14:00 02 October – Lenovo ring to tell me the laptop has been repaired and is on its way back.  I got a new tracking number at 17:00.

08:00 03 October – tracking number returns no data on the DPD.uk website – I’ll try again later.

16:30 I embark on a lengthy, and ultimately fruitless, attempt to discover where my laptop is: DPD parcels has no record of the tracking number I have been given!  Despite the valiant efforts of Lloyd he suggests I speak to Lenovo.  James, at Lenovo, agrees to send an e-mail to Germany but the repair centre is  closed and he, James, is not at work tomorrow (4th) so he can’t get me an answer before Friday.  He concedes the laptop may  already be with me by then.  Let’s hope so, and that it works.

08:00 4th October.  The use of the tracking number still returns no data, more than 40 hours after it was issued.  I would have expected my parcel to have a unique number that followed it wherever it went, and however it was combined and recombined with other parcels to form larger consignments.  It appears that once an item is into the system it can attract layers of numbers which cloud, rather than clarify, the identity of an item, its destination and ultimate owner.

16:00 .  Lenovo explain that although my laptop/parcel had been given a tracking number two days ago, it was probably sitting on a pallet to make up a full load.  Nice of someone to tell me.  They suggest I check the DPD.de (German) website tomorrow and, once it appears there it should be in UK within 24 hours.

09:30 5th October.  Checked the DPD.de site.  My parcel was scanned, on pick-up for Kesselsdorf, at 19:29 (18:29 UK BST) last night but still does not show on the tracking system on the UK website 13 hours later.  At least the destination is shown as our postcode.  What is the point of a tracking system that doesn’t update and track internationally?  It’s ludicrous that you have to check the website of the country the parcel is (or may be) in at the time you check.  That’s a question for ‘James’ from Lenovo, who promised to ring me with an update today.

18:30 .  Guess what, no call from James (or anyone else).  The laptop parcel’s location is still where it was 24 hours ago, according to the DPD.de website.  According to the DPD.uk site it still doesn’t exist.  GRR.

07:00 6th October.  According to DPD.de the parcel was scanned into Unna Depot, still in Germany, at 02:34 this morning.  Still doesn’t exist on the UK site.

07:00 7th October. According to DPD.de the parcel hasn’t moved from Unna and it still doesn’t appear on the UK site.

09:00 8th October.  Both DPD.DE and UK show no change.

12:45 . I ‘phoned Lenovo again because I’d had an e-mail from Medion Electronics inviting me to complete a customer satisfaction survey because I had now received my computer back! After apologising that James had not ‘phoned as he promised they told me what I already knew – they have no idea where my parcel is.  Ben promised to call back but “since he would have to contact Germany, it might not be today”.

06:30 9th October.  Hooray!  Suddenly my parcel appears on both websites:  it was allegedly scanned into Oldbury (Hub 3 Birmingham) at 20:42 yesterday.  This is a bit odd since I checked before I went to bed and nothing had changed then.  Still, mustn’t grumble eh?

13:01 .  It has arrived in at my local depot but is not marked ‘Out for Delivery’.  I think this means it missed the afternoon van and will be here tomorrow afternoon.  Let’s hope it works after all this.  I’m still waiting for Ben to call back.  GRR.

09:03 10th October. ‘Out for delivery’

14:00 AAAAARGGHHHH!  It has ‘misrouted’ – been put on the wrong van!! I don’t believe it.  (Actually yes I do).  of course, nobody let me know, so I waited in.  Chris, from DPD customer services in Swansea offers to “upgrade” me to a delivery before 12 tomorrow but, sort of, suggests they cannot track parcels being moved by third parties.  Since AJG in Inverness is acting for them, in primary pick-up and final delivery, I don’t understand his point.  The bottom line is that NONE of this is my fault.  I’ve done everything I’ve been asked to do, even when it was really up to DPD / Lenovo / Medion to do it.  Throughout, nobody has kept me in the loop and nobody has ever called back when they promised to.  I just hope the laptop works – I couldn’t go through all this again.

12:05 11th October Far from being here before 12 noon it is still showing at the depot, where it was returned to at 18:00 last night: not even ‘Out for Delivery’.  I rang DPD again, this time speaking to Tom in Liverpool who ‘phones Swansea and then the depot (Inverness).  Tom tells me they left it off the van for today!  He also says that the Inverness depot can’t deliver to us in the morning, despite Chris saying they would, because of our “remote location” (which all of 45 minutes from the depot).  Talk about being economical with the truth!  He PROMISES it will be here this afternoon.  This is SO infuriating – I was in Inverness this morning and could have collected it.

12:42. Miraculously the parcel is now marked ‘Out for Delivery’ – with the scan timed at 09:36!!  How do they think they can get away with changing their records like this?

