Apparently the top line is wrong

My OnePlus 2 has served me well, but the battery is starting to show its age, and it lacks certain features like Android Pay which I’d really like. So after a bit of reading around, I decided to show some brand loyalty and order their latest and greatest, the 5T.

There are some websites which offer it for a few tens of pounds cheaper than ordering direct from OnePlus, but a bit of digging into WHOIS revealed these to be run out of the Cayman Islands (despite a .co.uk suffix). So I decided not to touch those with a ten foot pole and stick to the “most official” source. Consequently, I wasn’t in the mood to spring a few pounds extra for expedited delivery – this not being one of those “I just broke my last phone” occasions, I reckoned I could wait a few days for my new toy. A few days, as it turned out, meant 16.

Day 0 – Sunday 18/3 – ordered from OnePlus, got all the confirmation e-mails, estimated dispatch on the 20th

Day 1 – Monday 19/3 – a text from DHL saying they’ll deliver on Thursday 22/3 (day 4) and giving me a tracking link.

Day 4 – Thursday 22/3 – DHL tracking claims the parcel arrived at their Oxford depot that morning. I’m at work (the delivery address) all day, and it doesn’t turn up. As late as 11pm, the tracking continues to estimate “by the end of the day”.

Day 5 – Friday 23/3 – Call from an 01235 number from someone claiming to work for DHL saying my shipment is “lost” and that this is being investigated.

Day 6 – Saturday 24/3 – raise a complaint with my credit card provider asking for a chargeback as I never got the goods. Told Mastercard requires you to wait 30 days. That doesn’t square with my reading of the relevant law, which talks about being able to do it sooner if a delivery date sooner than 30 days was agreed, but I didn’t push the point. I raised a complaint with OnePlus instead.

Day 8 – Monday 26/3 – my working day is interrupted several times by phone calls from DHL. Call #1 denies all knowledge of the Friday call and claims they only spotted a problem when OnePlus raised it with them. They promise to pass to another team. Call #2 is the other team telling me they’re on it. I sort of appreciate the personal touch, but reporting you have nothing to report might as well be done by text (like the original shipping notification).

Towards the end of this week, I get fed up of waiting and phone OnePlus (their UK customer support number is an Aldershot area code, but the people answering it sound distinctly American to me). I insist politely but firmly that their subcontractor’s mistake is not my problem, and it’s time for them to dispatch a replacement. The person on the phone forwards my request, narrowly avoiding me yelling at them for adding “…if possible” to the end of it.

Thankfully it seems they were about to reach that point without prompting – on day 11 (Thursday 29/3), DHL called to say the shipment was definitely lost, and OnePlus e-mailed asking for the address to dispatch the replacement to. I gave it to them, and they sent it priority. If I’d known they were going to do that, I would have given them my home address. As it was, I gave them work and consequently my new phone is (allegedly) sitting in the Oxford DHL depo, as it has been for the entire Easter holiday weekend.

I asked DHL how many parcels get “lost”. I was assured it’s “only about 1%”. I suppose I should have asked how many smartphone-sized parcels have something bad happen to them. The reason the tracking lies is that they use bar codes, and it would be too time-consuming to scan every parcel at each point in the journey. So they rely on scanning the pallet/container with lots of parcels at each point, and “arrived at Oxford” was based on that.

All in all, a bit of a mess. OnePlus handled it fairly well, DHL not so much. I’ll update tomorrow to confirm if the second one does actually reach me at work…

As for preventing this sort of thing, I’d gladly pay a few tens of pence more for delivery to fund the use of RFID tags for tracking, which could be checked individually at every point along the line (and presumably also be used to stop parcels “going missing” by walking out of a depot).

Update, day 16 (Tuesday 3/4) – no sign of the replacement at 17:56; a call to DHL confirms it never made it “out for delivery” and they’re opening an investigation. Really not amused now.

Spot the difference

After my success last year with the side repeater, I was defeated by the door lock module (the garage I gave up and paid a large amount to told me I’d done everything right except buying a too-cheap replacement part which was a dud). However, I pulled back ahead to 2-1 against the car tonight with a swap of the third brake light. All ready to not be an advisory when it goes for MOT on Monday.

So I’m catching the train south from Macclesfield to Oxford – something I’ve done plenty of times over the past eleven years. I don’t usually go for the last direct train of the day, but on this occasion, I did. 1949 out of Macclesfield, 2215 into Oxford. It’s direct, which is important when you’re lugging a large suitcase and some Christmas presents.

Things did not start well at Macclesfield, with the train arriving fully 45 minutes late and listed as going to Birmingham New Street. Unfortunately I have an 8AM Tesco delivery arriving at North HQ tomorrow, so giving up and trying again in the morning wasn’t something I wanted to do. So I dig into the National Rail app and discover I can still make it to Oxford by walking from Birmingham New Street to Moor Street, taking a local stopping train to Banbury, waiting for half an hour, and taking a local stopping train to Oxford – arriving at 0015. Properly tedious, but I do need to get home tonight, so I dig out a mince pie and prepare for the worst.

