Cecilie's frustrations

Min samboer og jeg har bestemt oss for at det er på tide å opprette en felleskonto vi kan bruke til felles regninger og matinnkjøp og slikt. Dette kunne man jo tenke var en smal sak. Bare opprette en ny konto i banken og bestille to kort til den, og disposisjonsrett til den andre. Så enkelt er det ikke. Mange banker tilbyr ikke disposisjonsrett, blant annet banken vi benytter (skandiabanken), og visa-kort koster 250kr i året. Var det noen som sa gebyrfri bank? 250kr i året for et visa-kort høres kanskje lite ut, men når man skal ha to kort hver, ett til privatkontoen og ett til felleskontoen, så blir dette totalt 1000kr i året. 1000kr i året?? For å kunne bruke pengene våre? Det hørtes ikke veldig gebyrfritt ut… Litt undersøkelser viser at de fleste, om ikke alle banker tar dette gebyret. Og alle tar 250kr. Noen unntak er vel programkunder i visse banker, men de har gjerne en årsavgift bare for å ha en slik konto. Så ikke noe bedre altså. Så hvorfor 250kr? Hvorfor tar alle like mye? Er det Visa selv som skal ha dette gebyret? En rask undersøkelse på visa sine hjemmesider gir følgende treff under “spørsmål og svar”:
- Hva koster det å bruke Visa-kort?
- Det er finansinstitusjoner som utsteder Visa-kortene direkte til sine egne kunder. Det er den enkelte finansinstitusjon som fastsetter årspriser og pris ved kjøp og bruk av Visa på egne kort. Prisene kan derfor variere noe fra finansinstitusjon til finansinstitusjon. For prisoversikt som gjelder for deg, ta kontakt med din finansinstitusjon.
Javel ja. Så det er bankene selv som fastsetter gebyrene for hva det koster. Men hvorfor tar alle 250kr i året da? Er dette en sak for konkurransetilsynet? Hvis du vet hvor dette gebyret kommer fra, så vil jeg gjerne høre fra deg.

Oppdatering: Jeg ser nå at forbrukerombudet allerede har uttalt seg om denne saken etter klager fra frustrerte kunder, og de krever fjerning av slike gebyrer for å kunne kalle seg en gebyrfri bank. http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/okonomi/1.6151000

I prefer shopping on the internet over shopping in physical stores. I find it much more convenient to sit in front of my computer, browse the web for the products I want, compare specifications between alternatives, and finding the best price. Of course, not everything is as convenient to buy on the web, such as food and clothing, but most of everything else I need, I buy in web shops. Now, everything in life has drawbacks, and online shopping is no different. Recently, I’ve experienced one of these drawbacks quite a lot. When you walk into a physical store, you can look around to see if they have what you want. If you can’t find it, you can ask an employee, and he might find it for you, or tell you that they don’t have it in stock. When you shop online, the bit about having something in stock is a bit more difficult. Most web shops show how many items are in stock, or at least if an item is in stock or not. The problem arises when something is not in stock. Then what? Stores have different policies when it comes to items not in stock. Some display an expected delivery date, and some just say “not in stock”. The ones that don’t display an expected delivery date often lets you type in you email address to be notified when the item is in stock. Now, you’d think that this is all good. Either you know what date to come back to the store and order your stuff, because of the expected delivery date, or you can wait for an email saying something is in stock. Problem is, most stores let you order items that are not in stock, even if they have no idea when they’ll get it in stock. This is what happens, because very often, the expected delivery date is just rubbish. Let me take a few examples.

Last summer, I had promised my mother to build her a couple of media center computers with Linux and MythTV. One for the TV in the living room, and one for her bedroom, streaming TV from the server in the living room. I was short on time, and made sure to order hardware that was in stock. Except for one item. The power supply for the bedroom computer. I wanted this to be quiet, and it needn’t have as much power as the one for the server, so i chose a low power one, with no fans. It was the only one, and it wasn’t in stock, but the expected delivery date was in just a couple of days. To be sure, I chose to have everything in stock delivered right away, so I was only waiting for the one power supply. After all, I had to start by building and setting up the server anyway, so the bedroom client could wait a few days longer. Problem was, when the date of expected delivery arrived, no power supplies were in stock, and the date was pushed for a week. When this happened again a week later, I canceled it, and ordered an other one, with a quiet fan instead. Out of curiosity, I kept checking the status of this power supply. Every week for a long time, the date was pushed another week. After a while, I stopped bothering to check. I don’t know if they ever got back in stock.

Now, for a more recent example. I’m currently trying to set up a 5.1 surround sound system in my living room. I have bought a receiver, lots of cable, and wall mounts for the satellite speakers. Now I’m only waiting for the speakers. Problem is, only one shop has the set I want, and it’s not in stock. The expected delivery date is in only 5 days, and it has been for over a month. Every day, since I started checking, the day is pushed one day. Meaning it’s always 5 days until it will be in stock. That’s ridiculous! When I try emailing them to ask when they’ll get it in stock, the reply is just that they don’t know when it will be in stock, and that they will update the date when they know. But they update it every day! while(!in_stock) {date++; sleep(60*60*24);} end. After a while, I got so frustrated, I sent an email to the Norwegian division of the producer of the speaker set. They informed me that there had been troubles during transport, and that they expect the set to arrive at the end of next week. Well, fingers crossed then. I’m just wondering how hard it could be for the web shop to acquire this information.

