Thursday
May072009
Tracking parcels is fun
Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 7:24AM
Are you a glass half empty or half full person. I'm a half full person... and the glass is half full of wee, and it's tramp's wee, and the glass is chipped. OK that may be going too far but I'm a pessimist. It's hard to get to my age without developing a keen sense of impending doom and failure. If you'd been through my experiences and come out of the other end with a happy go lucky sunny outlook you would have to be delusional and/or insane.
What's all this about? Well three weeks ago I sent my faulty Elgato turbo 264 off to Elgato for repair/replacement. It had to be sent to Germany (from the UK). The device cost me £155 so I asked about insurance. To get full cover the only option was to get a signature on delivery. I wasn't sure that Elgato would do this so I had to go for standard postage, which only covers the first £50.
As soon as I'd left the post office the pessimism fairies took over. They told me it was going to get lost, then I'd have to navigate the hellish post office compensation process. Or perhaps Elgato would get it but say it wasn't faulty and return it to me. So all these thoughts have been swirling around in my head. After two weeks it became too much to bear. Elgato have a ticket process that shows the pending state of a repair/return enquiry. It had stuck at an awaiting return state for two weeks. I emailed them and sure enough it had gone missing. Excellent. Britain have an established history of flying to Germany and dropping things there that necessitate repairs being carried out (think early 1940s) so why can't my parcel get there?
Anyway, a week later and they finally got the parcel and are sending me a new one (which I'll subsequently re-test and add to my review asap).
So after all the stress and worrying we are now onto the fun bit. I love watching parcel tracking online. It really is one of my favourite things. My first experience was tracking a wristwatch coming from Hong Kong and ever since then I've been hooked. I've very nearly ordered things just to watch the tracking, it's facinating seeing the convoluted routes parcels take. One of my favourites was seeing some Nixie Tubes coming from the Ukraine. With my iPhone and my Chumby I'm never more than a few clicks away from an parcel status update. Part of the magic is seeing the location of a parcel before I go to bed and then seeing where it has got to when I've woken up. Its facinating thinking of all the people, planes, vans, fork lifts etc that are involved in the processes that are summaried in just one line of text on a tracking update.
My hopes for the future of parcel tracking are for a realtime gps track - like the flashing blue dot on the iPhone Google map.
I always find the last 10 miles take the longest. My HK parcels usually take 2-3 days to get to a depot in Salford then another full day to get to my office in Manchester - about 2 miles away.
The picture is the current location on my 264HD.
What's all this about? Well three weeks ago I sent my faulty Elgato turbo 264 off to Elgato for repair/replacement. It had to be sent to Germany (from the UK). The device cost me £155 so I asked about insurance. To get full cover the only option was to get a signature on delivery. I wasn't sure that Elgato would do this so I had to go for standard postage, which only covers the first £50.
As soon as I'd left the post office the pessimism fairies took over. They told me it was going to get lost, then I'd have to navigate the hellish post office compensation process. Or perhaps Elgato would get it but say it wasn't faulty and return it to me. So all these thoughts have been swirling around in my head. After two weeks it became too much to bear. Elgato have a ticket process that shows the pending state of a repair/return enquiry. It had stuck at an awaiting return state for two weeks. I emailed them and sure enough it had gone missing. Excellent. Britain have an established history of flying to Germany and dropping things there that necessitate repairs being carried out (think early 1940s) so why can't my parcel get there?
Anyway, a week later and they finally got the parcel and are sending me a new one (which I'll subsequently re-test and add to my review asap).
So after all the stress and worrying we are now onto the fun bit. I love watching parcel tracking online. It really is one of my favourite things. My first experience was tracking a wristwatch coming from Hong Kong and ever since then I've been hooked. I've very nearly ordered things just to watch the tracking, it's facinating seeing the convoluted routes parcels take. One of my favourites was seeing some Nixie Tubes coming from the Ukraine. With my iPhone and my Chumby I'm never more than a few clicks away from an parcel status update. Part of the magic is seeing the location of a parcel before I go to bed and then seeing where it has got to when I've woken up. Its facinating thinking of all the people, planes, vans, fork lifts etc that are involved in the processes that are summaried in just one line of text on a tracking update.
My hopes for the future of parcel tracking are for a realtime gps track - like the flashing blue dot on the iPhone Google map.
I always find the last 10 miles take the longest. My HK parcels usually take 2-3 days to get to a depot in Salford then another full day to get to my office in Manchester - about 2 miles away.
The picture is the current location on my 264HD.
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