{"id":8322,"date":"2009-12-02T14:25:13","date_gmt":"2009-12-02T14:25:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/e-commerce\/how_tech_ruined_my_thanksgiving.html"},"modified":"2009-12-02T14:25:13","modified_gmt":"2009-12-02T14:25:13","slug":"how-tech-ruined-my-thanksgiving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/technology\/how-tech-ruined-my-thanksgiving.html","title":{"rendered":"How Tech Ruined my Thanksgiving"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was away for Thanksgiving and when in Florida, you do like the locals and go to the beach. While there, I glanced down at my phone and saw an interesting news alert from a service I subscribe to called BNO News<\/a> – Earthquake Hits Coast of Guatemala\/El Salvador.<\/p>\n

A little known fact about me – one I have never shared with anyone other than my wife who was sitting next to me staring at the ocean watching me turn white, is that I have a morbid fear of being in a tsunami. Sure, I can swim and all but floating out to sea – miles from shore was not how I chose to burn off the calories I planned on consuming by eating turkey later that vacation.<\/p>\n

So when I put two and two together (thankfully I had consumed only one pina colada at the time) I realized the earthquake took place:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. In the ocean<\/li>\n
  2. About 500 miles away<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Weren’t these the prime ingredients (coupled with rotten luck) in building the perfect tsunami I thought?<\/p>\n

    Now my brain started racing – that Discovery Channel special I saw on tsunamis… How fast do they travel? Then I remembered the last tsunami which took place in the Indian Ocean<\/a> – I recalled all the animals heading for higher ground before it hit. I scanned the landscape for iguanas, dogs, cats, anything. I couldn’t see any animals. Then again – I was in southern Florida – exactly where is the high ground? I had this crazy vision of 1,000 iguanas and alligators huddling together in the penthouse but the vision was shattered as I heard a larger than normal wave crashing onshore.<\/p>\n

    As I waited with one eye on my cell phone and another on the ocean – hoping to not<\/b> see a 40-foot wave approaching, I decided to scan Google News. Nothing. Then again I thought – this is a fine time for Rupert Murdoch to be pulling<\/a> his content off the search engine. Next I decided to check Twitter – many people call it the real-time web. A search on earthquakes showed a few tweets saying they hope there aren’t any tsunamis. Sure it was real-time but a crappy source of useful info.<\/p>\n

    Finally there were some news reports I found online stating there were no casualties. But still I wondered, in what direction do tsunamis actually travel? I logged onto a mapping program to plot the tsunami’s trajectory – assuming it like me had an affinity for Florida, and then realized this whole situation was stressing me out way too much.<\/p>\n

    The best thing to do was to go to the hotel room which was up about 12 stories and wait. So I sat there with an eye on my computer screen and another on the cruise ship miles off shore. I was just waiting for it to rise way up in the air. Not that I really had an action plan if it did.<\/p>\n

    While in the room I realized I had some relatives on a cruise ship in the Florida area. Maybe I should call I thought. The next thing you know they picked up and I realized I had a potentially awkward situation on my hands.<\/p>\n

    I said to my mother-in-law cautiously… Hi, I was wondering how the cruise is going… I didn’t want to hit her with a question like. “Is the ship a lot higher than it was a few minutes ago?” I figured the shock of getting a call from a son-in-law was enough for one vacation. After a short while I was able to ascertain her ship was fine (then again she was at least one pina colada head of me so I couldn’t be certain.)<\/p>\n

    Eventually and thanks to Wikipedia I found that tsunamis can travel up to 500 MPH and it had been about an hour from the time of the alert – and the earthquake was about 500 miles away. I figured it was safe to stop looking out my 12-story window and moreover it was time to change as the life preserver was beginning to chafe.<\/p>\n

    Technology can be a really great thing – but every once in a while it can ruin a Thanksgiving.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I was away for Thanksgiving and when in Florida, you do like the locals and go to the beach. While there, I glanced down at my phone and saw an interesting news alert from a service I subscribe to called BNO News – Earthquake Hits Coast of Guatemala\/El Salvador. A little known fact about me<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166,158,168,171,172,196,163,199,188,1681,206,118,177,174,175,1675],"tags":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8322"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8322\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}