Tag Archives: Amazon

Tests, Telephones and Temporary Blindness

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

The day started badly. Knowing that I had a moderately early appointment for a blood test, I tried to get an early night (by my insomniac standards), woke at five feeling hot (some days the heating feels hotter than others) and ended up unable to get back to sleep.

Eventually I got up, answered a few emails, made breakfast, woke Julia (who had no trouble sleeping this morning) and set off for the doctor. The road was closed, but the diversion signs were clear. While we were following the diversion I mentioned to Julia it seemed a strange sort of route, but didn’t think any more of it until we got to a sign that sent us back the way we had come from, and took us right back to the start of the detour. Other people were ignoring the signs, so we did. There was no road closure and no need to use another route. Strange . . .

We were still early despite this and I secured a good seat in the waiting room (the high, wide one with arms). It’s ideal for large, creaking people like me, but is usually taken by someone who clearly doesn’t need it. And today, instead of being able to enjoy it, I was called through early.

The nurse, when I asked, told me the roadworks have been like that for three weeks, nothing has happened and they are beginning to suspect an elaborate joke.

It’s Christmas . . .

I had to have two blood tests, one the normal INR test, the other a repeat of the one I did a month ago to allow me to keep having anti-arthritis drugs. For the second time the NHS has failed to access the results and are accusing me of not having the test done. I don’t mind that too much, but I object to them threatening to take the drugs away because of something that is their fault. The telephone call I made to their answering machine bordered on terse.

On getting home I sat at the computer, picked up my glasses and dropped something on the floor. I couldn’t see what it was, so I put the glasses on and turned to the screen. The screen was badly blurred and I found I couldn’t focus. For a moment, I admit I panicked. Then I realised that the frame had split and it was a lens that had fallen to the floor.

That was a relief. It’s annoying that it had broken but I buy them by the box from Amazon and still have several pairs yet. It’s probably time to order another box. So I did. I could have had some which block blue light, which are supposed to be better for computer users, but I checked on-line and there is actually no evidence to support this, just people trying to sell more glasses.

Glasses from Amazon. With hindsight, the zebra pattern was a mistake.

Nor did I buy the set of stainless steel dental tools that would allow me to clean my own plaque. Very tempting at just under £7 a set, but common sense dictates against buying cheap tools and starting to prod around in a mouth of ageing teeth. I have the same feelings about expensive tools too.

Time to make lunch now, so I will go.

A Senior Moment, a Problem with Amazon and a Breakdown

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This morning at 9am I noted that my Amazon delivery had only six more stops before arrival and was planning on delivering between 9.30 and 11.00. A bit later, it was forecasting 10.30-12.30 and only had one more stop to do. It was actually shown as being on the street.

At that point I made the decision to travel to Nottingham to pick it up. Yes, having ordered each item of a three item order to come to Peterborough (after carefully calculating which days I would be here), I pressed the button to purchase everything in my basket. This must have activated the default setting, which is still the Nottingham house, and sent everything to the wrong address. I seem incapable of learning.

Anyway, I have now made suitable adjustments to my details and this shouldn’t happen again.

When we arrived, there was no delivery. The slot had moved on, the van was still nearby and it only had a few more drops before me.

“The driver has to make a few more deliveries on the way to your address” it said.

By the time we left Nottingham at 2pm the time slot had moved round to “Before 10pm” and the van was, again, only a couple of streets away. It was still telling me “The driver has to make a few more deliveries on the way to your address”.

We were back in Peterborough by 4pm. At 5.03pm I had an email to tell me that the packages had been “handed to resident”. Well, I either have a doppelganger, or a burglar, or Amazon is lying.

What do you think?

Just to add to my delight, I am slicing coleslaw by the light of a desk lamp as the starter in the fluorescent tube has broken and we now have no light in the kitchen. Nowhere local that stocks them is open, nowhere that is open stocks them. My sister and Julia have just been on a wild goose chase and are now going to my sister’s house to bring another standard lamp.

What sort of house has a box of various spare bulbs but no replacement starter. If only I’d known about it earlier I could have brought one down from Nottingham . . .

What a night to break down, what an end to the year.

Plums and Problems

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Thinking of it, I shouldn’t have been surprised it was a poor day today. Yesterday my new batteries arrived. When I had ordered them – eight AAA batteries and a charger Amazon had suggested that I might like to try the latest model instead, so I did. The batteries seemed better and it was only a few pounds more.