16:30 It’s arrived!  Now for the laborious process of updating it with everything that MS and my Security programme has issued in the last 3 weeks.

Conclusion – 17 October   Well, my laptop is working as it should.  I bought an item with a warranty and, when the item failed, the warranty was honoured.  The process has clearly been less successful.  It would be better to not give customers a means of tracking the progress of their repair if that system doesn’t work.  The major difficulty arose because MY supplier devolved responsibility for managing the process, and our relationship, to third parties.  This is a major systemic customer services failure :  as Lenovo’s customer I should NOT have been left (and sometimes explicitly encouraged) to progress chase or project manage Lenovo’s suppliers – even if those suppliers are subsidiaries.  I’m closing this blog now with one final comment: DPD promised that someone from their customer service team would call to discuss their failures (which they admitted): they haven’t.  Enough said.

 

Well, my parcel got a new number and duly re-entered the maelstrom (or should that be mailstorm?) that is “international logistics”.  I went back to the DPD tracking service and, lo, my laptop had been  “Collected” and then, later, it was at the “Sortation Facility” (a.k.a. Hub 3 in Birmingham).  That’s priceless.  “Sortation Facility”!  Do they mean sorting depot?  That’s almost as good as Amazon’s use of “Fulfilment Centre” – which is actually a warehouse, although it sounds like a house of a different kind.

Anyhow, after being sortated (sortate must be the verb from which sortation is derived), its status changed to “In transit”.  This might have meant it was in a Ford van on its way to Deutschland but, this evening, the DPD tracker has it back at the “Sortation Facility”, so maybe it just went round the block.  Sic transit gloria mundi seems all too appropriate!

Wait! I grumped too soon!  The second visit to the  “Sortation Facility” is to one in Raunheim.  I don’t think that’s near Birmingham.

05:19 28th – It’s on the van for delivery at the other end – Kesselsdorf, Germany (not to be confused, like I did, with Kesseldorf in Alsace!)

I looked up both places on Wikipedia and Raunheim is close to Frankfurt Airport.  The flightpath takes ‘planes over the town at 300m, so my apologies to the burgers there.  Kesselsdorf, on the other hand, is not far from Dresden (formerly East Germany) miles away – so it will be a while getting there.

09:45 28th – It’s there!

 

My 8 month old Lenovo laptop broke but, being under “collect and return” warranty, I was reasonably relaxed:   it would be fixed and returned quickly.  Ha Ha.  Silly me.  I reported the issue to Lenovo but received a letter from a company called Medion Electronics, based in Swindon, with detailed instructions on packing and contact details of a carrier called DPD.  The letter included a label all made out to the repair depot in Germany and dire warnings, in red type, about the delay that would result from me not following the complicated instructions to the letter.

There was also a half a page of A4 disclaimer about Lenovo / Medion / DPD not being responsible for the data or programmes on the laptop: they recommended me to back up everything.  I had to buy a new external drive to copy everything to, and then learn how to do it.  Consequently it was a couple of weeks before I rang the carrier to arrange collection.  On Friday the carrier came at 4pm.  It wasn’t DPD but their local agent AJG parcels.  They left me details of the tracking number and said my parcel would be on its way that night.

On Saturday I thought I’d see how far it had got, and went ‘online’ to track it.  The tracking number I put in returned information that the parcel had been collected on 4th, not 21st, and that its status was “Awaiting receipt of parcel”.  I rang DPD to tell them, and ask who was “awaiting” and where?  DPD agreed the system was in error and said they’d investigate and ring me back.  They didn’t.  I e-mailed, twice, with queries about the discrepancies.  I rang Lenovo/Medion on Monday (all closed for the weekend), and DPD again.  Eventually it transpired that DPD’s local agent had returned to their depot too late on Friday to transfer my parcel to that night’s truck and, unaccountably, they had re-labelled my parcel (creating an entirely new tracking identity in the process) and sent it to Lenovo/Medion in Swindon instead of to the repair facility in Germany!  DPD suggested I ring Lenovo and warn them it was coming there.  This I did, and I was assured they would know what to do with it.  The whole process began to unravel as I am not DPD’s customer, Lenovo/Medion is, therefore such terminology as “customer reference”,  “consignment number”, “account number”, and “collected date” do not refer to me.  After six more telephone calls  (all to income generating 0844 numbers) and much recorded music I was at least able to find out that my laptop had arrived in Swindon.  Phew.

I then received replies from DPD customer services to my two original e-mailed queries (still with me?).  One was about my parcel, under its original identity, and told me they were still waiting to receive it (also suggesting I contact Lenovo to sort out DPD’s problem).  I told them that, far from waiting to receive it, they had delivered it (albeit to the wrong place).  The other was about an entirely different parcel, for someone else – nothing to do with me.  More ‘phone calls and embarrassed apologies from DPD.

