If you have traveled in Europe and stayed in hotels, you are probably familiar with the power interlock for hotel keys. It works this way: Inside your hotel room, near your door, there is a slot, which fits the door key card. The hotel only gives each guest one key. As you enter the room, you insert your key card into the slot, and all power in the room is enabled. Without the card in that slot, there are no lights in the room.
Then, when you leave the room, you need to bring your key, and it turns off all lights automatically. While this seems odd and inconvenient, it works quite well and I am sure it reduces unneeded power consumption in hotel rooms.
Some American hotels are now trying this concept, and it is failing ludicrously.
I am currently staying at a Hilton Garden Inn in Olympia, Washington. This hotel has such a system. You can see the slot, with a hotel business card inserted at the red arrow in the photograph above.
Since Americans are likely to never have seen such a system, the desk clerk is spending extra time with every guest explaining in advance how the system works. I am sure too many guests call down and complain that there is no power in the room. Here is the solution applied in this Hilton Garden Inn:
- The hotel desk clerk spends an extra minute or two with each guest explaining this feature. Guests are baffled, as I observed as I stood in line. Guests could not figure out what this was all about.
- The desk clerk gives every guest a hotel business card to insert into the slot so he doesn’t have to use the key.
- I noticed that the housekeeping service plays right along with this. When I came back to my room at night, the room had been cleaned, the business card was in the slot, and all the lights were on.
Clearly, there is a serious disconnect between this hotel’s management and its power-saving initiative, and the hotel staff that sabotages the effort.
Here in America we like our lights on – bright.
Government Contracting at its Worst
Posted in Bad Product, Commentaries, tagged government waste, TSA iPad app on April 5, 2016| 2 Comments »
We have all heard about the $600 toilet seats in the military. Here is a $336,413.59 iPad app for you.
Apparently the TSA needed an app to allow random direction for passengers to turn left and right. You can see the app in operation in the video below. That’s all it does.
Apparently, the TSA paid $1.4 million for this project, but over a million was for hardware, presumably devices. $336,000 was for app development. Further research shows that the total development cost for the randomizer app was $47,400, a TSA spokesperson told Mashable, which was part of the $336,413.59 contract. The spokesperson declined to elaborate on what else the contract entailed.
An Android programmer then writes this app in front of our eyes in about 10 minutes. So – the government paid somebody $336,000, to develop an app that took less than an hour to make. How would you like to make a million dollars an hour? Even if only $47,000 went to the developer, it’s still an hourly rate of over $200,000.
Ok, ok, there were endless exchanges about complicated specification, approvals, and all the standard government contracting overhead, which I am used to myself in my own work world. Even at an overhead factor of 90%, we’re now down to $20,000 per hour for the actual work.
If you’re not a programmer and don’t want to learn how to actually write this app, just watch the first minute of this video and then forward to the last 30 seconds. That’s all you need.
And this should make us all think about how our government spends our money. This just happens to be in one area that I understand well. Let’s take a wild guess about how it is that a single F-35 fighter plane costs more than $100 million, and we’re buying 2,443 of them.
Now, true to form for our government, and this is pure satirical speculation on my part, perhaps there are some things in this app that the government is NOT telling us about. What if the arrow is just a ruse for a profiling app. The camera points at the passenger, does it not? Perhaps it is looking for skin color, turbans, and other indicators of religion and directs those passengers “randomly” to one side or the other? Perhaps it is imaging all passengers and running face recognition in the background on some server, so by the time the passenger gets to the scanning station, they have the identity? Features like that – that they are not telling us about – would actually justify an app costing $336,000.
I have no evidence for that. Either our government is insanely incompetent by spending this much money for a trivially simple randomizer app, or it is cunningly smart by making an app that seems benign but has huge implications.
Your guess is as good as mine.
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