h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Many of us hate scratchy labels in clothes, but what about a much pettier hate; the sheer number of tags you get these days. In the past, all the info would be on a single tag, but nowadays you often have to leaf through a whole rolodex of taggage just to find what you want know.

My neighbours doing ing karaoke at 2:30 in the ing morning!!

I have a neighbour who regularly sings gospel in the wee small hours. However, she suffers poor mental health and can be excused.

I'm guessing that your neighbours are plain inconsiderate.

Suggest you treat them to a reciprocal arrangement tonight.

PP.

I think the reciprocal arrangement is much better delivered at 7am, thus prompting their hangover much earlier than they'd hoped.

Deb

Amazon dot com

Many of their items are from 3rd party vendors and they' know nothing' about your order and can do nothing to resolve a problem

Try not to deal with them unless you enjoy being annoyed!

F S

I'm with you on that one.

The amount of third party businesses trading through Amazon is daft, and a lot of them are less than dodgy. It really lowers my opinion of Amazon itself.

leave negative feedback and detail why - AFAIK they can't delete it and it will at least warn other potential customers.

(otoh: my experience with 3rd party sellers via Amazon has been very good, even down to no quibble refunds)

I have to say I adore Amazon and have never had a bad experience either with them directly or with any third party vendors. Once I ordered some spare phones for work and one of them proved faulty. The replacement (from a third party vendor) arrived before I'd even posted back the faulty one.

Although I do find their search facility extremely frustrating as there doesn't seem to be a way to search for only new products*. When looking for the above-mentioned phones, I wanted the cheapest possible and all the cheaper ones were used. I had to scroll through quite a few pages to find new cheap ones.

Deb

* If anyone can enlighten me I'd be eternally grateful. Amazon themselves don't seem to be able to.

When accessing H2G2 on my phone, I often accidentally unsubscribe to a thread. I did this with petty hates (again) just now and ended up with 13,000 posts to read through!

PP.

I know what you mean, Pink Paisley.

I often have the same problem on the touch screen tablet I'm currently using.

It has to do with the the close proximity of the control buttons on h2g2, originally designed for larger desk top and laptop monitors rather than smaller cell and tablet monitors, taken together with my 4" x 8" hands.

Even though I've got zoom controls that let me enlarge the control buttons, its still a problem that might be resolved especially for cell by means of better separating the on-screen controls.

The older/newer conversations buttons on Brunel are also a problem and its not only controls of the same general kind, but close grouping of controls generally.

Pastry may be able to put this on the agenda for h2g2 improvements.

My rant against Amazon;

Background

This Friday is my Father's 90th Birthday. He was a paratrooper in WWII, there is a book about his division, like a school year-book it contains both his picture and a listing at the end lists everyone who was in the division, any awards and if they were missing or killed in the war (fortunately my Father was neither of those or I wouldn't be here).
We had a copy of that book, a few years ago my brother asked if I had the book and I told him I thought I did. After going through everything I own I could not locate it

The Quest

I decided I would look on line to find a replacement copy, and found one on Amazon for $171.95 including shipping. This being my first order from them I placed no significance on the fact that it was coming from 'Hippo Books'.

My order was confirmed at 7:07 PM Sunday evening

I received a notice that my order had been shipped at 10:26 Sunday Evening, and that the order could not be changed or cancelled. Because I did not check my E-Mail until the next day, I did not notice the strange hour of shipment, but even so, many large warehouses run around the clock.

Another Petty Hate

During the week some helpful update or pug-in of my Windows 8.1 OS decided that I did not want to be bothered with any E-Mail and shut down that function. It only asks for confirmation for things I want it to do

I finally figured out that something was wrong Saturday morning and spent an hour resetting my system. Seven old E-Mails popped up including one from Amazon

A Wrench in the

Amazon had sent a brief note at 6:06PM on Thursday (Thing) notifying me that they were going to refund my money with no explanation why I did not think my Father would enjoy a refund anywhere near as much as his book, so I went on line and sent an E-mail to the seller asking why they had cancelled my order. It was early Saturday morning and Amazon sent me a nice reply saying the seller had two business days to respond and they might respond by Tuesday night or so.

They also pointed out that my E-Mail had been thoughtfully removed from my message so I would be protected from from any direct contact from them. (God forbid we should make contact and perhaps make a sale without any commission for Amazon.)

The delivery of my book seemed more unlikely than ever;

I plunged into the world of 'Chat'

Chat I, With Jason 7:19 AM 26 July

After over eight minutes typing the only conclusion was that he knew even less than I did, he would really like to help me, but

The Quest Continues

I still wanted my book so I did another Google for the the title and found Amazon had another ten copies available, the cheapest at $295.00 plus shipping. Back into the Chat pool.

