would have otherwise.

Monday

Not too much happened on Monday. Some cleaning, some studying (for Brigette), taking a little walk in the afternoon (for me). It was still a good end to a good long weekend.

Real fun stuff, I have to say. — I guess it could be so much worse (as in apartment trashed and tenants becoming violent), but it’s still annoying as hell.

My condo in Austria has been rented out since February 2006. The first year, during which it was rented to a middle-aged married couple, things went pretty well. The tenant tended to pay rent approximately a week late every month. Due to long weekends and holidays this sometimes lead to me not getting the rent till the 11^th or 12^th of the month. Getting it around the 6^th was “normal”. Not something you could get away with for very long in Canada, but laws are different in Austria. They are much more protective of the tenant, not the landlord, since the former is considered the “poorer” of the two while the latter is the “richer”. It’s stressing the social aspect of society. — Makes sense, I guess, in some ways, since people are not renting out the basements of their homes there to recover part of the mortgage cost, like they do here. So, somebody renting out is usually someone who can afford to own two places (one to live in, one to rent out) or is a commercial landlord. Plus it’s all about consumer protection and the tenant is, in this case, the “consumer equivalent” while the landlord is the “business owner”.

I was a little annoyed by his always paying late, but given the law and the fact that I am almost 9,000 km away, I just sucked it up.

Then that couple got divorced, in May 2007 or so. And the husband couldn’t afford the rent anymore on his own. Of course, he didn’t contact my mom ahead of time, letting her know what was going on. In June, he just stopped paying rent altogether without saying anything. Not good. My mom had to phone him up and find to what the hell was going on.

In the end, with the help of the realtor lady who had helped us find the renter, it was agreed that he would be moving out after two months and that the rent for these two months would come from his security deposit. The law requires three months of security deposit (not half a month as it is here). So, we kept two months of the deposit (as rent for June and July) and returned the third month to the tenant when he moved out.

The good parts about this story: the condo was in very good condition, not trashed in the least (it’s fully furnished), the guy was nice and understanding and didn’t try to put up a stink — which I am sure he could have to some extent, had he tried.

He was out by July 31, 2007, and our trusty realtor lady had already found a new tenant by that point. A young German business man who travels lots and was sick of staying in hotels. The furnished apartment was perfect for him.

He moved in the middle of August. So far, so good. There were a few hiccups getting the three months worth of security deposit from him (he obviously hadn’t done his research and didn’t know he’d need that much money up front), but in the end it worked out. It delayed his move into the condo by about two weeks, though.

However, it now looks like the fun hadn’t even started till that point yet. As unbelievable as it may sound, he has never paid his rent on time since moving in. Yes, NEVER. Not only did he not pay on time, it took several phone calls from my mom and meeting him in person each time to receive the rent — in cash. Afterwards, my mom had to go to the bank herself to deposit it.

He keeps promising that he’ll set up an Austrian bank account and create an automatic monthly transfer to take care of the rent, but this has not happened to date. How hard is it again to open a bank account? Not very. It took me about three weeks (if that) after coming to Canada to open a chequings and a savings account. Besides, the European Monetary Union ensures that it is possible to transfer funds within the EU free of charge, meaning he could even pay the rent from his German account just fine.

He seems to be a nice, friendly, reliable guy, and he has always been very respectful and forthcoming when my mom phoned him (and met him in person), which I appreciate — but come on. I know you are lying to her, dude. If you really wanted to set up an automatic bank transfer, like you claim, you had plenty of time to do so by now. Since the middle of August, to be precise. It’s not that hard. Yes, you are traveling lots, but still. And there’s always web-banking.

I have now invoked the help of our trusty realtor lady. She seems pretty confident that she can talk some sense into him. I hope she’s right, but she has never let us down. If she can’t do it, then nobody can and my current tenant is a real stupid MOFO (for not listening to her) and I’d like to have him out of the condo today rather than tomorrow.

Oh, and did I mention that he hasn’t paid his rent for November yet? Well, I guess, that didn’t really come as a surprise now, did it.

I added Snap Shots to all external links on this blog. Don’t know yet if I’ll keep them or not. We’ll see. Maybe they’ll start annoying me after a while, maybe not. It’s pretty funky, though.

As for the technical details: I am using the Snap Shots Plugin for Wordpress. Very easy and straight forward. No programming work involved at all.