The only problem was that they were AA batteries. I am annoyed at myself for not reading the details more carefully, and even more annoyed with Amazon for suggesting I order the wrong thing when I was well on my way to ordering the right thing before they interfered. They will have to go back, and because I don’t intend giving them another £15 while I wait for the £19 refund, I had to get a card of normal, non-rechargeable batteries. All my good intentions have gone for nothing, but at least I have my illuminated magnifying glass back. I had missed it.

Then I found I can no longer access my “Reader” from the bar at the top of my WP site. I have tried asking for help but it was not a lot of use. I can, at the moment, access the reader by using a link. However, I can’t seem to add a link permanently As I am trying to be a nicer person I will add no more..

We picked plums this afternoon. Well, Julia picked plums. I confined myself to a supervisory role. Some have already gone over, and the remaining ones are a poor selection – there has been too much rain this year and the fruit is watery and tasteless. We have had to leave some on as the picking tool has gone missing since last summer (I suspect it has been put away somewhere safe), we are not safe on stepladders these days, and I have let the pruning get out of control. However, that will be a problem for the new owner if all goes according to plan.

I’m now going to eat another plum and cogitate on writing poetry about eating fruit from the garden.

Reflected Plums – Victoria

Adventures with Amazon

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View from the office

My printer finally arrived today and I was allowed to have it.

On Thursday Amazon delivered some display cases and sent me an email with a one time pass code that I would need to take delivery of my new printer. In the evening I had another email telling me that there was a problem with my delivery. It was, to say the least, short on detail.

So, my free next day delivery was not “next day”.

Garden harvest – yes, baby carrots

On Friday the printer arrived whilst I was on the phone to the company that delivers my drugs. I call them that because it sounds more exciting than “the company that delivers my medication” and it’s easier than learning to spell Imunimulab. I have found over the years that if I put any effort into learning spellings they change my medication. It’s like when I finally learned to spell eczema: they changed the diagnosis to psoriasis.

They asked for the OTP. I gave it to them. It didn’t work so they took the printer away again. At that point I checked my emails and found they had sent a new OTP. They hadn’t told me I’d need another one.

Finally, today, I received the printer and managed to give them a correct code. I haven’t tried to set the printer up yet as I feel it is bound to be a disaster after all that has already happened. Maybe tomorrow . . .

Wasp exploring a knife smeared with jam

Meanwhile, I finished my piece on Nottingham Transport Tokens for the NSN Facebook page and added the finishing touches to the one of the medallions commemorating the opening of the carillon in Loughborough. I will probably add a few extra bits and post it on the blog. It’s much more interesting than you think once you start researching.

Nettle Soup

Pictures are from August 2015. Time flies.

£7.99 – an unconsidered trifle

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I’ve just been looking at books of haibun. A lot of them are around the £17 mark, which is a lot for a slim volume of poetry, particularly when some are by writers I don’t particularly care for, or have never heard of. I did find one volume that was more modestly priced, and by someone I like as a writer and a person, so I thought I’d give it a go. I’ve already ordered one book of poetry this week, another wouldn’t, I decided, do any harm.

Then Amazon stepped in. and tried to force me to take out a subscription to Amazon Prime. At one time you could often get free P&P if you looked round and accepted that delivery would take a few days extra. Now you have to pay £7.99 a month. Or I can pay £3.99 P&P for a 50 page poetry pamphlet. Cost, I believe, around £1.29 plus an envelope and the cost of slipping it in and sealing the flap. It’s not worth £3.99, and it never used to be £3.99. They are just trying to push me into Prime membership, and I don’t want it. Even at £3.99 I would have to order three items a month to get any benefit, and I don’t order three items a month.

If I did, I’d buy from eBay as I may as well support the manipulative tax-evading giant that helps pay my wages, rather than the manipulative tax-evading giant that doesn’t. Yes, there are other benefits attached to Prime, but as I don’t currently use them (or know what they are) I’m sure I can live without them.

There must be something magic about the figure of £7.99 a month. If I ever go back to Microsoft office it will cost me £7.99 a month. So does Readly, the magazine service, but I do get value for money there most months. Other things seem to end up at £7.99 too. It’s the sort of figure that doesn’t seem frightening in the same way that £9.99 or £10.99 does, a sort of 21st Century stealth tax on modern life.

However, for the time being I’m not falling for it, and I’m not going to be forced into it, or into paying £3.99 for P&P.

Amazon hasn’t lost a lot, because my purchase is insignificant, but I have lost out by not having the book and the poet has lost out by not having a sale. Eventually this is how the world will go – everybody either bowing to Amazon or suffering a second class life if they dare to resist.

