Very Expensive

• Pay off all my bonds
• Double cab bakkie (newer than 2007!)
• Canon f/1.2 85 mm L series lens
• Audi R8
• Trip to Thailand

Medium expensive

• Espresso/coffee machine
• Corsair 256GB Performance Series SSD
• Canvas print vouchers
• Clothes that will make me look cool (not sure these exist)
• Monopod

Less expensive

• Woolworths short sleeve large white T-Shirt’s
• Nivea roll-on
• Socks
• Rechargeable batteries
• Titleist Pro V1x golf balls
• Footjoy softjoy golf gloves
• Double adapters
• Buy a big issue from someone who needs the cash
• Wash my car + scooter
• Give me hugs
• High five me
• Say Happy Birthday

Something for everyone’s budget, hopefully

TO whom it may concern,

We placed an order this evening (the 2nd January 2009) at 8pm online as we have done many times previously.

By 9:30pm we had heard nothing, our order was not confirmed as usual. We tried repeatedly to contact Mr. Delivery Sea Point with no answer. It was our intent at this stage to cancel the order as we had made other eating arrangements. Eventually someone did answer and said that our order was “on its way”, with expected arrival approximately 10 minutes.

After 20 minutes had elapsed and we had still not heard anything; we called Posticino’s directly to check if our order had actually been collected. They informed us it had just been collected a few minutes earlier. After waiting another 10 minutes we still had no joy. We called Mr. Delivery Sea Point once again, thankfully someone answered and then informed us that the restaurant had been very busy, causing the delay. A few minutes later the door bell rang and the order was delivered, cold, of course. According to the driver, the delay was because of the huge amount of traffic on the roads. (I basically live 3km’s from the restaurant, so that is pretty hysterical!)

I indicated to the driver that I had opted to pay via credit card for our order as I usually do, but this was not reflected on the slip. The driver said that the office would be contacting us to confirm payment. He seemed happy to accept our signature, but left without leaving us any copies. This was at 10pm; at this point we had actually already eaten after waiting so long and retired for the evening. Pretty exhausted and disappointed about the whole ordeal.

Not long after, we were woken up by the door bell, I was quite shocked to find that the delivery guy, Kingsley, had returned and was demanding immediate payment. We explained to him calmly that he should contact us in the morning to claim his money as we were now in bed and not willing to conclude this at this hour.

He then threatened us and said he would contact the police to claim his money. He was unreasonably aggressive and persistent. We eventually managed to get him to leave the door. A few minutes later the ‘manager’ of Mr. Delivery Sea Point called us again, to claim their money. No apology was offered whatsoever. We explained our story and to our immense surprise, instead of offering an apology for causing us so much hassle, he proclaimed that it was actually our fault the payment didn’t go through when we made our online order. He refused to take any responsibility and then advised us to take up the matter with the driver!

We then went back to sleep, only to be woken up again at midnight (00:00) by an insistent and persistent knock on our front door (which is in a secure complex). We opened the door to two armed policemen and the aforementioned driver. The police were quiet while the driver ranted on about his money and us not having any sympathy for him. The police repeatedly told him to keep his voice down as it would disturb the other residents of our building. We explained the situation completely and calmly to the police officers and the driver once more which we believe was very generous of us given the circumstances. In an effort to calm the situation I offered to pay the driver in cash, less his tip and delivery fee, which he declined with the police as witnesses.

To be made to feel like criminals in our own home amongst our neighbours and friends is completely and utterly unacceptable for the sake of two pizzas. Not only was this a complete invasion of personal space, it completely ruined our evening. This kind of behavior can only be construed as harassment on the part of Mr. Delivery. The very epitome of Poor service delivery. The Manager spoke to me as though I was a complete idiot – he was thoroughly insulting and unsympathetic – in all fairness we believe he had the same attitude towards his employee.

We cannot imagine how something like this can be acceptable in an organization such as Mr. Delivery in a world class city like Cape Town. We are also astounded by the management’s lack of control and accountability in this situation, as we feel it could have been easily rectified.

In closing, we would like to have some basic questions answered.

1) What is an acceptable turnaround time for food ordered? When we ordered the delivery time was indicated to be 9:05pm and it had not arrived by 10pm (2 hours).

2) Is it acceptable that food is delivered cold?

3) After a late delivery where Mr. Delivery was at fault with the billing, is it acceptable to be harassed for a further two hours after the fact?

