Rob's Blog

A couple of weeks ago we got a card through the door saying I had got a letter with insufficient postage, and needed to pay 30p plus a £1 handling fee. Not knowing who it was from I paid the money in case it was important.

The next day the letter was delivered, and I was disappointed to discover it was some junk mail from “Visit East Perthshire” (I think they got my address when we visited the Outdoor Show). They had simply not put a stamp on it!

Obviously I wasn’t pleased so I decided to ask the senders of the letter to reimburse me the £1.30 that Royal Mail had charged, and I also added the same £1 handling charge, making a total of £2.30.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve received a few parcels recently where I’ve been asked to sign a touchscreen device as proof of delivery rather than a piece of paper. Not one of these time has the squiggle on the screen looked anything like my signature. This isn’t because it’s hard to sign the screen, it’s just the sensor doesn’t correctly sense where it’s being pressed.

As an example, here is the signature reported as my proof of delivery from Parcelforce this morning:

This is one of the better ones I’ve seen recently, but it barely resembles my real signature (I won’t post it here in case some clever identity thiefs try and use it).

The proof of delivery on their site also states it was signied by “R FARRAR”, despite the parcel being addressed (correctly) to me, and me spelling my surname to the driver. Again, this is one or the better interpretations, having had “FARA” in the past!

Why do they even bother using these touchscreens since they clearly don’t work? When they were testing the system did they say “well, it doesn’t work, but we’ll use it anyway”!? It would be very easy for me to claim this delivery never arrived!

Just before heading to bed this Friday, we flicked on to Pricedrop TV to have a laugh about what tat they were flogging. Normally they bend the truth slightly, or exaggerate the quality of the products, but whoever was presenting on this occasion was just coming out with lie after lie.

The first product they were selling was a mini Freeview adaptor that plugs straight into a scart socket. Quite a neat little solution to convert an old analogue TV. Looking on the website now it says the starting price for these is £50, but I seem to remember it starting at around £30 – £40.

Here came the first lie. He said “If you buy one of these, you don’t need to fork out £40-£60 for a Freeview set top box”. Now when we bought our first Freeview STB a few years ago, I think it was around £25. I had a quick look in the Argos catalogue, and their Freeview boxes range from £16.85 to £39.99. The only basic Freeview box they do for over £40 includes 1 month of Setanta, which is worth £10.99.

So, not only would you be silly to pay the claimed £40-£60 for an equivalent product, you;d struggle to find anyone selling one for that price. In fact Asda are currently doing  a Freeview PVR with hard disk recorder for £40! After the claim of how much these things normally cost came a challenge: he said “I defy you to find Freeview for less than £40“. He either didn’t do his research, or is a complete liar.

In the end the “auction” ended at £19.99 + £7.99 for delivery. £28 seems like a high price for this basic piece of kit.

Next came a set of wireless headphones. A fairly basic set consisting of a base that pugs into a headphone socket, with a seat of headphones with a wireless connection in between. When describing these he kept using the terms “Bluetooth” and “WiFi”. Bluetooth is a possible technology for this type of device, but certainly not wifi (well, it’s possible, but not all likely). I got suspicious about the bluetooth n the price went so low, and it turns they don’t use either technology, they just work on standard analogue radio frequency! Another complete lie to try and sell more tat!

I also noticed another presenter today describing a necklace as “Swarovski“, when it definately wasn’t. I bet Swarovski wouldn’t be too pleased! I also noticed someone saying you would pay “literally an arm and a leg”, but that’s another rant for another day.

I feel I ought to report these complete lies. Anyone know who I should report them to? Trading standards? OfCom? ASA? Maybe I should just leave them to ripping off poor (ignorant) people.

On a happier note, we stayed in on Halloween, and only got sweet young trick or treaters. No teenage scallies, and all done before 8pm!

