Since cell phones have become commonplace, plenty of business people have abandoned land lines completely in favor of the convenience of the phone in their pocket.
Generally, that works fine—except for my friend chiropractor, Dr.Steven Nagy. His vintage I-Phone3 died on a Thursday a couple of weeks ago. You might recall Apple had a rather major event the next day releasing its new larger phones.
He traipsed over to Stoneridge mall to change out the line Thursday, but, because he has a business line, AT&T said he would have to call the 800 number. They would have replaced the personal line phone on the spot. He called and was assured that it would be shipped overnight on Friday. Checking back in, he learned that somehow the person helping him had failed to receive some approval so it would now be shipped on Monday.
Meanwhile, he could not access voice mail messages. He had forgotten the password that was two phones ago. When he went into to reset the password, the system sent him a text—yes a text—with the temporary code. When he called customer service, they were no help. The system only works with the text message.
By Tuesday, the delayed shipment had arrived and his new IPhone5 was functional—he had no interest in the 6.

The one "party" that is growing in registration in California is a non-party.
The Secretary of State's registration report compiled 60 days prior to the November 4 election shows 23.1 percent of the 17.6 million registered voters declined to align themselves with any party. That's up from 21.3 percent prior to the June primary.
The number of Republican voters declined slightly to 28.23 percent, while Democrat registration held steady at 43.43 percent.

Some good news from Alameda County which finally broken ground on its East County Government Center in September. The process started in 2001 to both replace the existing Schenone-Gale (named for the original Superior Court judges in the valley) Courthouse in Hacienda Business Park and establish a service center in the Livermore Valley.
The county owned a large piece of East Dublin and sold much of it off, but retained the major parcels near Contra Costa County. Those contain Santa Rita County Jail, the animal shelter and now will include a 13-courtroom justice center at 146,000 square feet and a government center at 42,000 square feet. The courts will be adjacent to the jail so it will save the Sheriff's Dept. a chunk of change that it was spending transporting inmates to hearings around the county. Occupancy is scheduled for 2017.