An Amazing Effort, No News, The Nearest of Misses

My buddy Jeremy has been working for the state of Florida for close to a year now.  He reached out to me because he was in SW Florida, far away from his home in Tallahassee.  He was assisting with a state initiative to provide Starlink systems to those in need in our area.  Well in this case he was supposed to be dropping some off to various out of state emergency response teams.  It was already after 7:30 when I left the house but I thought it would be interesting to see this all in action.

I almost did not get to see Jeremy at all as the approximate time he said he would be on site came and went.  It was funny because one of the things I have always given him a hard time about is his lack of being on time.  Despite it being close to 10 years since I had seen him, things hadn’t changed.  To be fair he had some issues that held him up at the prior site.  He had also been present at the governors press conference earlier in the day regarding the hurricane relief efforts.

So initially I tried to get into the JetBlue Park (Red Sox spring training facility) before Jeremy arrived and was greeted by some military personnel. I explained I was there to assist in Starlink set up however when they called it in they could not verify it so they didn’t let me in.  I told them I would just wait for my buddy to show up.  So Jeremy and his son arrived.  He flashed his credentials and vouched for me which got me in.

The parking lot had been transformed into a huge mobilization center with tractor trailers and tents that looked like yurts, complete with AC.  It was an amazing display of just how many resources were being put into this recovery.  I had no idea that so many other states sent personnel in.  We set up systems for teams for three different states.

I never set up a Starlink system before.  You could definitely tell it was an Elon product with stupidly simple set up which took less than 10 minutes to go from cracking open the box to pulling down data as fast as 150MBS.  It was pretty impressive.  It was interesting and cool to help with the process even on a very limited basis.  It was also very cool to see Jeremy and Connor again.  Jeremy and I agreed we need to get together sooner rather than later, a decade between face to face interactions is a bit much. By the time I got home it was after 11 and by the time I fell asleep it was technically Thursday morning.  Despite this I woke up today feeling surprisingly ok.

I was checking all day yesterday in my online patient portal hoping CT results would be posted.  There were no updates and none this morning either. I would love to get some news sooner rather than later.

My commute to work today was awful.  At the county fairgrounds there are hundreds upon hundreds of utility trucks staged.  Every morning right around the time I leave the police are there blocking traffic to allow large groups of the trucks to exit.  So once I get past that the road is now bogged down by these hundreds of trucks.  Today schools reopened which added to the traffic causing huge delays at every major intersection.  However that was not the worst thing, I am used to shitty traffic.  When I was a mile from the office I almost was involved in another accident.

So I am heading into an intersection with a green light, following some guy in a Mercedes.  All of a sudden he basically locks up his brakes and simultaneously I hear a police siren.  There were two police vehicles that were entering the intersection from the left road.  It appeared to me they had their lights on but never hit the siren until they were right at the intersection, which is dangerous and dumb.  The guy in front of me either didn’t see them or was trying to beat them across the intersection before he slammed on his brakes.

So the warning siren in the Tesla fires off and I simultaneously slam on the brakes as I feel the anti-lock system kick in.  At first I thought I hit the guy but I apparently missed him by inches.  I was already frustrated by the quagmire I had been driving through, to have this happen at the tail end of the commute was the perfect infuriating cherry to put on top.  After the near miss the guy in the Mercedes put his hand out the window and waved, which I took as a “sorry I slammed on the brakes thanks for not rear ending me” acknowledgment.