The age of innocence

Most nights before going to bed, Avni and me read a story or two. Off late our favorite has been "Brothers Grimm fairy tales", we have the complete collection and I usually pick a random story and depending on the length we complete in 1 night or push it out to couple of nights. 

Last night we picked a story in which there was a war declared between land animals and all flying ones (including insects) and the pretense of the war was some bear had managed to insult some chicks. So, the birds (in my view smart ones) decided to spy on the animals to find out about their battle plans and managed to find out that if the red tail of the fox, animals commander in chief is high they will fight and if it is down they will retreat. With the advantage of this information the bird army used their hornets to attack the fox's tail which in a short while gets tucked between its legs and hence causing animals to retreat and hence the birds won the battle.  

For me it was a nice and funny story but for Avni it was otherwise. She declared that what the birds did was cheating and it is wrong and should not do it. She added to begin with why did they fight and not talk. I had no answers but to tell her it is one of those pretend stories and just a funny one to imagine the fix running with its tail tucked in. 

What it took for Google to fix our address

When our Art of Living Austin center relocated to a new location one of our over enthusiastic volunteer created a point of interest and in his/her enthusiasm entered the wrong address. Only a couple of days later we realized the mistake and I don't know what that person did but Google started to call our place as permanently closed even though we have been thriving and operating since February 2016. 

Every one searching online used to complain that our address cannot be found. As secretary it became my job to get it fixed. First I tried the crowd sourcing approach and requested multiple people to suggest to google that the place address needs an edit and also indicate that the place is open for business. I can't say that this approach was a complete waste of time and effort for Google had fixed our address and called us open (for couple of days) only to revert back to wrong address and close again.  

It was mind numbing to say the least, I was clueless. Google answered itself and pointed me to mapmaker.google.com and I started proposing edits there only to be rejected in a couple of days after suggesting the edits. But unlike other places, this one has a regional lead and whom you can contact by posting on a forum, the process led to some revelation. 

Per Google guidelines any change to an address would mean that they would call it permanently closed until they some how completely verify the new one and apparently that was what was happening to our location. 

They suggested I remove the present location and create a new poi,  I couldn't get that to happen and again went back to forum. This time the regional lead took mercy on me and looked through the history and after verifying with me that the first entered address was wrong and all we were trying was to get the right address in, he made the change happen and in less than 24 hours after that both Google maps and Google search had our place as open and we were in business. 

The other interesting thing I noticed was that Apple maps uses Yelp for its poi (luckily for me Yelp was an easy beast to handle).