In reply to slefain :
One of the reasons I decided to fold my business was because of all the problems I was having with shipping and their complete lack of accountability. I got tired of fighting with them every time they lost or damaged a package. It was always my fault for some reason
I am beginning to realize the downsides of not owning a truck, SUV, or convertible for the first time in my life.
How do people manage?
Delivery? No thanks, local Lowe's delivery is like $90 every time I've looked in the past, whether it was 6 sheets of plywood and some PT lumber or 20 of drywall and a bunch of studs. Private sales like from marketplace are hard to wrangle too, even offering asking price plus a delivery fee based on distance.
Rent their truck? Fair enough, still $20-40 extra and extra trips to and from the store.
Borrow a friends? That's usually an option, but not always convenient or available.
And neither the Civic or the SRT would really do well with a trailer of any size.
In reply to RevRico :
If you have a place to store it, a little Home Depot 4by8 trailer is the best thing ever. I moved my daughter 2500 miles with one of those, and a Dodge Neon.
RevRico said:And neither the Civic or the SRT would really do well with a trailer of any size.
It's not ideal but it works
I have used my harbor freight 4x8 to haul an enormous variety of things.
I prefer trailers over trucks for the most part.
This guy has been with me since the 80s. I used to haul it loaded with firewood behind my 81 Corolla wagon.
slefain said:Last week USPS delivered my package to a local apartment complex instead of my house. Completely different address, nowhere near my actual house. Package was long gone by the time the postal worker went back to find it. Great.
So I learned my lesson used FedEx to deliver my next package. Except they delivered to to who the berkeley knows where and sent me a cheery "packaged delivered!" photo....of some townhouse nowhere around here. berkeley me.
My favorite has been the FedEx Ground package (garbage disposal) that they said was delivered, but no package. I asked for the proof of delivery, they sent me a screenshot of my "signature" which was very easily readable. ie definitely not my signature. (Funny thing, the disposal showed up on my porch like 3 days later. I think he drove it around in the truck until he felt like stopping by.)
Peabody said:I'm getting ready right now to walk the 20km long course with a shovel to try and create some drainage. It's bad enough that they scheduled two off road events in one weekend, the weather isn't making it any easier
I did that and I'm glad I did. No rain in the forecast, it rained again, really hard a few hours after I did that. Then it rained again, really hard a few hours later. Finally yesterday it stopped, I went to the track yesterday morning and did some work. After dinner, on my way back, no rain in the forecast, it pissed down again.
If it could just stop raining for a few days, that would be great.
In reply to Peabody :
Send the rain my way
Why do some folks have to have phone conversations on speaker in public settings?
I don't get it. You're on a phone...put it up to your ear. I'm glad everyone now loudly knows about your sister's physical therapy appointment and her upcoming trip to Florida.
County inspector just showed up to sign off on our new RV carport. 30 seconds start to finish, didn't even take a serious look at anything. If you're going to force me to apply and pay $$$ for a permit, and require an inspection, you could at least take it seriously.
slefain said:Last week USPS delivered my package to a local apartment complex instead of my house. Completely different address, nowhere near my actual house. Package was long gone by the time the postal worker went back to find it. Great.
So I learned my lesson used FedEx to deliver my next package. Except they delivered to to who the berkeley knows where and sent me a cheery "packaged delivered!" photo....of some townhouse nowhere around here. berkeley me.
I live at 123 Something, something LANE. Six blocks away is 123 Something, something ROAD. It's an empty lot. My packages are frequently delivered there and left on the curb. In an attempt to get ahead of this I always capitalize LANE when filling out forms, online, and when giving directions to friends. I've lost count how many friends first go to ROAD, call me, and say "I wondered why you typed LANE in CAPS."
Folllowing up on my previous DoorDash rant- last night we ordered dinner on DoorDash since I had to work late because of starting later because of being out at the cabin. Same order we've gotten before from a restaurant we order from a lot- I think we've probably had DD deliver food from them at least a half dozen times over the last few months without issue. Also, there were no drinks in this order. Everything looks to be going well and I happened to be downstairs playing with The Bat when the driver arrived and dropped food off. Even before seeing what they delivered I was scowling at the driver- they were driving a white Challenger with blacked out windows and a loud cam & exhaust and punched it when they pulled away from our house (we live on, essentially, a dead-end street where people park on both sides regularly and you have to take at least one fairly sharp curve to get to a larger road) and made a lot of unnecessary noise.
Then I opened the door and saw the food- and was immediately confused. We had ordered two dishes from a local Cajun place which have always come in styrofoam clamshell containers, so we should have had a plastic bag with 2 styrofoam containers in it. Instead, there was a large pizza box with a plastic bag on top that contained a syrofoam container (smaller than the Cajun place uses) which I found on opening it contained hot wings and an aluminum container (my SIL would have probably fainted from the horror of hot food in an aluminum container) which we eventually determined contained spaghetti and meatballs. So- very definitely not our order.
