KGB reportedly spent $2.6 million on their Super Bowl ad inviting people to use their service, but should have done some investment in their servers instead. According to our source with quite a bit of KGB experience (who will go unnamed), s/he only received two questions during the entire Super Bowl due to KGB servers being so overloaded that they turned off virtually all features of their site (including CSS) and begged people not to refresh their screens.

Tags: server overload

Well, I’m pretty calm about this, because it didn’t happen to me, it happened to Scott. Luckily, he has lots of experience with such emergencies from traveling with us when he was younger (that sounds a lot worse than it actually is), so things worked out pretty well. But still…

It all started last Friday. Scott’s fiancee, Heidi, flew down to be there when he graduated from BMW Step School in Rancho Cucamonga (I could just say Cucamonga all day, couldn’t you?). Their plan was to drive back home the next day, since Scott had a job interview at East Bay BMW in Pleasanton on Monday. So they stayed at Heidi’s grandfather’s house, and Saturday morning took off heading north.

So far so good, until they decided to change their plans slightly and take the scenic route, which in this case is the famous California Route 1. If you’ve seen any horror movies, you know what happens next…they have car trouble and are forced to stay at a weird motel, far from anywhere. The desk guy has no eyelids, and just about midnight, they hear a creak from the back door that they were sure was bolted and barred…

OK, it wasn’t quite that bad. But he did notice the alternator light going on and off, and finally he did stop at a lonely motel somewhere near Big Sur, where (shudder) there was no cellular service!

There was a pay phone, though. And they needed a tow truck by this time, so they called Allstate, since Heidi has all sorts of road coverage with them. But Allstate gave them the runaround and basically said they wouldn’t, couldn’t, or dassn’t come out to help them (leading Heidi’s dad to cancel all their Allstate coverage on all their family’s cars, plus their boat, and their trailer, and their boat’s trailer, and oh yes their house too, but that’s another story).

But our State Farm insurance also has all kinds of road coverage too, so Scott was finally able to get a tow truck to get them up to Monterey or so, where there was a shop where they got the belts replaced, and where they could stay Sunday night and hopefully enjoy a bit of the weekend.

So now it’s Monday morning and they’re starting out fresh with new belts and everything, and all they have to do is drive to Pleasanton for the 1 PM interview and then back up here. But no…they made it as far as San Jose when the light started going on again and they found a Midas, where they eventually found he needed a new alternator too. This Midas didn’t have an alternator tester so they had to wait a few hours while Midas borrowed or bought one, so they didn’t actually get to leave until around 5 PM. So poor Scott finally rolled in around 9:30 PM last night and went right to sleep.

But he’s here!

Tags: Allstate, car insurance, road trip, State Farm