I bought a couple of items on eBay this morning, and despite having just cleared my inbox, I suddenly found it full again! I normally ignore most eBay emails, or at the most glance at them, but I thought I’d analise exactly why so many need to be sent.

The item I’m going to concentrate on was a ‘Buy it Now’ auction, so there was no need to get bid confirmation emails and such. I also paid for the item immediately using PayPal. Let’s look at the emails I received:

1. From: eBay, You won eBay item…
   Confirming I’d “won” the item, and asking me to “Pay Now” (including appropriate links)
2. From: Auctiva, You have won eBay Item…
   Essentially the same as the eBay email. Tells me I’ve “won”, and asking me to log in to eBay to pay. Also advertising the seller’s Auctiva store.
3. From: PayPal, Receipt for Your Payment to…
   Standard PayPal receipt for payment
4. From: eBay Member, Ebay item Purchased eBay item…
   Telling me I’ve “won” and asking me to pay. Essentially the same as (1), although gives me instructions for sending payment through the mail. I’ve already paid by this stage however.
5. From: eBay Member,Thank you for your payment. eBay item…
   “Thank you” email, including links to other items. No details on how it will be despatched or anything else!

All these emails were sent within 3 minutes! It strikes me as an excessive quantity of emails for one small transaction (around £5).

If this had been an auction format I would get even more, although arguably these would be justified.

Would it be very hard to put a small dellay into the process that sends emails 1,2 and 4 so that if payment is sent imediately, these are skipped (or at least changed). Can eBay not also put a field in their emails to allow the seller to send a message, rather than sending out a separate one (and so getting rid of email’s 4 and 5).

I understand that eBay and PayPal are officially separate organisations and so should send separate emails, but given how integrated they are these days they could quite easily share emails (although in my case my eBay and PayPal addresses are different).

Email 2 is just blatent advertising from Auctiva – no reason for it whatsoever!

So, to sumarise, in the case where a Buy it Now item is “won” and paid for within say 10 minutes, the number of emails could be kept down to two:

1. From eBay: You won item…
   Thank you for your payment etc. Including optional custom message from seller.
2. From PayPal: Receipt for your payment…
   Standard receipt. If the email addresses are the same, I don’t see a reason this can’t be integrated into the first email though. It would be good if the seller could add to this too, to let the buyer know when the item will be despatched etc.

Of course if payment is dellayed more emails may be required, although since eBay doesn’t send a payment confirmation email anyway, it could still be kept to just two, with the first one asking for payment.

Of course if further emails say something useful (such as “Your item has been despatched”) they are justified, but having so many almost identical emails makes information hard to organise and find – especially if you buy a lot.

Why is it that delivery people find it so hard to use doorbells? You’d have thought they would be more experienced than most, but they seem incapable of pressing that little button. Maybe it’s something missing from their basic training.

I suppose they are too used to doorbells not working, but surely people wouldn’t bother installing doorbells if they didn’t have a use for one. Why not knock and ring?

The reason this is such an annoyance for me is that I work from home in a log cabin at the bottom of the garden. This means I can’t hear anyone knocking on the door, which is why I installed a wireless doorbell. I’ve missed a lot of deliveries because of their fear of bells. Citylink seem to be the worst offenders, but I missed one from Royal Mail today.

I think I need to get myself a “Please Ring” sign, but I am reluctant to have to put up instructions for such a simple device. Maybe something like these from Dave Gorman’s Flickr set:

(see also this Flickr Group)

I was enjoying my lie in on Saturday morning when I was rudely awaken at 07:30 by the sound of a lawn mower coming from the front of our house. The strange thing is we don’t have any neighbours with a front lawn.

I looked out of the window to see someone cutting our neighbours hedge with a Flymo lawnmower! Sorry about the photo quality – I only had my phone on me and just snapped a quick pic (click for larger).

Not exactly the right tool for the job, but to be fair to him, the finished result was ok!

Our main problem with it was we were woken up before 8 on a Saturday morning – Abby was not happy at all!