Sephy’s Platzish

Well, it has been 10 days now since I put in my order for the iPod touch from Walmart, and while I received my accessory kit literally the next day, I still have not received the iPod itself.

Why is that?

Well, simply put, I don’t know. Why don’t I know? Well, let me set out the scenario for you…

Before starting, though, check out this image first - it somewhat explains the process.

April 8th - I place the order for the iPod to be delivered to the store (as it was the only way for me to get the bundle kit - plus shipping to home would have incurred additional charges, such as shipping and an additional $2 in taxes payable to our local stadium and my county).

April 9th - Receive email stating that the accessory kit is available for pickup. I pick up the accessory kit, with the anticipation that if this portion of the order was delivered that quickly, I’d receive the iPod itself within a couple of days, or even that same day.

April 10th, 11th - No emails from Walmart, and the “Track your shipment” page showed nothing at all in the way of movement.

April 12th, Easter Sunday - In checking the tracking page, a new item shows up - Arrived at Sorting Facility; Greencastle, IN. I look at a map, and find out that it’s only 300 miles away (of course, I’ve had prior experiences with things about that far away taking their leisurely time to get where they’re supposed to be), and think, this shoudn’t take too long to get here.

April 13th - Nothing. At all.

April 14th - Movement! It’s In Transit to the Delivery Facility. Of course, they don’t actually tell you where the facility is, so you’re left to guess. I had some kind of inkling it would be somewhere in Minnesota or Michigan, but we would have to wait to find out!

April 15th - Nothing. Again. Apparently, everything in Walmart world takes 2 days to process.

April 16th - We have a location! Time for the iPod to sit at the Delivery Facility for another 2 days - this time a mere 30 miles away from the store! Surely, that can’t take too long to get there.

April 17th - Wait; what is this? They can actually process something in a facility in less than 2 days? I didn’t think it was possible, but they managed to get it In Transit to the Store at 10 am. I find this out at my break in the afternoon and decide to call the store to find out what was going on.

As it turns out, even a simple 30 mile trip isn’t so simple for Walmart. The person that I spoke to told me that they “might” have had it the same day, but likely tomorrow (i.e. today), and worst case scenario Monday. I didn’t go into it with the gal, mostly because she was cool about my questions, and did take the time to check in and see if it had arrived already, but it makes you wonder: what’s the motivation for Walmart to offer a shipping method which, one would think, since it involves their own delivery facilities and methods of transport, should be pretty straightforward and efficient, only to find out that it is anything but?

Now, I don’t necessarily agree with all of Walmart’s business practices (though, unlike a lot of other people, I don’t think they’re solely responsible for the demise of the mom-and-pop business - there are lots of factors which have led to this problem happening, mostly among them the fact that our society has become one of standardization and similarity that it makes someone who is unique in their field stand out when you have a lot of people who just go to a store - say Home Depot - simply because of the fact that they’re familiar with that store in their hometown), but I do like their stores, even if they’re too darn concentrated in our area. However, will I use the site-to-store again? Not unless it’s some kind of amazing deal that I can’t get anywhere else, especially in the brick & mortar store (and electronics, I think I’ll stick with Amazon - free shipping and no sales tax, yo! )

What in the world is he talking about, you’re probably thinking, right?

Well, I actually spent money and purchased a bit of leisure equipment to enable me to actually get online without any wires again. Plus, it allows me to download my favorite podcasts (Roy & HG, presented by CGU, we put the “U” in CGU - I’m looking your way) without having to putz around with iTunes.

Yes, I’m getting an iPhone iPod Touch!

How’d it all start, you ask? Well, I lost my iPod for  a couple of days, and in that time I was determined to get a new one to replace the one that I thought I had lost - I was looking at eBay to find out what kind of deals they had (and don’t get me wrong, they do have some good deals on there), until I was gently reminded that, yes, I will not get that great of a deal on eBay - plus, it’s kind of not 100% risky free, especially when you’re talking about $200 of purchases on there…

So, I finally bit the bullet (and the credit card) and purchased a bundle - yes, they did call it a bundle, and I’m not just talking about something that I would have picked up in my job - including the iPod itself and an accessory kit which includes a set of covers, including one in pink…which I did offer to fob off, but it wasn’t accepted…ah well

Oh, and the other iPod? Well, it was found once more - it had fallen behind the trash can in the kitchen of all places; I suspect that the Touchy will be a bit harder to lose though.

You might not know it if you’ve been only reading the blog, but I am still alive and kicking around the Internets.

Last time I posted, I was still talking about combovers and still on one side of the fence when it came to the election - however, I have now moved over to the other side and I’ve realized that I’m actually more liberal than I thought I was.

Also, in that time, I have gotten involved in a project - at first it was reluctant involvement, but since launching it and thinking more about my political feelings, I’ve gotten involved more - and more willingly. That project is The Mudflats Forum - which was started out of a blog - Mudflats - which gained a lot of traction when Sarah Palin was named as John McCain’s running mate.

It is an amazingly craizy busy forum, with 1200-plus members and nearly 700 posts a day. The best part is that the moderation team on the forum is a group of awesome people, without whom Snos & I wouldn’t be able to run the forum as well as it does run.

Now, in other news

I’m still working at my job, and still looking at other opportunities to get more work on the side; I’ve been to the zoo, pictures of which you’ll be seeing over the next few weeks when I have a moment to actually sit down and edit them! I’ve also been to the race track - free - thanks to a gas station.

However, just so you know, here is a sample image from the zoo - nothing terribly exciting, just a peacock which are all about the place

A thought occurred to me when I was writing down my phone number recently, about something that we had taken for granted (and see less frequently even on TV) - the 1 you dialed for accessing long distance calling. I haven’t used it for dialing a phone call for at least a half of a year (when I fired the old phone company), and even before then, it was rare for me to use it because we just didn’t do that much long distance phoning.

