While you do have to know what you are looking for, and walk the long way around from the larger Bletchley Park site, the National Museum of Computing is still (as of last year) there with volunteers showing off the workings of a bunch of rebuilt computers including the Colossus. I can't recommend a visit, with a guided tour, enough. And you might as well visit Bletchley itself while you are there, which is a different experience, but still worth while.
I had an issue with my own address on google maps (not as severe as this, it just had the wrong zipcode). After trying to correct it using the tools built in to maps 3 times and having my correction rejected every time, I tweeted my complaint @googlemaps, did a quick DM back and forth and it was fixed shortly thereafter.
(please do not take this as an endorsement of google maps support, merely an anecdote of what did work for me that I hope might help you)
When going from JFK to somewhere else in queens, yellow cabs are supposed to get a voucher from the dispatcher that allows them to skip to the front of the line when they get back to the airport. The fact that he was surprised when you said Queens implies that the dispatcher failed to do this, which explains both his going back to the dispatcher and his annoyance.
And maybe this is the reason. Not that it should matter... But why then should I care? Why should I have to deal with the problem? I tell you what, I've never had this happen in the hundreds of Uber and Lyft rides I've taken this year or the thousands in the years before.
So... Okay there's a reason. But that reason still demonstrates why one would prefer rideshare over taxi.
If the symptom is "I don't want task X, I'd rather sit here earning nothing waiting for task Y", the root cause is compensation being too low for X and too high for Y.
Re: daily standups. A lot of what the OP criticizes standups for is what I like about them. The content is only half of it. In my experience, it can be very easy for a team to cease feeling like one and instead become a loosely-coupled collection of independent contractors. 15-20 minutes a day of forced synchronous communication goes a long way to making you feel like you're actually on a team and therefore act like it, and is well worth the minimal time. This is especially true if the team isn't all in the same physical space. It can be disruptive, so scheduling it at the right time is important.
Of course, if you already have meeting overload, standup is going to feel like the worst.
it may not be possible to conceptualize all parts of a system simultaneously but that doesn't mean nobody can fully understand the system. A layer of abstraction isn't about not having to understand what's beneath it; it's a tool to aid in understanding.
No, i literally mean there's too much information involved to review in a human lifetime. You can at one point understand any part of it, but a human life is too short to at one point understand every part of it.
