miscellany

Nov 08

The Jessops Retail Fail Saga - intermission

If you’ve been following the saga so far: any suggestions for appropriate behaviour moving forward?

The Jessops Retail Fail Saga (part 2 of ?)

The rain dampened our Friday night hopes of catching a fireworks display before I travelled - I suddenly got a real jones for Bonfire night celebrations, knowing I was going to be in Chicago and miss the biggest and baddest displays on Saturday evening, and anyway, I’d come back late and spitting angry after the fiasco in Jessops, so I pretty much wrote the evening off and had a quiet one in with the missus.

Saturday morning. I’d been promised a 9am call from the manager. 9.30am, having heard nothing, I called the store. The manager apologised, saying that the member of staff that was supposed to pass on the details of what happened was stuck on a tube somewhere. The short of the conversation was that, if I wanted a swift resolution, I’d probably have to go into the store. They’d need to get on to their merchant services, who’d probably ask me all kinds of questions about my card/account. I was in two minds - I had access to other money, and I had no intention of buying the camera from Jessops, so it really was just a matter of reversing the two “failed” transactions (which Jessops had indicated would take up to 4 working days) and finding somewhere else to get the camera from. I’d lose a days worth of images, but hey - such is life.

In the end, once I’d finished packing and tidying up the flat, I decided take a detour on my way to Heathrow and stop at the store. I figured I could spare maybe half an hour, and surely it wouldn’t take more than that to resolve, right?

Just as I was arriving at the store, I was called (yep - on the mobile) by the member of staff that had told me he wasn’t able to help me on Friday. He was asking for the authorisation codes for the two “failed” transactions (which I’d managed to get from my bank while I was in the store, on Friday, and had told him that I had). I told him I was already at the store - an almost comical moment. We met face to face, he called HSBC merchant services, and spent a few minutes explaining the situation. During this conversation, it slowly dawned that they weren’t going to ask me any questions at all. I COULD HAVE HANDLED EVERYTHING OVER THE PHONE. Being there would have made no difference.

HSBC said that the money was in “holding” - a kind of limbo between my account and Jessops (my bank, Abbey, had explained as much on Friday, which is why they couldn’t do anything from their end). HSBC went on to say that there wasn’t much they could do. I don’t really need to detail what happened next - let’s just say that I became very persuasive - but I eventually managed to encourage the person on the other end of the line to expedite the situation. He spoke to my bank directly, and promised that he’d fax Abbey with instructions to cancel. Abbey would then take care of it from their end, and the whole thing should be resolved in four hours.

I could have cursed and blinded. I could have thrown a tantrum. I could have let the south-east Londoner (Lewisham, to be precise) loose. I could have channelled my mother (she’s an expert in these kinds of situations, all righteous fury and indignation), but I had a plane to catch, and however frustrating the situation was, I couldn’t really see much else that I could do. I left, once again, with no camera, and a promise to have all of the money back in my account in four hours.

Fast forward through a few hours of travel to the airport, meeting with the team and other travelling companions, a quick bite to eat. Pause for a moment to buy THE SAME CAMERA, WITH AN 18-55mm KIT LENS FOR ONLY £10 MORE AT CURRYS IN THE AIRPORT (someone told me that the lens is worth £100, and I really don’t use it in my practise, so I may well sell it on for further savings…) on card for a different account.

Resume playback. Just as I’m boarding the plane, I call my bank. I’m in a good mood. The team are already presenting themselves as some really nice kids, and I’ve got a good feeling about the trip. I’m just calling to put my mind at rest before I travel, to confirm that all of my money is where it should be. The person I speak to says that no money has been returned to my account. Odd. She checks card services, and 10 minutes later (these calls aren’t free, particularly on a mobile!) she returns with the bad news.

The fax was never sent. There were no instructions to cancel.

I’m leaving the country in 20 minutes, and Jessops still has £1120 of my money for a transaction that never happened.

There’ll now be a short intermission before we continue with part 3.

The Jessops Retail Fail Saga (part 1 of ?)

Currently writing from a futon in Chicago. It’s a clear, fresh sunny morning. The flight over was uneventful, and the team I’m over with (adults and students) are a beautiful bunch. It’s going to be a beautiful week.

And that’s in spite of Jessops.

For anyone that doesn’t know, I like taking pictures. I’m over in Chicago with a team of young poets - this year’s highest scoring team from the London Teenage Poetry SLAM project that I run - and it’s a great opportunity to play with a camera, but more importantly, to document a once-in-a-lifetime experience for a team of 8 young east London poets, many of whom haven’t been to America before.

I sold my Canon 350D to a friend on Friday evening. It was surprisingly easy to part with - it’s been my photographic workhorse for the past few years, and I’ve learned to love it in new ways since I started experimenting with some of my fast Pentax manual lenses in low light (I’m a natural light photographer and rarely if ever use flash). One of the things that made it easy to part with was the plan to upgrade to a Canon 500D. Straight after handing over my 350D, I walked down to New Oxford Street, to Jessops to buy the upgrade. I’ve already got lenses so I just wanted a new body, which Jessops sells for £529 - not the best price, and I could have got it online for cheaper, but I wanted it ready for travel on Saturday, so I was willing to stump up a little extra cash to have it in hand.

And so began the drama. The sales assistant asked for my card. I entered my pin… and the screen on the salespoint returned to a “welcome to Jessops” greeting. No receipt. The assistant suggested that the connection had dropped during the transaction, and that we should try again. Which we did. Same result. We moved to another till. Same result. The assistant suggested waiting a bit, to see what happened when someone else made a purchase, which happened approximately 10 minutes later, with no problems. So we tried again. Pin accepted, out churns a receipt: transaction declined.

