Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Time to say goodbye

537 words on

All right, my iBook is almost history… the auction ended yesterday, the amount of money I got for it (€715 - or rather €690 after making eBay rich) was all right but I had hoped it would be a little more, particularly as the price had been at €600 a whole day before the auction ended. So soon the PowerPC era will end for me after pretty exactly a decade. Let’s hope things go well.

In this process of computer exchange I had to deal with two horrible web sites. eBay’s and Apple’s. eBay is just an insult. Despite checking the ‘remember my login’ checkbox once in a while for the past years, their site never remembers my login. And when it starts sending e-mails to me, they are 99% garbage with something like one line of the important message by a potential buyer who requests additional information. That’s just crap. And coming to think of this, charging a more-or-less fixed percentage of the final price is just one of the worst rip-offs ever. After all, the service they provide to me isn’t any better if the item I sell is expensive (in fact, I’d say it’s worse than as you’re more like to want a good presentation of your auction for potentially expensive items, so you’ll edit it more carefully and be cursed by their horrible web site even more).

That site hasn’t changed in years, it has things like three line message boxes to type your questions in, I find it hard to actually locate those of my data in the ‘my eBay’ section of their site every single time I use it. And I like to think that it’s not entirely my fault.

Apple’s site is much better, but it still sucks. Placing an order with them means that you’ll receive an e-mail that looks crap in both its proper and HTML versions. Even when using Apple’s own Mail client. So imagine I’m buying such a machine for the style alone… shouldn’t I be insulted and disappointed by such an e-mail. The fact that the dates they write aren’t localised or their sender address is do_not_reply_con_de@euro.apple.com makes you wonder as well whether anyone in the company knows a bit about software or treating your users well.

A multi-billion dollar computer corporation that can’t make a computer send decent e-mails… haha, funny joke. And things got even better later on. I placed my order and received a message confirming that it had shipped the next day. Which made me happy because the site claimed the shipping time was 3-5 days to begin with. Unfortunately, I completely lost the ability to track the order at that stage as it has yet to receive a tracking number… after almost a week! So perhaps it hasn’t even shipped yet? Who knows? At least the arrival date started off being 7-9th of June, then changed to 13th and today got a bit better by being changed to the 12th. I have no idea why, and it seems rather ridiculous to me. Do they actually ship each of the machines from Asia to your door? Wouldn’t that be very expensive and inefficient when you’re selling thousands of machines? Just wondering…

June 8, 2006, 0:38

Tagged as ebay.

Comments

Comment by Dan O’Donovan: User icon

I bought my little MacBook the day Apple announced it and delivery was scheduled for three weeks later. Happily, it turned out that the delivery date was wrong and the computer was delivered a week early - when I wasn’t in. The delivery company (TNT) repeatedly attempted to deliver the computer on days that I wasn’t in (despite many phone calls) but eventually our space-time locations coincided and I got my ‘puter.

One small question - if you’ve already sold your ibook and the macbook hasn’t arrived does your buyer have to wait until you’ve transferred all your files before he gets his comupter? Poor sod… Porst delivery times… Ho hum.

June 8, 2006, 12:33

Comment by ssp: User icon

I’m still hoping for some timing wonder like yours to happen of course.

As for my buyer… I’ll just save my data to an external disk, so it’s not a problem (apart from me being more limited in writing inane blurbs here). He’ll get the machine as soon as the wonders of bank transfers gave me the money.

June 8, 2006, 13:44

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