Shopping Madness

So, you would rather give me my money back than work with me to arrange delivery. Isn’t that rather short-sighted. Why would I ever shop with you again?

So, I try to buy a new power supply from a computer supplier (let’s say they are called Tell Computers).

Buy online and pay by credit card. They will only ship to the credit card billing address. No problem, I say, somebody will be there to pick it up and sign for it. Takes so long to arrive that nobody is there anymore. So, I think I’ll have the courier redeliver to work. They can’t change the delivery address without Tell’s permission. OK, I say, “Somebody will be in on Thursday; please deliver it then.” They try to deliver on Friday.

No problem, thinks I. I will have them deliver one evening. “We don’t do evening deliveries,” they say. So I say, “I’m in Saturday”. We don’t work weekends”. Huum.

“What about if I collect from your depot?”

“It is a delivery centre with no collection point. Try calling Tell to have the address changed.”

“Hello, Tell. Here’s my problem”

“Sorry, I’m in billing. Here’s customer service.”

“Hello, Customer Service. Here’s my problem.”

“We can change the address. Oh, you bought online. You’ll need to speak to our Internet team”.

“Hello Internet Team. I have a problem, and I’ve spoken to many people. I am assured you can help me.”

“No. We can’t change the address because you paid by credit card.”

“But here’s the problem. I am not at home during the day anymore. You don’t deliver evenings and weekends, and you don’t have a collection point.”

“Can’t help you. Sorry.”

So I say, “I will have to send it back and have a refund”.

“Certainly, Sir, no problem.”

“So, you would rather give me my money back than work with me to arrange delivery. Isn’t that rather short-sighted? Why would I ever shop with you again?”

“Sorry, that’s our policy. Somebody will call within the hour to confirm the refund”.

That was Thursday morning. Nobody has called.

Agggggggggghhhhh

Paris In The Summer

I have never been so hot while in meetings – which I think added to the sense of exhaustion by the time my head hit my pillow.

I don’t know what to think. I am so tired. I had a business meeting in Paris on Monday. Travelled Eurostar. It’s usually fabulous. Up at 04.30 to make the 06.20 train was OK, but the 18:16 return train was delayed by four (count them, 4) hours (sat on the train for 2 of them), and so I wasn’t actually back at my house until nearly 1am.

21+ hour day – now that’s what I call working. And I probably didn’t achieve very much 🙂

Paris was baking. I have never been so hot while in meetings – which I think added to the sense of exhaustion by the time my head hit my pillow.

Have you ever thought about how the internet is feeling (apparently, it has emotions)?

Right now, it’s looking The current mood of the Internet at www.imood.com (honest).

Welcome To Curnow.Org

And now they say go.

My website has been online for a number of years (in fact, my first website was in late 1993 on the backend of the web servers of the company I was working for). Over the years, I have kept up various parts of the site, taken others down, and generally tended it like you would a garden that you let go “back to nature”. To be honest, I left it alone. Some of the more cringe-worthy stuff may be moved into this new look (but I doubt it), and my site devoted to pictures of satellite dishes has been, forever, lost (and, honestly, I am sad about that).

So it was time for a revamp. Time to do something different with my site, and that’s when I decided that maintaining a site was hard work and there must have been an easier way. I had been experimenting with various blogging tools for a year or so and never settled on anything I felt wholly comfortable with. Then, taking a walk down one of the web’s odder byways, I stumbled across Movable Type and decided that, if I was serious about making it easier to maintain my site more often, then this was the tool I was going to use. And so here we are …

I have now given myself the power to do this stuff quickly and efficiently. At last, I can update my site easily. But when it comes to the moment of truth, I expect the next few entries to be pointless links to (vaguely) interesting stuff until such time as I find my voice again.

Update August 2008: You may have noticed that the site is no longer powered by Movable Type. I’ve switched to WordPress, which my hosting company, Dreamhost, updates automatically for me.