Grumpy drop off, It’s actually good now, Fooled you, Round three

Last night after work I hurried home to load up the two EUCs that I am trading which have been sitting boxed up in my kitchen for several days. I was shipping them via UPS. I had prepaid labels on them from my Stamps.com account. There is a UPS store less than a mile from my house.

I took the truck as I needed to also take my dolly as the one box was close to 100lbs. When I got in the door I was greeted with a long line which was less than ideal. However as I was standing there I got to observe the absolutely miserable personality the one clerk had. She was grumpy, condescending and just plain mean to the customers I saw her interacting with. She also was careless with the packages people were dropping off to ship, casually tossing them into a pile along the wall. Thankfully when it was my turn I got to interact with the second clerk that was missing her miserable attitude. The two boxes are now in the system and I am trusting that my partner in this barter deal does the same. (he will)

Yesterday my car woke up with an April Fools gift from Tesla, a free month of FSD (full self driving). FSD is an add on feature that can either be purchased up front for $12,000 (um yes) or paid on a month by month subscription for $200. Either choice is prohibitively expensive.

When I bought my first Tesla Model 3 in 2019 I actually bought FSD with it. At that time it was an additional $5000. I thought it was cool at the time but it was buggy and downright scary at times with some of the things it would do with sudden direction changes or even worse abrupt braking. When I bought my first Model Y I did not get FSD as a result and I did not buy it with my second Y either.

The last time I had experience with FSD was when I bought a one month subscription when I drove to Texas as it was helpful in long distance driving scenarios. Yesterday was the first time I got a look at the revised and updated FSD which I believe is now close to what has been in beta testing for a very long time. I was pretty amazed at how much better it has become.

The first thing I noticed was the greatly improved visualization of the cars surroundings. Without FSD you get a much more sparse representation of the environment around you. With the feature turned on you get a full appreciation of what the car actually is aware of around you and how quickly it recognizes it. I was very impressed.

As a test I allowed FSD to try to navigate me home from the office last night, turning it on in the office parking lot. It did surprisingly well, confidently navigating the rush hour traffic. I only had to briefly cancel FSD when it picked one of the two turning lanes that would have been a PIA to get out of since another left turn was coming up shortly afterward.

I allowed the car to take the multi-lane turns and it was rock solid. When I used to do this the car would be unsure of itself, slowing down and making scary direction changes as it tried to get it’s bearings. This did not happen once. This morning I allowed the car to once again handle the driving and again I only had to take over once when the Tesla was unwilling to make a right hand turn with intermittent traffic coming as it will always err on the side of safety. But once I was out in the flow the car again had zero issues, despite a high volume of traffic. I plan to do a video about how much better FSD is soon. Too bad it’s just too expensive because I would really like to have it day to day.

So last night I had an idea that just popped into my head, I was going to make an April Fools video. I rarely do anything related to April Fools but I thought this idea I had would be funny. I recorded a video announcing that after much thought I decided to move to California. This was done with one take and no script. Evidently a lot of people don’t bother looking at calendars or watching videos to the end (where I revealed the joke).

I had some serious replies from people shocked by my decision. It was entertaining to say the least.

Today I have yet another round of defective vein destruction, can’t wait.