Australia Post strikes again

After taking 9 days to shift a small (and I mean sub-paperback book sized) parcel from Perth to Melbourne, yesterday afternoon I received this notification from Australia Post:

Great... now I've got to waste at least one more day before I can get my gear.

But wait... that's not my local post office.  It's not even the right suburb.  Bosch?  Closed?  WTF?  And I know that area pretty well, and I reckon I know what that address is.  Yep, I'm right.  Post office my arse.

Ring up AusPost and put it to the nice lady I spoke to that the address I'm being directed to is a large commercial manufacturing and warehousing facility for a German electrical multinational, and that it seemed unlikely that to present myself there would result in the intended and desired outcome.

Much tapping of keyboards immediately ensues, along with hushed consultations with other staff.

AusPost - Am I *sure* that's not a postal depot or something?

Me - Pretty sure, I drive past it about once a fortnight and it still looks like a factory to me.

AusPost - Any chance it's closed?

Me - Probably not since the weekend, and I expect the mate I saw on Sunday who works there would have mentioned it if so.

AusPost - Ah.

More tapping of keyboards.

AusPost - We suspect it's been mis-scanned... since we can only see the same information as you can, we can't locate it either.  We'll have to do a lost item search.

Me - Awesome!  Might Sir inquire as to how long that will take?

AusPost - Well, normally a couple of weeks, and you'll have to get the sender to report the item lost - only they can initiate that process.

Me - Excuse me?!?  You've obviously got the item, it's apparently in Melbourne, you're the ones who lose it through mishandling, and you've sent me a notification for it... but I now have to go back and get the sender to report it lost?  How does that add any value to the process whatsoever?

AusPost - That's the way it works....

Me - It seems very much that that's the way it bloody well doesn't work to me!  Look, the item was being delivered to my home address, right?

AusPost - Um... I'm not sure.

Me - Why FFS?  If I look at the tracking history for the parcel on the web, it clearly shows the delivery address - are you telling me that I can see more as a customer on the web than your own internal systems do?

AusPost - Erm...

Me - In the name of preservation of sanity, let's take it as given that it was being delivered to my home address for the moment.  On every single occasion past, when an item requiring a signature couldn't be delivered, it ends up at the AusPost at my local shopping centre.  So it would seem likely to me that that is what has happened on this occasion too, yes?

AusPost - Erm... yes, probably.

Me - Excellent, we progress.  Now, if I was to ring up Fuckwits'R'Us and put the question to them as to whether my item was there, all I will get is some peabrain who wants a tracking number, which will then tell them the item in question is sitting at a manufactory 10 kilometres away.  The peabrain won't see the slightest issue with that and I will be back precisely where I am now.  And that's assuming there is actually a documented contact number for Peabrain Central, which I bet there bloody well isn't, because your organisation carefully removed them all some time ago.  Do you think that your ongoing assistance today might extend to ringing them up and exploring the idea of them actually looking for the thing?

AusPost - Um... erm... can I put you on hold for a while?

Me - That was inevitable at some point, so I have been mentally preparing myself.  Please proceed.

While she talks to Peabrain Central, I ring up SWMBO at home, get her to grab the come-and-collect me card from the letterbox, and skedaddle up to the post office.

AusPost - OK... we've found the item!  You can collect it from the local post office.

Me - Excellent.  Excelsior.  Could you please communicate to Peabrain Central that my wife is standing in their shopfront now.  Her name is xxx.  She's blonde, is wearing purple glasses, she'll be the one with the tendrils of smoke coming out of her ears.  I suggest approaching in line of sight.

So, ultimately, I have my parcel.

The english language does not contain words to express my feelings that the fucking shop sent me the wrong gear.

Cracked stab #2

Cracked one of my long rods for the second time the other weekend - carbon tube came loose from the base stud.  No catastrophic failure or anything, I only noticed it when I went to do it up and it obviously spun the tube on the stud slightly.

I've already glued this stab up once before with 24 hour epoxy and clamping, but apparently my glue-jitsu was insufficient to the task.  I'm suspecting the gelcoat surface of the inside of the rod is just too slick to stick to.

