IN WHICH I WAS THE SHEEP: At the arena in Charlotte this week -- again, not that we're talking about why I was in Charlotte -- they had free cell phone charger stations arrayed around the concourse on each level. With ports for every type of device (though not enough for iPhone users), these kiosks were a great amenity for folks at the end of long and battery-draining days, and I assume they'll become standard at many locations within a year or two. Plug in, wait by your device (or trust the credentialed masses being watched by Secret Service), voila. (I did also see kiosks with credit card-activated locked doors for devices, but they weren't at the arena.) Except ...
Except that it was free. And because it was free, folks would hog scarce ports for thirty minutes, an hour, or more (and with monitors on the concourse, you could still keep tabs of the proceedings on the stage), and iPhone and Droid users were often left waiting in intolerable queues.
If there's a better illustration of the tragedy of the commons, I'm not sure what it would be. Consider what would have happened had they instead charged for charging -- $2 for ten minutes? $5? (We know this was a valuable resource given how much people were willing to wait for it.) That way, you provide an endpoint to everyone's consumption of the resource while capturing the value that's out there. Or am I missing something?
1. The problem with charging is that it creates even more of a bottleneck, with people fumbling for cash or credit cards to pay rather than just plugging and going. And do you then create variable pricing? It seems like iPhone/Droid charging outlets were more valuable than Blackberry outlets. Should users pay more for an iPhone charger than a Blackberry one?
ReplyDelete2. So in other words, it was easy for your phone to get fired up? Ready to go?
They had those stations in Tampa, too, and I found that there was no line there. So maybe Charlotte was just a question of too much demand for too little supply -- reflecting perhaps the difference in demographics of the attendees to the two conventions.
ReplyDeleteFriends at MIA told me that Jay-Z's powermats were all over the place and were awesome. Add that to the new Windows phone's built in wireless charging and developments in WiFi and bluetooth and I wouldn't be surprised if in the next decade people stop plugging their phones into anything.
ReplyDeleteCharging for charging! Awesome. But I quibble with the header quote, unless I'm missing something, I've come to expect more. Maybe "Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'"? or "Where's Charles when you need him?" or something?
ReplyDeleteI'm not an iPeson, but aren't the chargers also data transfer/synch cords? I think that iPhone users should have been told that after every ten minutes they spent plugged in (per hour), one random song, contact, or photo would be deleted from their phone the first minute, two the second minute, four the third minute, etc. Voila, no fumbling for credit, people unplug their phones and move on.
<span>Charging for charging! Awesome. But I quibble with the header quote, unless I'm missing something, I've come to expect more. Maybe "Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'"? or "Where's Charles when you need him?" or something?
ReplyDeleteI'm not an iPerson, but aren't the chargers also data transfer/synch cords? I think that iPhone users should have been told that after every ten minutes they spent plugged in (per hour), one random song, contact, or photo would be deleted from their phone the first minute, two the second minute, four the third minute, etc. Voila, no fumbling for credit, people unplug their phones and move on.</span>
Wait, they were chargers but not outlets? So, if you brought your own charger - what did you do?
ReplyDeleteHow about outlets that automatically shut down after 10 min?
At the next "event" - we'll charge our bodies in our flying cars, so it won't matter.
Except that it was free. And because it was free, folks would hog scarce ports...
ReplyDelete(Comment deleted for violating The Rule.)
I think it shouldn't be free for a dual eco-minded (eco-nomical and eco-logical) reason: electricity costs us money & uses resources, and people shouldn't use it like it's candy.
ReplyDelete#FirstWorldProblems
ReplyDeleteI was at an outdoor festival this summer, one where people camped out for days* and the smartest vendor booth I saw was the phone charging booth. For a dollar or two, they'd check your phone and charge it until full.
ReplyDelete*No, I did not camp out at Mountain Jam.
Nothing can be worse than trying to find a power outlet in the gate area at an airport with many flight delays.
In Charlotte, because it was a multiple day event, did norms evolve or change to cope with the scarce resource, or did it remain a state of nature, every person for himself or herself? (And why don't we have gender-neutral individual pronouns in English?)
Themself?
ReplyDeleteGathering of the Juggalos, right?
ReplyDeleteIf someone would make a parody infomercial for either the DNC or the RNC in the vein of the Gathering infomercials, would be appreciated.