What? I’d done a bit of shopping that evening (new battery for my Macbook Pro, some knitwear from Uniqlo) but a quick mental calculation suggested that I should have had more than enough money in my account for the purchase. I wasn’t going to give up on the camera (I had it in my hand!) and something just didn’t seem right, so I called my bank on the spot (thank the lord for telephone banking) to figure out what happened.

Those ‘failed’ transactions? They didn’t fail. Jessops’ till took £1120 from my current account, without producing a receipt or any other record of a successful transaction.

So, to clarify, I was left on Friday evening with a near cleaned out current account, no camera to show for it, no funds in my current account purchase an alternative, and no alternative card on me to pursue the sale elsewhere. Jessops staff said there was nothing they could do: their head office was closed, and their manager was out of the store (they were closing at 7pm). I ended up spending close to an hour in the store between their staff and my bank (not a free call!) and finally had to leave the store with no camera, and no money. Nothing but a promise that the manager would be in on Saturday morning (the day I was flying to Chicago).

We’ll now take a break, before continuing with part 2.

RIP: the clothes peg -

bobulate:

Wooden clothes pegs, an invention of the American sect, the Shakers, have been mothballed and are no longer manufactured in the United States. Why? A sharp decline in the use of clothes lines:

Some 80 per cent of US households own and operate a tumble dryer, with millions more of us going down the street to a laundromat. The average American household dries eight loads of washing a week; over 2 million households do 15 loads a week or more.

Further, there’s a stigma to the display of a clothes line in America:

Clothes lines are viewed as flags of poverty, yet we could be saving 10 percent on energy costs if we did our laundry the green way. Clothes lines evoke a negative emotional reaction from many Americans, who view them as flags of poverty. Property owners often fear that a clothes line in their neighbourhood will lower the value of their house.

There’s also a strange brand of prudery at play. Middle-aged men, prone to scanning the web for all manner of scantily clad beings, do not want to see oversized bloomers out their window.

Projects like Project Laundry List could be turning things around and studies such as Pew giving insight.

[Image: “Original wooden pegs. The two on the left, the oldest of the collection, are known as ‘gipsy clothes pegs’ from the beginning of the 20th century.]

[via]

I currently live in a tiny flat, so hadn’t thought about this as an issue, but now I come to think of it I haven’t seen a clothesline in a very long time…

Nov 03

[video]

Nov 02

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-11-1) -

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

Oct 27

Email Workflow

Still need to find a home for things like this. Here will do for now.

The following depends on a familiarity with IMAP and Mail.App’s smart folders (OS X). My PC support tech days are long behind me, so I have no idea how to replicate this set up on a Windows machine. Also, I use MailTags and MailActOn for easy keystroke filing of email.

SET UP

- Set up an ‘Action’ folder in Mail.app. Just a regular IMAP folder for all actionable items.
- Set up an ‘Action Urgently’ smart folder, showing all messages in the ‘Action’ folder that are marked as ‘High Priority’
- Set up an ‘Action Today’ smart folder, showing only messages in the ‘Action’ folder that you received yesterday.
- Set up an ‘Action When I Can’ smart folder (optional) - shows you email that isn’t in ‘Action Today’, or ‘Action Urgently’

Using smart folders, there’s little I have to do manually - at the end of the day, actionable messages left in ‘Action Today’ tick over into ‘Action When I can’. Also, any of today’s messages that were filed in my ‘Action’ folder will automatically show up in my “Action Today” folder tomorrow.

PROCESSING

First email session of the day:
- clear your “Action Urgently’ folder
- clear your “Action Today’ folder
IN THAT ORDER.

If you haven’t got the time to do so all in one chunk, break it into sessions during the day. The goal is to deal with all of yesterday’s actionable email.

The important idea, as put forward by Mark Forster, is that yesterday’s email is always finite, and won’t be added to. It gives you a solid, attainable finishing line to aim towards.

For the rest of the day, whenever you check email:
- if it’s urgent and you’ve got the time to deal with it, deal with it.
- if it’s actionable but not urgent, file it in your action folder. You’ll deal with it tomorrow.
- Once a week, review your ‘Action When I Can’ folder and deal with anything that’s slipped through. Because you’re human, and things will inevitably slip through.

The beauty of IMAP means that, wherever you can access your email, you can file the actionable emails for later attention in the appropriate folder. If you’ve got an iPhone or another mobile device that doesn’t allow you to set flags or priority levels for email, you may want to create a separate folder to house your ‘Urgent’ emails, as opposed to just a smart folder. That way (using IMAP) you’re totally in sync wherever you are (Mail.app on the iPhone doesn’t show smart folders). I usually pick up on urgent items in my morning review, so I haven’t found this necessary.

None of this is rocket science - it’s just cobbled together from other tips and hacks I’ve found over the years.

Resist the way that incoming email messes with your ability to focus on the things that really need your attention.

Oct 26

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-10-25) -

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

Oct 24

“i experienced the taste of the sirocco in her mouth. and later, in the hotel room—her eyes spinning like the tires of an overturned taxi; my heart raging like the headlights of a policecar, one of them shot out.” —

George Wallace, Poetry: Issue 30 - The Cortland Review

Just found George Wallace via Robert Peake. Definitely interested in picking up some more of his work…

Oct 22

“Western laziness … consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so there is no time at all to confront the real issues. This form of laziness lies in our failure to choose worthwhile applications for our energy.” —

Sogyal Rinpiche

swissmiss | Being Lazy by doing too much