Mark Carroll's Journal

I was annoyed in ordering from the Royal Mail's online shop. Something that is delivered in 1 - 2 working days, after ordering, became should be with you in 2-3 days … please allow up to 10 days. In the event, it was delivered after three days, which was just soon enough. I contacted them about this and they responded with a form reply to Roy where they can fully understand your concerns then blather on irrelevantly about their pricing structure and suchlike.

I was also a little annoyed at car repair. My car had a transmission sensor fail, which it really oughtn't in a fairly new car. There's only one Honda dealer in Glasgow and they take two to three weeks to get around to looking at a car. In this case, they then needed me to make a separate appointment, with another such delay, for the two days they thought they would need to fix it, at which it turned out they didn't already have the part waiting. And, despite the five-year warranty on the hybrid powertrain (which Honda's website mentions but the dealer knew nothing of), apparently the transmission sensor isn't considered part of that. Well, I paid, and the car has been happy since.

Well, the car isn't wholly happy, it shows a tyre pressure warning. Apparently, this is a feature of having two different tyres on the same axle, say the dealer. I've checked and the pressures seem as prescribed. We lost a tyre some weeks before, early one evening near Glasgow Green. Roadside assistance said they could come by in a couple of hours. Later on, it switched to looking more like after midnight, how about tomorrow instead? I agreed and turned up at the appointed time that morrow, then waited still further, for a pleasant man in a little RAC van who bore no help at all. I forgot that this the UK, not the US. All that waiting didn't bring a tow truck, he didn't even have a spare wheel. Annoyingly, Honda don't supply a spare wheel with my car, and roadside assistance just had a puncture repair kit, which I had already and would have used the previous evening would it have sufficed. In the end, I used a local mobile tyre service.

A further annoyance has been the electronic displays in fast food restaurants. McDonald's is a particularly strange offender: they have a preparing screen and a collect screen or somesuch, both of which bear fictions. One's order number travels from one to the other then off into the great beyond before it is even ready for collection, the status displays are so misleading as to be best not seen by customers. Perhaps performance monitoring is being gamed? The same order number can even appear multiple times.

Coffee shops are a different kind of offender. They have the menu up on some of an array of screens. When you've read half of it, it vanishes, replaced with low-information advertising, and one must wait then read quickly in order to peruse the menu. On one occasion, a section of the menu was clearly ongoingly absent, even after quite some waiting and exhausting the whole cycle; I pointed this out to the staff but I don't think they believed me, if they cared at all.