The L.A. Report – Part 33

08-02-2023

Today is my 65^th birthday. I now get Medicare, but it’s not cheap. Part A is free but Part B costs me $165/mo., my Blue Shield supplement is $158/mo and my Part D drug supplement is $8/mo, for a total of $331/mo!

My other big news is that I finally got COVID. I think I got it from my sister, who had just returned from a tour of Norway, including a couple weeks on a cruise ship. When she informed us that she tested positive, I did a test, too, and it showed that I was positive, too. The next day I had flu symptoms and went on Paxlovid. I was never worried, though – I’m fully vaccinated and boosted. Felt pretty much back to normal after a week.

Other than that, this report is mostly about my job. I don’t have any acting news anyway, especially during the writer’s strike and now the actor’s strike.

My job at The County of L.A. is still going very well. I’m working on the property tax assessment system. I just found out that the assessed value of all the property in L.A. County just hit a record $1.9 TRILLION! The annual tax billed is $22 billion. That was actually in the news, I didn’t learn it on the job.

Like most companies/organizations, they’re trying to replace their aging mainframe systems. But that’s never easy, to put it mildly. My main role is to support the old system until they finally replace it, as well as support the development of the new system by telling them what the existing system is doing – also not an easy task. The biggest program was written in 1986 and has over 84,000 lines of code! So you can imagine all the customization that has been done over the decades! They’ve already missed the conversion target date at least four times, so I have a feeling I’ll be needed for many more months.

There are two people – a Chinese woman and a Korean man – on the team that I work pretty closely with and they are fantastic. The Korean guy is 68 years old and he goes way out of his way to help me. We go out to lunch every Friday, taking turns driving. He’s not only nice to me – A few weeks ago we were sitting next to a mediterranean eatery in a mall food court and a Lebanese-looking woman with an infant and a toddler walked over to our table and said she needed food. I thought about handing her 5 bucks but Peter said, “You want some food? Like that kind (pointing to the mediterranean place)? She said yes, and he says, “go put in your order and I’ll pay for it”.

My project lead is always very appreciative of my work. After I solved a thorny bug and led a meeting with the users to explain the problem and my solution, she sent an instant message saying “Thank you for doing excellent work. We appreciate you very much!”

I have had to work more with The Dragon Lady, but I really shouldn’t call her that now – after those first few weeks, she’s been incredibly cooperative, appreciative and friendly. Maybe I just had to “prove myself”.

I told you I was a little annoyed that I had to go to the office three days a week instead of two like most of their employees. The administrators’ ears must have been burning because they finally announced that you only have to come into the office twice a week, apparently out of consideration for us 5-days-a-week workers (most of their employees work 4 days a week - 10-hour days).

The office still isn’t the greatest environment. It’s very sparsely populated most days (I’m guessing less than 20% of the employees are in the office on any given day). Many of the people use speakerphones instead of headsets, which is pretty annoying. Like most offices, it’s also freezing cold, and many of us wear coats.

As I mentioned, the floor is enormous. The nearest men’s room is 100 yards away, so I do the 100-yard dash several times a day! Sometimes the restroom is temporarily closed for cleaning and the next nearest one is another 180 yards away!

Like I said, they don’t even supply bottled water, but I discovered that a nearby drinking fountain has a built-in filter with an indicator light that shows the status of it – and they do replace it when needed.

I also discovered an unused Keurig coffee brewer in the lunch room so I’m now using Keurig K-cups, which I’ve never used before. My Korean friend likes his coffee a little weak so he reuses my K-cup after I make mine. We joke that he gets “sloppy seconds” and even though he’s Korean he DOES know what that originally meant!

The commute is fairly tolerable most days. As I said before, it’s between 30 and 35 miles – depending on the route I take – and takes about an hour, sometimes 5 or 10 minutes more. The speeds vary wildly – from 5 mph to 80!

I never used to use a navigation app for my commute but now I use Google every time. There is one way it takes me about 60 percent of the time but otherwise, it monitors the traffic, constantly evaluating the best way, avoiding accidents, slowdowns, etc. The most common route is the 101 to the 134 to the 5 to the 710 to Imperial Highway, but it’s taken me a myriad of other ways, too, using the 101 farther, the 405, 105, 10, 110, 605, 170, Sepulveda Blvd, Magnolia Blvd., and even Zoo drive once! On the way home, a couple of times it’s taken me off the freeway into a crappy area of downtown (to get around an accident or something) and I say, yikes, I hope you know what you’re doing ‘cause I never would have thought of going this way in a million years! Usually, it does. In fact, I’m always amazed by the accuracy of its time estimates. More often than not, it’s right to the minute!

People ask me if I’ve ever used Waze. No, I haven’t, but Google owns them so I suspect they get a lot of their info from them.

They also ask me if I listen to books-on-tape or podcasts. No, I don’t because the traffic is pretty hectic and you really have to pay attention – to all the cars around you, the crazy drivers, what lane you need to be in, Google’s instructions, traffic reports on the radio, etc. In fact, each trip is like a little adventure!

When I got home from work on March 22^nd, it was raining and I had my hands full with my umbrella, briefcase and leftover food so I forgot to lock my car. When I got in the car to drive to work two days later, the few things I had in the car were a little scattered so I wondered if maybe we had an earthquake the night before. Then it dawned on me what happened and I looked around to see if anything was missing. My work ID badge was gone, my N95 mask (who the hell would steal a used face mask???), and my Costco card. The next day I discovered that the bastard also stole a shirt-jacket I had in the trunk (luckily, not my favorite Columbia fleece one that was also in there). When I got to work, I reported it and my God – you’d think I lost the nuclear launch codes! I had to sign an affidavit describing the circumstances. Then, to get a replacement, the only way they would give me one is if I filed a police report! That’s ridiculous! I wasn’t about to waste the time of the already stretched-thin L.A.P.D. for a simple theft with no damage! Luckily you can do it online and they email you a PDF. So I did that, even though two months had passed by the time I got around to it. If I would have had to go to a police station or have the police come to me, I would have said the hell with it – thanks for three good months!

‘Til next time, take care,

Jay