Chat II with Yuvarani 12:08 PM

I briefly recounted my previous travail and pointed out That they had other copies of the book available and I wanted to purchase one of these, but only if I could get some assurance that it would actually be delivered. Yuvarani replied 'However if you place the order, I'm sure it will not be cancelled. You'll receive the order on time.'

Perhaps I got a little greedy from exasperation - I asked 'Can I get expidated shipping for the delay?'

Reply 'In this case, please place the order now with Amazon. I'll upgrade the shipping method.'

Second Confirmation

Placing my order for the second book as quickly as possible, it was also confirmed at 12:08PM, it still reflected standard shipping, but Yuvarani had not had time to upgrade my order, I was confident that she would do so before forwarding it to the vendor

The order was reported shipped at 12:50 with the admonition that changes could no longer be made, of course by now I knew that that only applied to me. Standard shipping was still listed with a much more unacceptable deliver date

Chat III with Wilson 1:36PM

I started with 'I just placed a reorder with you and received the shipping notice. I was promised expedited shipping and it is showing it was not applied! If I had known I would have paid for it myself!'

after 26 minutes of 'we can't do anything' I finally left the reply 'How can I know that without this unfortunate incident It will be a long time before I order anything from here again!

At which point I pressed the 'End Chat' Button.

An Explanation

At 1:41 and again at 1:44PM I was forwarded an E-Mail from Hippo Books about my original order, it seems that when they went to pull my book off the shelf it was not there! Even though I had been sent a shipping confirmation FOUR DAYS earlier! More on this later


A Message from Customer Service

At 3:17PM Amazon sent me an E-Mail starting with;
'It looks like something caused our chat to lose connection. (it was me, stupid) I'm really sorry for the inconvenience.'

In a full page of text they said little, except maybe we can do nothing, but they did give a link to the vendor, which only led to another Amazon page.

Into the Web

Determined to avoid any further contact with this useless company I decided to turn to Google and see if I could contact the seller directly.

This led me to a Bookseller in Holland (I was taught that it is properly 'The Netherlands', but their address clearly said 'Holland', but you all probably know far more about this than a poor American Nevermind)

In any event, after couple E-Mails they very kindly explained that they did not use Amazon and that I was dealing with a US company with a similar name. Next time I am looking for a Military book I will check their site first.

Back into the Abyss

I swallowed my pride and returned to my order page and hit the contact seller button.

At 4:52 I received an E-Mail from the seller that included his wife's cell number. After exchanging information I was assured that she would upgrade my shipping to insured priority mail as soon as they returned to their office on Monday afternoon. So much for the myth of shipping confirmation from Amazon.

Rant over for now, I will let you know when and if I get my book

Sorry if you had to read all this



F S

ITIWBS and PP, what skins are you using where you have problems with links close together?

I'm working primarily in Brunel and Pliny, alternating between them, never use any of the other skins except if someone else is and I need to see what the display looks like in the skin they're using.

Well, we can't change Brunel I'm afraid. But if there's any links/buttons in Pliny that are too close, let me know which ones they are, and what device and browser you're using, and I'll see what I can do

My petty hate is any kind of software, websites, etc, which are set up to be nice and easy for mobile users but practically impossible for antiquated laptop or pc users.

Deb

Websites should be able to tell the screen size, and then offer the *same* functionality, but laid out according to the need.

I absolutely *hate* websites that detect you're on a mobile, and then only give you a very stripped down version of their main site.

Mk2s sisters "helping me out "in the kitchen, then, after they have gone, I can't find anything, as they have out everything in the wrong places?

So I end up spending more time looking for things

Smudger.

I'm using Alabaster because I'm a Luddite and I have fingers about as wide as my telephone screen.

Please don't change it, I am aware that Alabaster's days are numbered and I sort of hope that it has been overlooked and will be left alone forever.

PP.

It's not been overlooked PP, it's been *deliberately* left

As long as we can, the old skins will stay up and running, and we can't change anything else with them.

The vast majority of work we're doing at the moment, behind the scenes, is creating a new database. We have to do this so that we can bring in all the new stuff we want h2g2 to have. Unfortunately the old database just isn't structured to allow us to do these. Until such as time as the new database is fully working as we want it to be though, the old database will be running in tandem powering the old skins.
We'll only be looking at turning that side of things off when the old skins have been migrated onto the new system, and that's a huge job, so it's a while yet

Thanks Pastey.

From what I can tell, it seems that you are talking about magick.

Please be careful out there.

PP.