Category: annoyances

Categories
annoyances

What the brown can do for you

Before my planned leave to Ukraine I have ordered several items from eBay (couple of laptops, PDA, quad-band cell phone, accessories, etc.). Everything, except for laptops was to be delivered by UPS. And almost every delivery got messed up. Notes for packages got switched with one another. Packages were delayed. Packages were not delivered on promised time. 24 hour customer service several times in the row condirmed that thay cannot clearly communicate with local station that is responsible for delivery. Local station has no control (and no way to communicate to) delivery trucks. Delivery truck drivers lack English language skills. Overall – each delivery was major hassle, a lot bigger then finding proper item, winning an auction and getting the stuff mailed as soon as possible by contacting seller directly.

For some magic reason carriers like FedEx, DHL and USPS never had any problems finding my location. UPS, on the other hand, hires drivers who never attended English reading classes, so they perceive 1 street and 1 floor as randomly interchangeable entities, have no idea what “Leave with neighbour” means and, apparently, lack general intelligence.

Order something. Ship it through UPS. See what the brown can do to you.

Categories
annoyances technology

Some more about bad ideas

Working with client who recently lost his web sites due to some complications I have discovered yet another great example of how stupid ideas can make it all the way up. There’s this provider I’m sure a lot of people are familiar with, cox.net – especially on West Coast. In order to figure mail server names I went to their support pages…

Guess what? The “customer friendly” web site has all the help articles and forms to open via JavaScript. So if you finally made it to the article you were looking for and wanted to bookmark it (yes, some people do that) – tough luck, sorry, dude, can’t help ya. Oh, and if you were hoping you can just copy-paste the URL and at least get to the tech support index page – no can do, nope, nicht, nein, nyet. If you try that you simply get an error. Sometimes I wonder if people who do this do think at all… reminds me of a centuries old anecdote about a letter writing clerk who didn’t write letters to destinations he wasn’t willing to go. Reason – his writings could only be read by himself…

“No way out”. On the bottom of the page is says “Powered by Support Soft”. Good job, folks. Keep it soft, we’ll take it from here.

Categories
annoyances personal technology

Credit cards

Years ago when I was very young, not as young as I am now, but still pretty young – I often thought that when store clerk swiped the card at that “magic credit card reader” money somehow manage to get transferred into cash register through the wires. Only recently, after acquiring merchant account for my own purposes had I found that purchase by credit card is indeed a credit given by merchant, since he gets the funds with significant delay. In fact the delay could range from 3 days to a full month.

Updating bank info at credit card processing company can be a real pain in all the places you can think of. In my case – it is.