19 July 2010 (Monday) - Stuff

What with weekends away and late shifts and bad weather stopping getting laundry washed, let alone dried, today was my first ironing session for a couple of weeks. Oh, there was loads to do. And after an hour and a half the novelty had firmly worn off, and so I stopped, with still loads more to do. I’ll do that another time.

This evening I plugged my phone in to charge. Anyone who’s ever spent any time in my company will realise that plugging my phone in is a regular event – I’m always complaining that the thing’s battery rarely lasts as long as a day. But today was the first time I’ve charged it up since Friday; I’ve got three days out of one charging. And the secret of my minor victory? On Friday I turned off the Bluetooth. I can only imagine that Bluetooth must be rather power-intensive. From now on, Bluetooth remains switched off.

On May 30^th I mentioned a belt I’d bought from eBay. Naively I thought a belt billed as “size 42 inches” would fit a forty two inch waist. I was wrong. The belt, billed as “size 42 inches”, was actually forty two inches long, and so didn’t come close to what I need. Bearing in mind the overlap one needs when wearing a belt, I should have ordered a forty eight inch belt. However the belt itself was good enough, and I gave it as a gift to “My Boy ^TM ” who seemed to appreciate it, and I consoled myself with leaving a neutral comment on the eBay feedback. I honestly think that the belt was not as described, and so warranted a neutral feedback.

Since then I’ve had emails from the seller on a daily basis asking me to remove the neutral feedback. I amended my feedback to say what a pain the seller was being, but still they kept hassling me to remove the neutral feedback, so last week I formally complained to eBay. eBay replied with what looked like a nice automated response which utterly failed to address the problem, and then they asked me to complete a survey about how well they’d dealt with the problem. I was rather scathing in my reply, and this evening I got what was obviously a personal response to my problem of being inundated with emails from the seller of this mis-described item. A response, but not an answer. eBay told me that “If we find that there's not enough evidence of Email Forwarding System Abuse, which is the case here, we can’t take action against the reported account.” They went on to suggest that if the emails continue, I might like to consider changing my email address (!) I’ve replied asking how many emails I need to receive before they consider their email forwarding system has been abused.