Here’s the ironic part - as far as I can tell, for a long time, the numbers for area codes (i.e. three digits, second was a 0 or 1), were likely reserved as unavailable. The reason for this was that the telephone numbers used to be Two letters followed by a varying number of digits (in big cities, out where I live, it was more like a ring pattern that was dialled). In fact, some businesses took that particular tactic of advertising their old letter prefix into the 80s, as seen here by this series of Lincoln Carpeting commercials from Chicago -

Of course, the 0 and 1 don’t have letters (unless you have one of those phone models that have the Q and Z on the 1, even though it’s common practice to put them on 7 and 9 respectively), so they weren’t part of the mnemonic dialing system of the olden days, along with a lot of other opening combinations which really didn’t have a logical word to correspond to them like 57. Though of course, I expect to be proven wrong on that.

Why is it that we’re not using the 1 as much as we were before? Simple - the advent of digital phones. The first time I experienced not having to dial the 1 was when I was at my last job when my boss pointed out to me that I didn’t need to dial the 1 to get access to the main phone system out of the office and out of the area. Then, we move a few years into the future and we get the digital phone activated at home, and I try dialing without the leading zero, and voila, it works perfectly.

I know that you can’t repurpose the first number of the 11 in the dialing sequence (i.e. the 1) because of the people who dial into the country from overseas and kind of need that number to make sure that their call gets to here instead of winding up somewhere in Africa or Asia, but I do wonder if it is possible to consider a way to use that almost new opening for another digit to be added to phone numbers, which should alleviate the problem of reducing available phone numbers and constant expansion and contraction of area codes.

So, on Monday, I mentioned that I’d have something about a toy that I’d be getting this week. So far, I’ve gotten nothing. Well, that’s actually a lie because I did get the thing that I wanted to get so that I could save on this thing.

What is it, you ask? A digital to analog TV converter box of which there is a program underwritten by the US Government to subsidize the cost of the boxes to the effect of upwards of $80 (2 $40 coupons per household).

What had spurred me on to applying for the coupons in the first place was the appearance of the boxes in the local Wal-Mart store. I had noticed them at the beginning of March, on the day when I was doing the test drive to and from work, and we stopped at the store which I pass every day to check it out.

When I first saw them, they literally had stacks and stacks of the boxes. At the time, I thought that they would be in plentiful supply for quite some time. Since seeing them at first, and seeing them in a whole bunch of other stores, I didn’t think anything about it until I received my coupons on Tuesday (I knew that they were coming because the site said that they were sent out on Friday or so), and I had an item on my list that said I’d look at getting the box after work.

So, I stop at Wal-Mart on my way home from work. I had an inkling (from other stores disappearing the boxes in recent days) that they might not have any out, but I checked anyway, expecting to just walk in and walk out with a box for $10 after the coupon.

I get to the electronics section, and there’s nothing. Zip, zilch, nada. Even the display unit has disappeared. I go to ask the clerk in the area, and they make a comment that they’re sold out, but might have some on Thursday or early next week.

Just a side note here - you can tell I want something when I have this unending desire to get it. Do you want an example of this? Well, at midnight, I called up the store which had just opened up in the area.

Lesson 1: Don’t call Wal-Mart at midnight.

Why? Well, you tend to get some of the densest folks in the store. I call them and ask if they have the digital converter boxes. I get put on hold, and after a minute or so, the person comes back and asks if I’m meaning for an audio system. In the end, as far as I can tell, they don’t sell them there. I’d just guess they’re out as well.

We get to Thursday, and I need to go over to another city to pick up some medicine from my clinic, so I decide to make a pit stop at the Wal-Mart there (they’re like viruses, in just about any city now [but not as bad as Walgreen's, which appear on every street corner {I pass 2 on my way to work every day}]). I head over to the electronics department, and they actually have a box there. Well, not exactly. It is just a display model with a clock ticking down to February 19th, the switch off date for analog TV. Any boxes? Nope. Any in the back? Nope.

So, I go back to the first store which said they might have one Thursday night. They don’t have any, but fortunately, the gal remembers me from Tuesday night, and mentions one important thing - they are backordered. They don’t have any at the store, and even the distribution centre is having a backlog of orders as well, and the next time they might have some available is unknown.

Lesson 2: Do stop at a Wal-Mart early in the morning.

This brings us to Friday morning, and since I have an hour or so between when I arrive and when I start to volunteer, I decided to head down to the Wal-Mart that is about 3 miles south of where I was to see if they had any. The setup was the same as the second store I went to - display unit with countdown clock. No other display, no boxes. I decided to skip over the folks at the electronics counter because I was listening to the reason for stopping at Wal-Mart at 7AM: the Wal-Mart Radio network. They were reading out a list of employees who had worked for them for 20 plus years. It was a simple format - Employee name at store number in city name, x years. It was such a fascinating thing to listen to  because of all the numbers they just roll off in such a short succession. Plus, it was completely content-free radio. Just names read out by some guy, along with some music (which he claimed was requested music).

I get to the door, and strike up a chat with the greeter (because frankly, there ain’t much going on at 7am in a Wal-Mart which has just opened), and I mentioned the converter boxes. She said that they didn’t have any, but I should try the store I had tried (I explained what I was told), along with one that was, well, just too far out of the way

She then mentioned that she had cable and was OK with the conversion to digital, which is completely true. I’m safe with it as well, but the biggest reason that I want the box is all the channels that you don’t get on cable (luckily she has the same cable company as I do so she can appreciate it ). She also made a comment along the lines that I observed - in March, they had stacks and stacks with no clue what to do with them. Now, you can’t find them.

It’s like they’re disappearing like they’re going out of style!