Our RV Adventures

Not about the Rattlesnakes, but about the Cell service here at this gate.

Last night and tonight, it’s been all over the map. Sometimes it works great, and then sometimes nothing. And pretty much everything in between.

Sometimes my AirCard shows that it has Internet Access but no data will flow. My laptop says it doesn’t have an Internet Connection. Then for a while it will work fine.

Later last night my S5 phone showed 3 bars of 4G and I got good data rates, but I couldn’t make phone calls. When I tried, all I got was dead silence, with no ringing.

Hopefully they’ll get it fixed soon.

I slept in until about 12:15 this afternoon, about an hour later than normal. I’ll keep pushing it back until I’m comfortable not taking a nap later in the afternoon before I go into work.

About 12:45 Jan and I headed off to Barth’s for their Fried Chicken and Roast Beef lunch.

Need I say more.

Hard to believe that food this good is only $6.50 for all you can eat. And this one plate was more than enough to fill me up.

Next up was a stop at the bank to pick up the checks ordered. While I was there I also ask them to check on a problem I’m having with my MasterCard Debit Card that I have for my account there.

Normally it works fine, but anytime I’m asked for my billing address zip code, like at a gas pump or sometimes online, it tells me the number is incorrect. My zip code on all my mail from them is correct, but maybe it’s screwed up on the debit card address somehow. But the cashier found nothing wrong with it.

On the way home I was mulling over the problem and remembered a similar occurrence at a client’s quite a few years ago. Their payroll system would not recognize an new employee’s SS number and kept saying it was invalid. But it looked fine on the screen.

So I went in and looked at the actual code of the file and instantly saw the problem. Somehow the secretary, when she entered the SS# originally, entered a non-printing character as the first entry in the SS# field. Probably she accidently hit the ALT key in combination with some other key which can cause the problem.

Non-Printing characters are ones that the computer sees but you don’t. An example some of you may be familiar with is the Show Non-Print Formatting Characters command in Microsoft Word. When you use this command you see Paragraph Markers, Manual Page Breaks, etc. Otherwise they’re invisible.

The secretary had deleted and reentered the number several times without fixing the problem because she just backspaced over the old number and just typed in the new one again. But in doing this she stopped backspacing at the first VISIBLE number in the field.

If she had just backspaced one more character, even though she couldn’t see it, or if she had clicked in the field and hit the Delete key, she would have fixed the problem herself.

So hopefully I’ll be able to talk to some of the computer people at the bank and have them look at the problem.

After a quick stop at the HEB it was back to the rig for the afternoon until I was on the gate at 5pm.

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