ReplyDeleteWE'VE GOT BILL CLINTON AND GEORGE CLINTON!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteMAIN STAGE ON SATURDAY, GWEN IFILL!
ReplyDeleteCLINT EASTWOOD SPRAYING FAYGO ALL OVER AN EMPTY CHAIR IN A FIELD!
ReplyDeleteYou could solve a lot of this with ye olde drink ticket concept. When you check into the convention, you're given a card. Said card is good for a certain amount of charging time. Swipe card, activate charging station. Run out of time, stop charging until new card is swiped. Cards are fully transferrable - you lose it, your problem. You can give it away, trade it, or sell it, we don't care.
ReplyDeleteEven better, give coded cards, one for each day, with smaller amounts of charge time on them. Then you don't have one person using their entire hour of time all at once and hogging an outlet - you only get, say, 20 minutes per day. use it wisely.
You've just described O'Hare. O'Hare has like 12 outlets per concourse, so you can watch hundreds of people just walking around with open laptops and dangling cords looking for a free one. Sometimes people will plug in and just watch movies, which does not bother me in the least. Yes, they are hogging outlets while doing something frivolous. But I refuse to believe that people in the airports want to charge their phones and iPads and laptops for non-frivolous reasons. Everybody is trying to juice up for a little Fruit Ninja or iTunes movies or whatever. True, there is a non-trivial number of people who need to charge up for business reasons, but the solution to that is to have pay-per-charge stations where people who have legitimate needs can pay to jump the queue. For the rest of the people, if we're just allocating charging for frivolous uses, higher in time is prior in right.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, a couple of weeks ago I watched a man walk up to a charging phone and unplug it so that he could plug in. The woman who owned the unplugged phone was as quick to red-faced rage as anyone I have ever seen, and I am a man who is quick to red-faced rage in airports. And then the man did a beautiful thing: he plugged in a multi-outlet extension cord he was carrying around. So he got to charge, and she got to charge, and there was even another outlet for somebody else to use. I almost want to use the word "heroic."
There were also outlets in random places.
ReplyDeleteJennifer Granholm's speech would have required no editing to fit within a Juggalo ad.
ReplyDeleteI just re-read this and realized I said "higher in time is prior in right." I am a real idiot.
ReplyDeleteI carry a three plug extension for just this purpose. I usually show it to the other person before I just unplug their stuff. Turn one outlet into three and make new friends.
ReplyDeleteIt would be nice if one of those new friends was a single guy who likes sports and can construct a properly spelled and punctuated sentence while headed to the same home destination that I am, but I digress.
This is why we charge for printing at the library, even though we don't charge enough to actually cover our expenses. The idea is, if we're charging you 6 cents a page, you'll think about what you're printing and how much before you just willynilly hit send. When I worked at a library that DID have free printing, I saw where someone had printed out, from Early English Books Online, an entire copy of Paradise Lost (which took almost a whole ream of paper) and then never came to pick it up.
ReplyDeleteThe reason this wouldn't work? It's only a fraction of people who want to consume the resource in the first place, so they'd accumulate a lot of them.
ReplyDeleteWhat makes the DNCC unique on the use of these devices is how long the event is (doors open at 1p, speakers go 5p-11p), and how miss-able much of it is. If you're at an NFL game, you're not ditching a half hour of it to charge your phone.
There was someone at law school who would routinely send mountains and mountains of shit to the printer at school from her home computer, usually late at night. I'm not talking two big cases. I'm talking 25-30 docs, 300 or 400 pages a throw, and all as a single print job. As you can imagine, certain of us trying to print out a case or two from the computers in the lab didn't much care to wait 30 minutes to run a print job or baby sit the inevitable paper jams. And, of course, she'd be mad that it hadn't been filed in the appropriate box come morning (often late morning) time. Or that the print run hadn't gotten to the end and no one had refilled the paper for her.
ReplyDeleteIf you aren't in the building? Your car not even in the lot? Sorry, you don't get to run through a ream of paper while I'm waiting to print a single document.
Then you can make it a badge swipe and make it harder (but not impossible) to use someone else's allocated time.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if it was the same woman, but there was a PhD candidate who used to print out a draft of her dissertation literally every day. Sometimes she'd print out a draft in the morning and then one in the afternoon. She was only there because it was the only free laser printer at the University. I think she was the principal reason that the school started charging per page, and she definitely was the principal reason that the law students didn't get pissed off about it.
ReplyDelete