09:48 – Barbara went to dinner with a friend yesterday, so I spent the evening watching Heartland reruns. Bizarrely, Netflix streaming has only the first 14 of 18 episodes in series three, so when I finished watching the final streaming episode I popped in the DVD to watch the remaining episodes.
The first menu that comes up when the DVD loads offers a choice between English and French, so just for the hell of it I chose French. I knew that Amber Marshall is an Anglophone, but I figured some of the other cast members might be bi-lingual, so I decided to see if the original actors had dubbed the French audio in their own voices. Nope. All of the voices I heard were done by other people.
But I did notice something strange. I don’t speak French, but I grew up in a neighborhood where many of the older people spoke Italian at home. That and my years of Latin often allow me to work out the general sense of what’s being said by a native French speaker and I’ve listened to quite a bit of spoken French. All I can say is that the French soundtrack didn’t sound French to me. It sounded like a severely degraded French overlaid with a strong accent. But whatever it was, it didn’t sound to me like French. I thought people in Quebec spoke French, but apparently not.
We’re now officially out of chemistry kits. We ran dry this morning, with three orders overnight that accounted for the only three finished chemistry kits remaining in stock. So today I’ll start final assembly on another 30 and move them to the finished-goods inventory area. Then tomorrow or Friday I’ll start building yet another 30, as well as ordering in some components we’re going to run short of.
I ended up spending most of yesterday completing a project that had been high-priority on my to-do list, but had slipped down out of sight. The forensic science book hits the bookstores one week from today. At the end of each group of lab sessions, there are review questions. I was supposed to have done an answer key document for those questions, but I didn’t get around to it until yesterday. So now it’s complete and ready to go.
14:31 – I just received the last item but two required for the forensic science kit. I actually ordered those missing items, along with one other item, on 1 August from imedmart.com. Don’t ever order from them. I got an email from them soon after I placed the order, confirming that I’d placed the order, but without saying what I’d ordered. The email said they’d send me another email with tracking information once the order had shipped. So I waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, on 9 August, I visited their web site again to check the status of my order. Of the three items I’d ordered, two had disappeared from my order as shown on their web site. The third item was listed as “processing” or something similar. So I called their “support” phone number.
At first, everything seemed normal. Rotten elevator music, and a recorded voice that popped up periodically to tell me that my order was important to them. Yeah, right. After the first five minutes or so on hold, the recorded voice changed. It now told me that I was second in line and could expect a four minute wait. A minute or so later, it came back to say I was second in line and could expect a six minute wait. Eh? Then a minute or so later it came back to tell me that I was now first in line and could expect a ten minute wait. Crap. At the ten minute mark, I got a different recording that told me their customer service reps (which I’m sure was an exaggeration; there can’t be more than one, if that) were extremely busy and that I should fill out a support request form on their site. It then hung up on me. I went to that page and filled out the form, which told me I could expect a response within 36 hours.
On Friday, I got an email from them telling me that my order had shipped. Again, no details about what exactly had shipped, nor any tracking number or other information. The order showed up yesterday. The only thing it was the one item they’d admitted that I ordered. So I called back and wasted another ten minutes trying to find out if they ever intended to ship the other two items or not. I finally left them a message on their customer “support” feedback form telling them I was going to order the other two items elsewhere, so please cancel them. And that if they did ship them to me, I’d dispute the charge on my credit card.
I still needed those two items, so I went off to Google in search of a reasonable price on them. I found one, which was about $90 not including shipping for those two items, versus $79 plus shipping from imedmart.com. The vendor is called Cooper’s Nutrition/Living Naturally, and it’s obviously a small family business. I entered the two items in my shopping cart, and clicked on the checkout button. Something happened to me that had never before happened in all of the hundreds of transactions I’ve done to purchase products on-line. The site thanked me for my order and displayed an invoice. It emailed me a copy of the invoice. No problem at all, except that it never asked me for my credit card number.
So I went to their customer support feedback page–one of those things with fields at the top for your name and email address–and left a message saying what had happened. A moment later, I got an email bounce from them quoting my feedback message and saying the email to them was undeliverable. So I tracked down a phone number for them–not easy, since they don’t publish it on the site–and called the place. The guy who answered laughed when I told him what had happened. He said they hadn’t gotten their site setup to take credit card information yet (they’ve been running since 1999), and that he’d have called me to get the credit card information over the phone. He said he’d call me back in a few minutes after he’d checked to see if the two items I’d ordered were in stock. Four or five hours later, I finally called him again. He said he’d been meaning to call me, but had been busy. Okay, I can understand that. He said both items were out-of-stock, but they’d have them in Thursday. He said they’d ship Priority Mail, which means I should get them maybe next Tuesday. That’s soon enough, but I’m glad I followed up.
15:46 – So, I decided to do a quick mini-batch of 6 chemistry kits, just to hold me for the next couple days, I hope. I packed all of the items needed in six shipping boxes. Except for the 100 mL graduated cylinders. I had none of those in inventory, at least not on the shelves. But I did have stacks and stacks of boxes sitting in the library, and among them I knew there was one that had 120 100 mL graduated cylinders in it. I even knew which vendor it was from and that it was in the group of four boxes that arrived from that vendor last week. That meant it was toward the front of the piles.
As long as I was opening boxes, I figured I might as well check the contents against the packing list. So I opened all four boxes–the graduated cylinders were in the last one, of course, and checked all the items in, getting dirty and sweaty in the process. Now, instead of four large boxes sitting in the library, I have bunches of small boxes: twenty dozen each of the 50 mL and 100 mL beakers, twenty half-dozen boxes of 250 mL beakers, ten dozen of the 100 mL graduated cylinders (less the six that I pulled out for the kits I’m building), and so on and so on.
What I want to know is where Obama was while I was doing all this. According to him, I didn’t do it myself. But I sure didn’t notice him helping. Quite the converse, in fact. Just about everything he does hinders people who are just trying to build and run their businesses.
