Upgrade kafuffles with Special Delivery

Upgrade kafuffle

I recently splashed out on a Dell 24″ 2405FPW wide-screen display. With the 20% discount offer (Small Business site only!?), living in VAT-free Guernsey and shipping being a very reasonable £5 the whole thing came to a sound £588.

As I already own an LCD, the capable Iiyama 20″ E511, and my current Radeon 9800 Pro is equipped with just one DVI connector I was going to need a new AGP graphics card equipped with two or suffer blurry images.

Nvidia have decided, in their infinite wisdom, that their latest 7800 chipset won’t be doing AGP while the clueless at ATI are certain AGP cards should only come with one DVI and one VGA despite the triviality of DVI to VGA conversion and the impossibility of converting it back.

I briefly toyed with replacing my motherboard so I could get my hands on a good graphics card but found that only one manufacturer is producing a PCI Express motherboard that would take my 3.2GHz Pentium 4 because Intel changed the socket. That motherboard would require throwing away half my RAM, any other board would require I throw away my processor. I am quite happy with both…

Left with little choice I went for an older Nvidia 6800GT card, thankfully Overclockers have a good price.

Special Delivery

Ordering something is never as simple as it should be and while OCUK got my graphics card out of the door in record time it wasn’t here the following day despite Royal Mail’s “Guaranteed Delivery”.

I typed in the number to their tracking and receive “Your item is progressing through our network”. I call them and once through the menu system am electronically told the exact same sentence. Only when a human operator comes on the line can I be told immediately “It’s delayed” although they can’t explain why…

I am reminded I am now eligible for a refund on shipping, which of course is the final joke of the process. Royal Mail know full well that Customer B, inconvenience by their failure, is not actually entitled to a refund. That goes to Customer A, the person who paid for shipping who is normally a big company and simply can’t be bothered reclaiming a few quid. It’s one step better than the money-back guarantee gimmick.

I can’t help but feel that having typed in my number to the web site, a message indicating that the item had been picked up at XX:XX and alas, had been delayed because of Y wouldn’t have been as annoying.

Chalk up another case where a company should try using it’s own services to see where it needs fixing…

[)amien