Last example: I ordered a headset and a bunch of DVDs from a web shop with a different policy on items not in stock. Usually, they remove the “buy” button, and replace it with a “get email when in stock” button. Everything I ordered had a “buy” button, so I figured everything was in stock. But they sent me everything but the headset, which I’m still waiting for. It’s been a week since I ordered now, and during this week, the “buy” button has been replaced with an “order” button and a new expected delivery date has been displayed. I didn’t even know that they used this strategy at all! It has been switched back to a “buy” button, and back again to an “order” button. So, if they’re information is correct, they should have had the item in stock twice since I ordered, but I still haven’t received anything. Next expected delivery date is Monday, and that is the same as they told me in an email when I asked. They probably just looked up the same date I did, without actually checking with their provider. So, my request to all the web shops out there: don’t just display random expected delivery dates! If you don’t know, print that you don’t know! And if you do know, print the correct date. And at least try to get some extra information when a customer asks why a product is so delayed! Now I’ll go back to running my script that checks the delivery date for the speaker set…

This Friday I thought to myself: “Finally, a weekend with no basketball game, no duties from anyone. I’m just going to relax, play some Super Mario Galaxy on my Wii, and basically just staying indoors taking it easy. You think that turned out the way it was supposed to? Never does. Shortly after I’d been thinking about this, I get a message from ace on jabber. “What are you plans for the weekend?”. Of course, I reply none, I’m just going to relax. “Sorry”, he replied. I ask what’s going on. He says he has to go to his grandparent’s cabin this weekend, to remove the snow from the roof. Apparently, there is about 2 meters of snow. I understand where this is going. He wants me with him. Of course he does, who’d want to go do something like that alone. I think about it for a second, and I’m hit with a sudden urge to go to the mountains. Can’t be that bad, I say to myself. Maybe we could even get some time to go snowboarding on Sunday. I tell him it’s ok, I’ll come, and that I would like to go snowboarding when we’re done. He tells me it would probably take about 4-5 hours to remove the snow, so no problem about the snowboarding. I take his word for it, after all, we have no winter cabin in my family, so I’ve never been doing any snow removing from a roof in the mountains. We decide to try and leave early on Saturday, so we’ll have time to finish before sundown, which up here in Norway is about 5PM in January. Maybe you see where this is going? It’s now Sunday, and I’m not snowboarding. I’m sitting inside the cabin, pretty wet, my clothes drying near the fireplace. We’re still not done, and ace is up on the roof finishing the last of it now. Then we only have the outhouse left… What happened is that we didn’t get to leave as early as we wanted on Saturday. We got up at 7.30AM, but we spent way too much time getting our gear together and into the car, even though we had prepared a lot on Friday. We finally left at 10AM. It takes us about 3 hours to drive here, then another hour to get our stuff from the car and ski up to the cabin. You do the math. We finally start digging at around 2PM. That leaves 2-3 hours of sunlight. At 5PM, we get out our headlights, and keep going until we give up at 7PM, go inside to make some dinner, and go to bed. Exhausted. We’re over halfway there, but there’s still a long way to go, and the snowboards won’t be able to come out of the car before we’re home, and have to take them back inside. We slept for about 11 hours tonight, and now, I’m only hoping we’ll be able to leave the cabin before dark. It’s no fun to ski in the dark with a headlight as the only source of light. Especially when you’re as bad a skier as me.

Now you’re probably thinking that I hate this. That’s not entirely true. It’s actually kind of fun, the problem is that things never go as planned. Everything takes longer than one thinks (you know, multiply estimate by pi). But we’ve taken lots of photos, and I’ve learned some valuable things about shoveling snow. Besides, it is kind of relaxing to be up here in the mountains. The air is great, and not polluted. It’s quiet. And my laptop has limited battery capacity, so I can’t use it too much But I’m glad I bought a usb modem for internet access via 3G this summer. Comes in handy when I feel like blogging about my frustrations up here

Well, I better get back into my hopefully slightly less wet clothes and out there again, so we can get done and go home. At least I’ll have a good story to tell my coworkers when I get back to work tomorrow, and the obvious question pops up. “Done something fun this weekend?”

I finally gave in and created a blog. I know I’m far behind everyone else, but it just occurred to me what I could use a blog for. Venting my frustrations. I get frustrated a lot, which I bet is not uncommon among Linux users. So, instead of screaming to a wall, I’ll be posting my frustrations here, in my blog. It’ll probably have the same effect: none… Except getting it out of my system of course. Who knows, maybe I’ll even post some solutions to frustrating problems. And then, maybe, eventually, someone will actually read this…