Three Weeks In and I’ve Had Enough

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I’m beginning to wilt under the pressure and nearly went shopping today on the way back from dropping Julia at work. We don’t need any groceries but the days are not as much fun in this second lockdown as Julia is at work and I’m beginning to find myself feeling a little lonely after three weeks of isolation without company. Lockdown One – lie-ins, sunshine and company. Lockdown Two – up at 6.45, cold and lonely. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for people living on their own all through the first lockdown. I thought of the lack of freedom as the main problem, not loneliness. I have plenty to do so I don’t usually feel lonely. But I don’t usually have this much time to myself.

One thing I’ve noticed about the new computer is that it’s virtually silent and the case doesn’t even get warm despite being on for hours. This is very different from the old one.

Highpoint of the day has ben talking (a) to a scammer and (b) to Amazon customer services.

The first was an obvious scam because Amazon don’t have my home phone number so I asked if though t I was stupid enough to hand over my bank details to a random caller. He was very good at pretending to have hurt feelings. However, the third time I explained I thought he should have some sort of ID he put the phone down mid-sentence. I’m not sure even an Amazon employee would be that rude.

Of course, I had to go to my account to check it just in case and managed to lock myself out. They now send One Time Passwords over the phone as links rather than codes. I’m not online with my phone so I can’t use them and had to ring up. To be fair, once we established that I had no intention of linking my phone to the internet, it all went quite smoothly as two polite, cheerful and intelligent members of staff sorted it all out for me. It’s not often you’ll here me say that after dealing with a customer helpline, so remember this moment. It’s ten out of ten for Amazon.

I don’t know why everyone needs you to be linked to the internet. Back in the 70s you didn’t have to walk round with a pocketful of carrier pigeons so why do we need a phone for everything?

And yes, it’s another cat. A good, old-fashioned cat that doesn’t need you to be linked to the internet so that it can treat you with indifference. On the other hand, if you die alone, a mobile phone won’t start to eat you.

It’s not actually a stamp, they just added a few pictures to the sheet of stamps – first time we had some I didn’t realise and counted it as a First Class Stamp.

Another Forgotten Title

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Yesterday passed in a blur of activity.

Following straight on from the last post I spent half an hour reading other blogs, which included visiting India, the Philippines and Scotland. I then sharpened my brains with a cup of tea and a bit of sorting.

Another hour and I had sorted books, visited the New Forest by blog and read a couple of chapters of a book on how to write poetry. He’s just moving on to the chapter about bad poetry. I like that one. Time to put a pasty in the oven and get back to reading.

This is part of my commitment to self-education. As such, it is exempt from charges of skiving or procrastination.

I burnt the pasty because I got carried away reading.

After a lunch of soup and pasty flambé, I moved on to more sorting, wrote a couple of haibun (prose only – the haiku need time), picking Julia up from work, washed up, cooked tea (devilled sea bass with stir fry veg), finished the poetry book (it was only short), watched TV and fell asleep in the chair.

Today I rose at 6.49 – bladder-related rather than self-discipline) and came down to write before Julia gets up. It’s her day off. She has an exciting day of domestic chores in mind. I think she ought to relax.

I am not sure how I feel about sea bass. I’ve seen fish cooked so many times on TV I have to say that it went easily. It’s just that I don’t like fish that much. Plus, they were not generous fillets.

However, Julia said she enjoyed it.

On that subject, we had one parcel yesterday, containing the back-up gift. This was posted with a 48 hour guarantee but took four days. The other arrived yesterday, having been posted the day before the other one. It had a big orange Signed For sticker, and was left stuck in the letterbox with the sticker showing to people who walked by in the street. It wasn’t too big for the letterbox, the postman just didn’t push it through.

I know that they are under pressure from Covid, but they are still charging full price for a service that they don’t provide, and leaving the orange sticker showing is like advertising the envelope contains an item of value.

At least it’s all done. I’m going to have to order weeks in advance for Christmas.

Meanwhile, back at the shredder, I fed an oiled sheet through after reading the 20 pages instruction manual. Yes, twenty pages, Seven languages.

Feed it through the shredder like a piece of paper. Then run the machine in reverse for 10 seconds. That’s it.

A couple of pictures – one of feeding a sheet into a shredder and one featuring a button marked “R”.

20 pages!

They came in cardboard box inside a stiffened card envelope. If Amazon really are committed to saving the world, as their TV adverts claim, I know where they can start…

Sorry, posted without a title. Have just corrected that.

