Replied to On customer service (and how SCE is dreadful at it) by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)

Just the same way that VC-backed rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft offload corporate cost centers and burdens onto their employees (which they’d otherwise like to call independent contractors), most customer service phone trees are meant to save time for their paid employees while offloading …

I can’t speak for every company, but as someone who has worked in a Call Center, the purpose of phone trees is not to offload the burden onto the caller. It is to route the caller to the right people. Everyone who answers the phone at an organization isn’t identically skilled. If you press 0, as so many people do, you could end up going to someone who isn’t qualified to do what you want, which means a poor experience or being transferred again. So, phone trees have callers do the work of telling the company what you want. Now, from your description, it sounds like their setup could use some improvement. I’ve been involved in the past in discussions to change the one at my employer based on the data we have on usage as well as feedback from the employees on how people are confusing the options.

Simple Location for WordPress 4.1.12 Released

A new version of Simple Location is out. Version 4.1.12 has many under the hood tweaks/fixes, and only one major user facing feature, a redo of the caching system. The caching system is used by the weather system to avoid poling for the weather on every refresh. There is now a setting in each widget to set the cache frequency. I recommend at least 300 seconds(5 minutes). The weather won’t change that much, and if you are using an API key, this will reduce, assuming your site gets 1 visit per second, requests from 86400 to only 288 times a time.

I did try to implement trip support in this version, but due to issues, I have pushed that off to rethink.