I called Lenovo/Medion again, and spoke to yet another different customer agent.  Lenovo/Medion claimed that DPD had not advised them of the changed label.  Charming though they have been, until this morning, I haven’t spoken to the same individual twice, in any organisation, so I’ve had to tell my story over and over again.  Why am I, Lenovo’s customer, having to sort out problems between them and their suppliers?  Not good, DPD/Lenovo/Medion.  AJG claim it is DPD’s fault that they redirected my parcel to Medion’s HQ, because the computer system showed no return address – only “Various”.  I should say here that this is deliberate on Medion’s part: it is their instruction to state the ‘alternative address’ when booking the collection by DPD and put the return information inside the parcel.  AJG also tried to blame me for not contacting them instead of DPD.   Not only pass the parcel but pass the buck!

I’ve tried to explain to AJG and DPD that what I see on screen, as an “end-use” customer tracking a parcel, is not what they see.  It is different information because,  as far as the parcel system is concerned, I am NOT the customer in the transaction:  DPD is AJG’s customer, Medion is DPD’s customer and Lenovo is Medion’s customer.  For this type of transaction the whole system is facing the wrong way:  they need to sort that.

At time of posting this I have just heard the details of my parcel’s new identity (woo hoo!): it will get yet another one when it is put back in the system (I use the word loosely) in Germany for return to me.  No doubt it will be handled by another local agent there, so now I am convinced that,  with more changes of identity than Jason Bourne, all the ingredients are in place for my laptop to disappear without trace.  So much for the dire warnings of delay if I didn’t follow their instructions…….

By the way, the repair requires they undo a couple of screws, take out a dodgy DVD drive, plug in a replacement and test.  I could have done it myself in 20 minutes.  GRRR

What is it with drivers and roundabouts these days?  I know that they are a relatively new phenomenon in the Highlands, and I know it takes time to adjust.  In fact I can remember the first on Lewis quite well, and around Inverness, that can’t be more than 30 years.  Only 30 years of new drivers being taught the rules of the road, going to other places where they have these weird obstructions – like traffic lights and box junctions.  Only last week I came across a woman driving the wrong way round a roundabout; having realised what she had done, instead of exiting at the adjacent exit, she reversed towards where she had entered the roundabout but, because she couldn’t reverse either, she ended up on the traffic island!  Saints preserve us.  It seems that approaching a roundabout increasingly requires you to adopt the mindset of Ben Hur in the Circus Maximus: charge right in and devil take the hindmost.  I’d love a set of retractable scimitar blades on my hubcaps.  Very James Bond.

What happened to “Give way to traffic approaching from the right or already on the roundabout” or “Signal”?  Signal?  You’re lucky to get any signal, never mind one that is appropriate or timely; I assume everyone is an idiot, and wait to see if they really mean it, but maybe it’s not their fault.  Perhaps it is something to do with these warning signs that say “New Road Layout Ahead”:  you know, the ones that have been there since forever?  How long do they need to be there to capture all the local drivers? 3 months, 6, 9, a year at most?  I suppose drivers must see the sign and get confused: perhaps they think it has changed again since this morning or last night and forget what lane they should be in.

In over 45 years of driving I’ve never been hit by, or hit, another moving object and I don’t intend to start now.

GRRR.

 

I really hate it when someone approaches us in a shop or restaurant with a cheery “Hi Guys”.  If  I were on my own they wouldn’t say “Hi Guy”.  More often than not I’m with my wife, and the last time I checked her gender was female – so she’s not a “Guy” either.  What the heck is wrong with Hello, or Good Morning / Afternoon?  I’m not looking for obsequiousness, I’m uncomfortable with Sir and Madam, but nor do I want bland trans-national ubiquity.   It’s not as if they actually want to form a relationship with me, they just want to get my order (which often is not delivered because they haven’t actually made that connection and been listening)!   Straightforward, standard English polite would do very nicely.  Have a nice day.

 

 

 

I see our beloved leaders are still pushing the twin mantras of consumer consumption and property ownership.

Let’s build our way out of recession by having more houses for sale; lets keep the shops open all hours so we can have “choice”.  We are skint.  Thousands upon thousands can’t pay their bills for basics and you want us to troll round the shops on a Sunday for what exactly?  Presumably to check out the home furnishings for the house we can’t get a mortgage on.  Give me a break, please.

What is the point of sending a corrrespondent, and a sound and camera crew, to stand outside a location where a story is based, BUT NOT ACTUALLY HAPPENING!?  Yesterday we had a poor lady freezing her bits off outside No 10 Downing street, at 10pm, to tell us what had already been reported earlier in the day.  I suppose we got to see the PM’s cat, live.  Really useful.  Well done the BEEB.