OK, here we go. Time to finally get on with it and change our home over from our ADSL to the NBN. Our ISP has been pestering me on and off for months and I was just about to start the process when we all went home and worked from home due to COVID-19. Loathe to have something go wrong with a working setup I put it on hold for the past two months…
Its a Friday, crap customer service from not one, but two different companies.
Ascension Records 1, Australia Post nil Three weeks ago I bought a CD boxed set from Ascension Records, two days later the purchase appeared on my credit card and I thought no more about it. Yesterday my VISA bill arrived and I thought the CD was taking a bit long so I called them up, yep, ordered on the 2nd, shipped on the 8th.
Now that definitely leaves a bad taste in the mouth Mr Garmin.
You purchase a GPS in good faith, one that comes with a 12 month warranty and so when it breaks you send it back to be repaired. You can’t send it to Garmin since they don’t have a presence in Australia, instead you have to send it to GME, who are the “sole repair and distribution centre.”
When it comes back you assume that the replacement one has a warranty, then nine or ten months later that one breaks too… that’s when you discover that according to GME “they’re not real reliable,” but since its a repair unit it only has a 3 month warranty and it’ll cost you $209 to have your unrepairable GPS replaced!
Such a good day, and such a bad taste left from three bad experiences with Connex in under 24 hours! Last night’s train into the city — the trains that run every 15 minutes — was 19 minutes late to arrive, the only reason the 17:48 didn’t run into the 17:54 was because Connex cancelled the 17:54! Today’s train home was running on time, I guess, but the whole trip the pleasant recorded announcements were one station wrong, so were told that “The next station is Richmond” as the train left Richmond — it’s only ANZAC day, there’s only hundreds of visitors probably trying to use the trains and get useful information from the announcements!
A courier arrived this morning and brought me a shiny new replacement Edge 305 GPS to replace the one that broke back in January.
At one month and one day Garmin are twice as responsive as Canon for repairs — last year’s warranty headache — but I’m still not really impressed that it takes that long for them to send a replacement unit, I would have thought they would keep them in stock.
The Telstra BigPond package turned up at home this morning, it contains one “insert and run” Microsoft Windows CD and one PCMCIA wireless card as well as the ADSL modem and Ethernet cable.
I had carefully told the nice man with the almost unintelligible Indian accent that I needed the wireless card for a DESKTOP PC and that both PCs ran Linux and not Windows. So I’ve been given a CD I can’t run and a wireless card I can’t plug in!
Australia Post actually called me back! I was starting to wonder if it was going to happen; I’d even jotted down a note to call them up and find out what was happening about my call on the 23rd…. The call lasted under a minute, “We’ve spoken to the delivery contractor and been assured that future deliveries will not be left unattended, you will recieve a card and need to pick parcels up from your local post office.
Ground Effect, 1; Australia Post, nil.
Following up on my missing parcel from Monday, Ground Effect sent me a replacement, after asking for a different address. With some trepidation I gave them the home address, since every parcel that we’ve had delivered here since last October has been left lying on either the footpath or the front doorstep, not once, but every single time!
Sure enough, I got home this evening and there it was, sitting on the footpath just inside the front fence!
Customer Friendly… Four days after filling in a “missing part” report on the Lego website, the offending item turned up in a little post bag all of its own. A most impressive turn around!
Non-Customer Friendly… Not so easy was a last minute attempt to book some tickets for the Taikoz show on Friday. I called up the Alexander theatre on the phone and started to book two tickets, we got all the way through to the “how do you want to pay?
I called Qantas this morning to enquire whether it was possible to check some of our luggage through from Melbourne to Geneva, even though we’re spending a couple of days in London. Thirteen minutes on hold listening to an endlessly repeating tape, then a voice comes on the line. “Yes, there’s no problem with that,” said the nice lady on the phone. “Just call back with the flight numbers so we can check that it’s with an airline that we share with.
Wow, impressive response to a Usenet posting! In a discussion of UK cycle routes and Sustrans routes I made the comment that when searching I hadn’t been able to find any information about them, and then when I looked on the CTC’s website it was rather “hostile,” and that when I sent email enquiries I had never received a response… today I find an email from the Director of the CTC asking for feedback on how I believe they can improve their service — I can think of a few other organisations that could do with that level of customer care!
Surprise, surprise, BP hasn’t replied to my email, despite the assurance that they would do so within five working days. I’ll try a written enquiry tomorrow…
A Bund dinner at Mexicali Rose. Despite the photo being solely of beer and other beverages, we did have food as well.
Well, I’ve sent off my enquiry to Mr BP asking them to explain themselves and tell me exactly which law it is that requires me to dismount from my bike before filling it…
Thank you for communicating with BP Australia. Your feedback will help us to provide a more valuable, responsive, and reliable internet service in future. A customer service representative will respond within 5 working days.
Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets on whether they will respond within 5 working days, or whether they’ll be like the last bank I wrote to who never responded.
It was wet, it was cold, it was miserable, and all I wanted to do was to fill my bike with petrol on the way home. I called in to the BP service station on Ferntree Gully road, the same as I’d done any number of times in the past. Pulled up to the pump and put the nozzle in the tank, waiting for the pump to be switched on… and waited… and waited…
[2000-04-11 Tue] A simple task — I called Telstra to ask for the phone to be changed from 5/42 Cameron street to 1/59 Westbank terrace. Both addresses are in the same suburb so it is a simple job and I can take the number with me. They ask me to make sure that a phone is plugged in on Thursday night and it will be done on Friday ([2000-04-14 Fri]).
Vanity site? Technology experiment? Learning tool? Blog? Journal? Diary? Photo album? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you…
I experiment. I play. I write and I take pictures. Some of the site is organised around topics, other parts are organized by date, then there’s always the cross-references between them.
Its all been here a fairly long time. Like the papers on my desk, or the books on the bedside table, the pile just grew… and it all grew without much plan or structure. I try not to break URLs, so historical oddities abound.
Long ago it started as a learning experiment with a few static HTML pages, then I added a bit of server-side includes and some very ugly PHP. A hand-built journal/blog on top of that PHP, then a few experiments in moving to various static publishing systems. I’ve never wanted a database-based blogging engine, so over the years I’ve tried PHP, nanoblogger, emacs-muse, silkpage and docbook before settling on Emacs Org mode for writing and jekyll for publishing. But the itch remained… I never really liked jekyll and the ruby underneath always seemed so much black magic. So now the latest incarnation is Org mode and hugo.