I finally wrestled the stud out and the last batch of epoxy was still bonded to the alloy stud OK, so I cleaned it all off and scrubbed the inside of the tube out with a wire wheel on a Dremel, then cleaned everything with acetone.

This time I have busted out the 72-hour cure epoxy and I'll see how it goes.  I made up a clamp to hold everything from moving for the full cure time, although to be honest I think it was more just preventing any form of movement, because the mating surfaces are a concentric circle thing.

The excess I left to cure up seemed to cure pretty well so I'll see how it goes.

If this doesn't work then I've got NFI what I'm going to do with it.  I could try to scrounge up some industrial grade adhesive, but even the smallest container of of it costs about as much as it would to just replace the rod.

Rag head photo bomb

Magic smoke escaped

Got presented with an external HDD housing and power supply yesterday, with the complaint that "it made a bad smell, and won't go".

Brief inspection yielded a possible clue as to why.

I honestly have no idea why the manufacturers of these things persist in using an incredibly fragile plug that is utterly unnecessary to carry a single DC voltage to the enclosure electronics - it has its own onboard DC-DC supply to run the logic board, USB interface chipset, HDD supply etc.

Honestly, if you can't use a simple barrel plug then I can only assume you are slime sucking scum who deliberately use a fragile connector in the hope that people will wreck them and buy another one.

Seriously, a quality external enclosure with a decent power supply arrangement costs a lousy 45 bucks.  Stop rewarding crappy asian manufacturing companies with your business.

Stupid scammers

Scam attempt 87,365 for the year.

It helps if you read it with an indian accent to help explain the rubbish grammar.  FFS people, if you're going to try and scam someone, at least try and get it to the point where it looks like it might be genuine.

This couldn't be more obviously fake unless they typed "please do the needful" at the bottom of the thing.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Your parcel (1) has been dispatched with Australia Post.

The courier company was not able to deliver your parcel by your address.

Label is enclosed to the letter. Print a label and show it at your post office.

Label: RYR3337216

To view/download your label please click here or follow the link below :

https://eparceltrack.auspost.com.au/external/webui/aspx?LabelCode=label_3337216

**Please note that this is an automatically generated email - replies will not be answered.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Final ironic twist - the URL behind the code actually points to:

https://www.sugarsync.comDELIBERATELY_BROKEN/pf/D3593997_270_623923013?directDownload=true

Sugarsync are a cloud file storage, hosting and collaboration company that markets themselves to business users.  Mmm, yeah, I'd like to put my business files on your hijacked webserver....

Seagate strikes again

Just got home and opened a parcel from a family-in-law member, containing a hard drive pulled from a computer a week ago by their local shop.  Drive wasn't reading properly but had heaps of unbacked up data they really didn't want to lose - pictures, correspondence, the usual stuff.

I opened the box and I don't know what made me cringe harder - seeing it was a Seagate Baracuda 1TB 3.5", or that it was in an antistatic pouch, but rattling around totally loose in the box with zero padding or fill whatsoever.

I doubt this one is coming back to us, but let's try anyway.

Dug out my Archgon HDD dock (not pretty, but goes like a shower of the proverbial) and powered it up, and all I'm getting is click... click... click.  Hmm.

Pulled the drive out and gave it a single gentle tap on both sides on the desk, back into the dock and power on, and this time it sounds like an episode of Will It Blend overlaid with the sound of a piece of blue metal stuck between a brake rotor and caliper housing.

Family-in-law member has been told (not educated, that would imply they learned something) not to buy Seagate and sent sadly on their way.

RAID whoops

IT horror story of the day from a friend in the US –

 

Corporation’s large RAID array drops disk 1.  They don’t have a new spare, so under protest and on direct order of the IT manager, they insert a used disk.  The array rebuild starts.

 

5 minutes later, they’ve got a flood of tickets from users unable to access network shares, and alarms going off from applications that have dependencies on them.

 

Investigation showed that the particular RAID controller will rebuild the array from NVRAM configuration… unless it finds a working schema on disk 1, then it uses that by default.  Which is a problem if your disk 1 used to be disk 1 in another array with a different schema.

 

Whoops.