4) Who is responsible for the systems in place at Mr. Delivery, the client, or Mr. Delivery?

5) How is it possible that our order was placed successfully online and yet our payment details were somehow misplaced?

6) In a matter like this, especially given that it is impossible to get through to your call centre’s, who does one phone in this situation?

UPDATE: 2010/01/04 – Response from Mr Delivery

I received this email from Laurence Levine yesterday.

Dear Mr. Jackson

Please accept my humble apologies this type of behaviour is definitely not condoned by my Company and all guilty parties will be dealt with accordingly .

I am currently oversees and I will get my Head of Operations to take care of this matter in my absence( Mrs Zettie Potgieter ) .

However I will be following up personally  on this matter on my return to SA  .

In the meanwhile I would like to offer you two complimentary pizza’s and free delivery on your next order or if you wish to eat at Posticino I will pay for your next meal there  .

Lastly thank you kindly for contacting me with this unacceptable service without customers like you I can never fix problems such as these .

Kind regards

Laurence Levine

While I am thankful for the gesture and also the apology, I really hope something is done to prevent something like this in future. Mrs Zettie Potgieter did indeed call me today, and I discussed the issue with her further. She indicated to me that she would be following up with me further based on what action was taken. I will be posting all the details here as they come in.

Gift #1 – The blog update

So yes, I have updated my blog to the latest wordpress version and removed any in script hacks that I did previously and just moved to plugins to keep things simple. I must say, the wordpress platform has come a long way since my old blog and I am extremely impressed! In addition to this I ‘refreshed’ my about page to be a bit more relevant to where I am and what I’m up to now.

Gift #2 – The product site

I have developed quite a cool SMS gateway product (IMHO) but I have done absolutely no marketing for it thus far. I have just been distributing it via word of mouth and through connections of mine in the industry. I decided it was time to release it into the wild and get a site up and running to spread the word, hence I have setup the site for Elite SMS Gateway. Yes, I know the name is a bit cheesy but my marketing creativity leaves much to be desired

Gift #3 – The photo blog

Those of you close to me, will know that I recently aquired a Canon EOS 7D and before I even received the camera I had planned on launching a photo blog. As they say about a panel beaters car, the same applied to my own personal blogs. So finally I managed to get it up and running at www.badphotographer.com. I called it ‘the bad photographer’ as a play on the idea that there is no good or bad photography, it’s all a matter of each person’s tastes. I’d love to get some comments on this blog on the photos.

So that’s it on the gift front, I am excited to keep the blogs moving and get a big of feedback from the community.

Have a safe festive season

Being the nerd that I am I adopted Multichoice’s HD offering as it was released. There were/are numerous things that I hate(d) about the new HD decoder. It’s buggy, it’s slow, and so on. But most of all what I hate is the seriously limited content that is available on the DSTV bouquet.

I am absolutely in love with the picture quality of the HD broadcasts, but it seems to me as Multichoice was just not prepared when they launched this system. The decoder out the box was buggy with debugging messages all over the place. The Olympics was a good platform to launch from, after it was over, I got really excited to see M-Net in HD, to be disappointed, there was no Carte Blanche at the usual 7pm timeslot. What Multichoice failed to mention was that M-Net HD is not normal M-Net, its basically a new channel with the odd ‘Simulcast’ (eg: Show’s run concurrently on standard M-Net and M-Net HD). I was looking forward to was the Saturday sport, Carte Blanche and other shows in HD. Only recently (this weekend) did they show some rugby in HD. It was BRILLIANT (ok and the Shark’s won ).

All I ask now of Multichoice is to add some more HD content/channels to the bouquet, there is simply not enough available at the moment and the HD decoder is not worth the investment at this point. I would like to see a roadmap from Multichoice showing the plans of when they are going to add more HD channels, so people can plan when they want to buy and not be fooled as I was into believing that there is an abundance of HD programming.

With that said, HD is the future and is brilliant, I just want more now.

Technorati Tags: DSTV, Multichoice, HD, M-Net

People go to gym to exercise right? Do weights, run on the treadmill, take classes, etc?

If they are there to exercise, why on earth do people have to park so close to the front door? Surely a few extra steps wouldn’t hurt, maybe it would be good for people to warm up a little.

I go to gym at the Virgin Active at Tygervalley and on a daily basis my mind is blown by people, who park on curbs, in bushes and all over the place, to avoid taking ten extra steps for a parking slightly further from the entrance. I’m not talking about there being no other parking available, just pure lazyness (or crazyness?).