Sure enough, we get to Birmingham, the train terminates and they tell us all to get off. But on getting off, the signs on the platform make it look like the front half of our train is continuing to Reading (like it should have done all along). So I get on, sit in an empty first class carriage, and watch the signs on the platform switch from “expected now” to “delayed” and then the train moves off…

Panic. Am I about to end up in a depot somewhere in the Midlands, trapped on a train all night?

Moments later, the driver confirms we’re off to Reading as expected, and will make Oxford a mere 45 minutes behind schedule (time to re-arrange my taxi for the second time, sigh).

Why they couldn’t have communicated the train’s ultimate destination properly from the start, I have no idea. I was half minded to wait on the platform, in which case I could still be there, fuming that the train I wanted had gone without me because it wasn’t labelled properly.

Nought out of ten for communication, seven out of ten for still managing to get the train through the same night, and one compensation request coming up…

Update: I filed my compensation request from the train, using its own WiFi. Southern (who I bought the tickets via) do have a nice online process including uploading photos of the tickets, but why do I have to take any action? Given we have a national database of what trains were or were not on time, the statutory compensation ought to be refunded via the same means I bought the tickets through, automatically and without me having to do anything. I feel a letter to my MP coming on.

2018 should be an interesting year – I turn 30 (just two more years until a really significant round number). To kick it off, I’m giving up a few things for January…

Alcohol

Nothing surprising or controversial about this. I’ve done “dry January” for a few years now, and I find it helps me lose a bit of weight, save a few quid, and best of all, it reduces my alcohol consumption over the rest of the year by lowering my tolerance through the month off.

Cash

From 13 January in the UK (and the rest of the EU), the law will prevent merchants from charging extra for payment by card. I nearly exclusively use debit or credit cards these days anyway (Monzo is great), so now seems like a good time to try and run on them 100% and see how it goes. I find it much easier to budget if I have a full list of what I spent where, and obviously a card and a decent app allow that to be assembled automatically rather than from receipts. As recently as six months ago, there would have been a few blockers to my attempting this – but now that the buses and all the parking meters in Oxford take cards, it should be straightforward.

Amazon

While digging through my Amazon history to pull some receipts for an expenses claim at work, I was mildly horrified to see how much I’d spent personally with Amazon in 2017. I won’t go into details, but taking a month off supporting one of the giants of capitalism should be good for my soul (and wallet).

I’ll report back in February on how all this went…

A good blog post today from Adrian Kennard on Monzo. I, too, have recently got on to the full Monzo current account after having the pre-loaded debit card for a year or so. And it’s impressive. Being a proper current account now, it has a sort code (albeit one which various companies are taking their time to recognise as “real”) and an account number, and it supports BACS and faster payments in and out. These provide a good example of the hidden corners which Monzo doesn’t shy away from implementing, e.g. giving access to the sender’s sort code and account number so you can send money back to anyone who has sent it to you.

So that’s my personal banking all sorted and properly 21st century, though I’ll be waiting for Monzo to implement the current account switching service before I move fully  over. Which just leaves some other pots of money I manage: St Columba’s URC and the Oxon 20s and 30s Walkers. These are banked at CAF Bank and Unity Trust Bank.

There’s nothing really wrong with either of these – both offer bank accounts to charities, the main difference to personal current accounts being the requirement (by law) for multiple signatories to sign each cheque* or approve each outgoing BACS payment. But seeing Monzo pushing the frontiers reminds me of what both CAF and Unity are missing:

• No apps or mobile websites. Both have rather clunky online banking websites which have to be used on a desktop/laptop. Being able to initiate/approve payments on my phone whilst waiting for a bus would make my life as a volunteer treasurer a lot easier and mean people and suppliers waiting shorter times for their expenses payments.
• No real-time movement. At CAF, outgoing payments after 4pm don’t leave until 9am the next business day, and don’t always appear instantly at the other end. Incoming BACS payments do seem to appear instantly during business hours, but I’m not sure about the rest of the time.
• Can’t see into the hidden corners. There’s no visibility of the sender’s account details on incoming payments, which is a pity, as 90% of the people I pay expenses to in both cases have paid us in the past, and it would be neat to be able to send money back to them without having to ask for their account details over an insecure channel such as e-mail or SMS (or a piece of paper).

There are some people (e.g. Starling) who seem to be taking steps in a Monzo-like direction of modernity for business banking, but nobody seems to be doing it for charities. Given that CAF are now charging for their accounts (£5/month), I’d be up for paying £25/month to fund the development of more modern IT and features. But given how little of what I suggested at one of their focus groups a few years back has been implemented, I’m not holding my breath on that.

For the walking club, I could conceivably move to a challenger bank with no way to pay in cash or cheques, but St Columba’s will need some way of paying in the physical contents of the collection plate for a while yet…

*Naturally, there is no longer any such thing as an outgoing cheque for any organisation whose money I run, but we do get the odd incoming cheque still.