A Trip to Town

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As if I haven’t suffered enough already it’s the Numismatic Society of Nottingham tonight and the subject is the Pre-Decimal Currencies of Scandinavia. As I know nothing about the subject there is a good chance I will leave the meeting after having been thoroughly educated. However, as I have absolutely no interest in the subject there’s a good chance someone will have to wake me up at the end.

I fell asleep in the auction last month but nobody noticed, which is good news, as I obviously didn’t snore. If I fall asleep tonight I may get away with it.

You’d think I didn’t really enjoy the meetings from my descriptions, but I assure you I do. There’s always something to learn and people to see.

This afternoon I broke a deeply ingrained habit and went into town. I am that desperate to find a birthday present. I did manage a small present, but the trip was mainly notable for a urinating tramp and a non-working car park ticket machine system which refused (a) to take payment and (b) to let me out even though I’d eventually sorted it out and paid..

And they wonder why people prefer Amazon.

Start with “You don’t have to pay £3.80 to park at Amazon as rude people push you out of the way, sales assistants sneer and tramps urinate in the bushes and swear at people who object.” After that, the decline of the High Street starts to look logical.

I’m now going to have a nice sit down in front of the fire before going out again as I’m feeling the cold. That’s something else you don’t have to worry about with Amazon. You can shop on Amazon whilst sitting by the fire.

Five Ounce Silver Coin

The coin went in the post this morning – five ounces of silver. It’s really a medallion but has been struck as a £10 coin of the Channel Island of Guernsey. No, I don’t know why they make them. Maybe they just have lots of silver.

More Trials and Tribulations

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It’s my 30th wedding anniversary next week, as I may have mentioned. I am married to a patient and forgiving woman with low standards in men. I am not sure if I have covered that before, but she certainly has. Last time she mentioned it was in relation to yesterday’s post.

It seems that if I’m the best that Western civilisation can mange it’s no wonder the world is in a mess. Amongst talk of male chauvinism, lazy stereotyping and Les Dawson (who was a well-upholstered British comedian with a great repertoire of mother-in-law jokes) it emerged that she felt I had slandered her in relation to snoring.

If I had my time over again I will resist the urge to explain that it was libel, not slander. It did not really help. Accuracy, it seems, is not always appreciated.

Fortunately, I have managed, by a mix of low cunning and good luck, to work out what to get Julia for a wedding anniversary present – perfume. I ordered it a couple of days ago from Amazon and it was delivered this afternoon.

Unfortunately,they didn’t deliver it to me.

They emailed this morning to say it would be delivered today, then again to say it had been left with a neighbour. I assumed that this meant it had been delivered to the home address despite me specifying the work address.

On my return home I found this wasn’t the case. There was no card through the door. So I checked on-line. They had delivered it to a neighbour of the shop, at 3.41, despite me being at work until 4.30.

I have just had a frustrating on-line “conversation” trying to find out how this could be. They are very apologetic, but short on facts.

I was very tempted to point out that if I wanted a bad parcel delivery service I would have engaged Hermes. In terms of poor service – slowness, half the parcel missing after a “security check”, theft and drivers cutting corners, Hermes are unequalled. I use them whenever I feel the need to have a delivery go unpredictably wrong. They rarely disappoint.

At least with Amazon it’s a one-stop situation – you buy from them direct and they even pack the soon-to-be-lost parcel for you. It saves time, but, to be honest, I do feel a certain loyalty to Hermes after all those hours chatting on the phone asking where my parcel is, or why my customer has just rung to complain half of it is missing.

There are, to be fair, other bad carriers apart from Hermes. You could give Parcelforce a try and, if you fancy a treat of a retro nature, move some goods by British Rail.

I will say no more. The anecdote about British Rail losing 400 day-old chicks is not very entertaining. Nor is the story of my marathon drive to track them down.

This is probably a good time to finish. More reused photos again as I keep leaving my camera at work. THey are a reminder of summer.

Small Tortoiseshell

Just a Quick Note

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Following my run of bad luck, I now have no charger for my laptop. I’m currently sharing it so I didn’t try to use it until ten minutes ago. At that point Number Two Son informed me that it wasn’t working.

That leaves me with 30 minutes battery life, hence the briefness of the post.

Hopefully a panic order for next day delivery from Amazon will produce a replacement tomorrow.

It never rains but it pours…

Apple Blossom

quercuscommunity

Life after the Care Farm