Am I the only person who sees the irony?

Well, I have recently had the (un)fortunate experience of travelling to Pretoria thanks to my loving company (shameless punt), and I think I have figured out the problem. There are so many accidents in Gauteng, because the people in Gauteng, drive like complete idiots. I have no doubt, driving ability wise, they are probably on average better than most other cities drivers, but when it comes to common sense, they must be the lowest.

While driving back to the airport from Pretoria, I was simply horrified to see how these loons drive. Zigging and zagging through the traffic at high speeds in their small sports cars until reaching a ‘go slow’ and then simply going down the emergency lane/yellow line. The question was, why was there a go slow? Because some idiot, in his sports car, had an accident. Now, in my opinion, from what I have seen, this must be a daily occurrence on the highways in Gauteng causing a serious head ache for motorists.

Being a programmer, let me try and approach this logically, and explain it to the loons out there who insist this is the best way to drive. If you drive fast and badly, ultimately, you will be in an accident and cause a huge delay for everyone else (law of averages), and while it may be some other loons turn today, yours will come. Now, if you all (loons) decide to drive with some relative sense (no emergency lane, minimal zigging and zagging), you will probably decrease your odds of an accident quite significantly, and if you all play along, there will generally be less accidents. Hence on average, there will be less delays, and everyone will be happier!

If you are from Gauteng and own a Z3/Z4/SLK/Any other equally compensating for something type vehicle, ask yourself, is it really necessary to endanger yourself and everyone else, to save those few minutes?

I’m guessing the answer is probably yes, but at least I tried.

Technorati Tags: Gauteng, Bad drivers, Loons, Z3, Z4, SLK

Wow. I went around 6pm after work and I was completely shocked, the gym is completely overcrowded. When does the gym draw the line and stop accepting new members? It was quite funny to see people jumping around trying to claim a spot where they could polish their guns.

If you work at the gym at Tyger Valley, stop accepting new members!

I am due to be back at work in a few days, which means I have just finished my time on the SA roads for the holiday season.

To my surprise things were not as bad as I suspected, for the most part drivers were calm, courteous and patient, except for some. So just to get my rant out I have decided to name my top 5 worst drivers list. As I don’t know the drivers (obviously) I have grouped (stereotyped) them by the cars I found to be doing the most stupid things out on the road.

5. BMW excl 3 Series
4. pre 2002 Golf GTI
3. Any car under R20,000 cost with a CF prefixed number plate
2. Any car over R50,000 cost with a GP suffixed number plate
1. BMW 3 Series drivers (est. 9 out of every 10 have no regard for others on the road)

If you fit into one of these categories, take a good hard look at how you drive, because if you’re late or in a hurry, don’t make it a problem of the other people on the road!

For those who know me, they will know the perils I had to go through to finally play Paarl, not due to the management but simply due to the weather, the 4 previous occasions I tried to play the course, it was completely rain soaked and the course was actually closed. Alas! 5th time lucky I was able to actually get on the course, it was well worth the wait. My playing partner and I were playing holes 1-9 and 19-27, for those who don’t know Paarl actually has 27 holes on the Boschenmeer Estate. Even though I shanked my opening shot just far enough to clear the water, I was not discouraged thanks to the beautiful surroundings of the course.

The first 9 holes we played (1-9) were quite challenging, with tree lines fairways and water in the most annoying places, but if you play smart (as opposed to the way I played) you will easily be able to keep the ball in play and hit the greens. The holes are not super long nor super short, I would say about medium length holes in general on the course. The day we played the course was rated 70.

The second 9 holes we played (19-27) had a more open feel, not as tree lined but challenges based on hazards and tee shot placement in order to attack the greens. There are some beautiful views of the surrounding mountains on this 9 and I was constantly gazing around just taking in the sights.

Aside from the golf, the service was excellent, there was a friendly starter there indicating where we need to tee off and when we were due on the tee. The half way house food was good value for money as well, as some of you may know playing golf at fancy courses sometimes also means paying R30 for a pie, but thankfully this was not the case at Paarl. We were one of the first groups off so pace of play wasn’t an issue with us and we rarely waited at all.

I give Boschenmeer a 9/10 as I was impressed with every aspect of the course, for R79 its an absolute bargain.

Technorati Tags: Golf, Boschenmeer, Paarl