I had seen that the driver had made at least one other stop before delivering our order, so I pulled up the app and went to message the driver to let them know they'd delivered the wrong order, figuring they could probably figure out where things got mixed up and take care of swapping the orders assuming the people who got our order and not their Italian food & wings had also reported a problem and not touched any of the food. But when I went to message the driver, the app said that the number it had for the driver could no longer be used and to contact Customer Service (and trying to call had the same result). Seems kind of like that shouldn't be the case- especially if they also didn't have a working number to reach the driver. So I reported an issue with the order, noting that the wrong order had been delivered and taking a picture of the order on the doorstep (very similar to the one the driver had taken when they delivered the order). Almost immediately I got a notice that the request for them to fix the problem was denied- which unsurprisingly pissed me off since anyone looking at either my picture or the driver's delivery picture could tell that it contained a pizza box.
At this point, it was less than an hour until the place we had ordered from was closing, so we couldn't have DD try again. There was an option to appeal the decision on the complaint, which I did- this time writing a bit more biting of a complaint than the first time (my guess was that since we'd complained earlier in the day and gotten a refund on the drink that wasn't delivered, their system just automatically denied the complaint on the next order because it thought we were trying to get free food) before hopping into the E46 and heading for the restaurant myself as The Dancer was getting pretty hungry and annoyed at the constant food issues.
The slight win that came out of it was that once I got to the restaurant and explained what had happened they replaced the food for us without any charge, which they really didn't have to do as I they had sent out the food with the driver and it wasn't their fault the driver messed up. But obviously, replacing the food was a good move in keeping us happy and more likely to come back (no need for that really, we love their food)- and since it was pretty close to closing, there was a decent chance they'd have ended up throwing it out anyway (they were already out of what I had originally ordered so I got a different dish).
DD did eventually issue us a credit for the entire transaction (tip included) at least, and I obviously left a rather low rating for the driver. I'm generally pretty loathe to do that, but in this case I thought that it was definitely deserved.
Since I was out on Monday and Tuesday for 'vacation' after the show last week, I was planning on working today (Friday) and counting Monday as my day off for our 4/10 schedule. NOW I get to find out what the charge code is for 'Some asshat wrote a Windows update that broke the world'.
Ironically, our company is supposed to be shifting to a 'virtual environment' setup where we are essentially remotely logging in to big honking computers back at the main office and just getting video streamed of the screen to whatever computer we want to work on- so if they had that up and running (and had managed to patch things), I'd be able to work as normal from my iMac.
As it is? Given our computers are encrypted, I have no idea how they're going to fix my laptop without my either having to physically mail it to them or possibly (if there's a decent IT component there) having to go in to the site nearby that is run by our parent company but not my specific division for them to be able to log on as an admin and delete the file that broke Windows worldwide (I already tried, and I can't access anything because of the encryption).
I get the feeling that a certain company (CloudStrike) is about to cease to exist with extreme prejudice...
Internet outage at the office. It has also taken out the phones.
Sigh. I'm pretty much shut down until it comes back up.
It's apparently a world wide outage. It's knocked banks offline and grounded aircraft.
Minor rant.
Half the team is down with the blue screen of death. Half us have no issues.
Minor win.
Management is down too but at least they shut off our customer service phone lines and chat feature so we could work only on the emails.
Now we're out of emails and I have little to nothing to do for the rest of the day.
Nothing like following someone in a full on heroin nod down the one lane highway. berkeleying junkies, just shootup with lead if you're going to put everyone else in danger.
Ashyukun (Robert) said:I get the feeling that a certain company (CloudStrike) is about to cease to exist with extreme prejudice...
When I was searching for news articles on the outage this morning, one of the hits was a business article titled "Wall Street Bullish on CloudStrike Stock" or something similar...
...that was dated 2 days ago.
Buy a Speed Queen they said. It'll be reliable they said.
3 trips from the repairman and $500 later we still have a non functioning washer. I'm going to buy the cheapest mechanical control washer that Lowesdepot has. berkeley this.
In reply to mtn :
If I can suggest- look throughout town for a real appliance store. I once cross shopped stuff between the big box stores and the appliance store, and found that the part numbers were very different. Kind of confirming that the box stores force makers to make cheaper versions of their items to sell. Which is why box stores have pretty bad reliability for their appliances.
And they will likely have an actual selection of mechanical computer *things*.
Yes, what Alfadriver said. Or hammer the estate sales and find an old GE Filter-Flo washer. They were in production for decades and have a cult following.
We were given a high-efficiency Samsung a few years ago, and it's been fine, but I cannot bring myself to get rid of the old GE.
dculberson said:
I have used my harbor freight 4x8 to haul an enormous variety of things.
Quoted for hot zoom-zoom content. SFW.
In reply to Ashyukun (Robert) :
I have rebooted and logged onto the servers N^N times today. It crashes every time I try to do actual work. Ugh. 
In reply to alfadriver :
Lawnmowers, too. My Husqvarna push mower does at least have a genuine Honda engine, but everything else about it has a Sears-specific part number rather than the "real" Husqy part.
In reply to alfadriver :
We did buy this from a specialty store. I'll check them out again. I'm mostly mad at speed Queen. 6 years old and the thing is broken. I could buy a new one from the big box store every two years and it would be cheaper.
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