Brown Family

UPS Singapore rant

[Final pdate at the bottom - now Monday and received.]

My luck with shipping agencies is poor. This week someone pirated my credit card, my US one, so I had to get a new one sent out. As I am traveling this next week the credit card company UPS expressed mailed a new card to me. Everything is great.

(Side note: I am very happy with my credit card company and their fraud prevention. An email note and a couple of calls and we are sorted. I have little paperwork but I feel they got me covered. Nice.)

Anyhow, so I am following my UPS package via tracking number. This morning I see it has arrived in Singapore and call the service center to ask if it will be delivered today. As it is Saturday, my thinking is I can go pick it up if necessary as I need it. Good news: UPS Singapore rep tells me it is set up for Saturday delivery and will arrive between 8 and 5. Well, I wish the time frame was more distinct, but I am happy.

Until now. I check the on-line tracking site and this:

Uh oh. It's now 1:50PM, I hadn't bothered to check the site for a while but suddenly it's not coming. So I call UPS. A get a new agent who says he's sorry, but it won't be delivered until Monday. I am furious. First agent one promised it will be delivered and now the story has changed (after waiting around six hours). Agent two's solution? I can go to Changi to pick it up. That's a $45 round trip cab ride, or a couple hours of MRT and walking. If I'd known that I had to pick-up myself today I would have taken MRT in the morning. Now I have dinner plans and little interest in hauling out to Changi as I've got other things going on at home.

The line drops. Great.

I call back a third time to get a third rep who is great. A couple of questions, an apology, and they put it on a truck. Delivery by 5PM if they are able.

The irritation for me is the second person I talked to: "...no record of your earlier call..."  "...sorry, the other guy should have checked the Saturday delivery more carefully..."  "...no, it will be delivered Monday..."  "...sure you can go out to Changi..."   I wonder who trains these people.

I hate this stuff. Another full day captive in my house waiting on a deliver company. I hate phone reps didn't provide accurate information or solve problems

We'll see. If the package/my credit card come today I'll have a fond memory of the third representative who handled my case so fast. If not, argh.

------------

So I waited until 6 PM, no delivery. I am very unhappy about UPS. I now will have to wait until Monday to contact them. My guess? They'll promise a Monday delivery, with another 10 hour window to wait around, and I don't trust them to deliver now anyhow. A complete drag - I have some services that need to be updated and wanted to do this all while I had my main computer set up. Come Monday my gear will be packed out for sea shipment - not impossible, but more complicated.

And the goof of it all is that after 4PM their call center shuts down, and their web site didn't offer any useful information past their update around 2PM when they promised a 4-6 delivery. Nothing, no call, no delivery update, no card.

Sum total: 10 hours lost waiting on UPS, three phone calls, two broken delivery dates, and unknown when I'll get my card. Thanks UPS, you ruined my day.

----------

Monday, 8 AM in Singapore and I call Customer Support. One "I'm sorry" and "...we'll try to deliver today..." and finally a promise to try to deliver as soon as possible. I pressed for a time and the agent was hard pressed to give one but finally caved in and said by noon. We'll see. Classic line from this call: "Is this a residence?" Yes, same as the other three calls. There appears to be no call history for the agents to review or they are not reading it. Let's see what happens today.

--------------

11:05 AM UPS arrives. Finally.

Singapore registers Sunday Drivers

In my humble opinion, Singaporeans taxi drivers are not the best drivers in the world - in fact many of them seem to only have two gears 2nd and 5th - which is sometimes a stomach bile inducing ride at best. The non-professionals, the regular people, seem reasonably OK but they are far less bicycle and pedestrian aware than California (yeah, hard to compare) and often seem a little sketchy to me.

But leave it to Singapore to mark the least active drivers, those who can only drive in the evening and weekends - the mythical Sunday Driver. The idea is to mark these poor unfortunate drivers with something akin to a scarlet letter - yes a red mark. In Singapore they do this by making the license plate white letters on a red background. They are easy to pick out and allow you to avoid their typical overly zealous or fanatically cautious driving habits that they duly hone on the few hours they drive a week.

Here's a photo with the number removed.

So if you see this scarlet harlot driving down the road your best to double check your blind spots and really watch the road.

Walk at MacRitchie Reservoir

Yesterday Kana and I joined our friends the Kaftans for a trek around MacRitchie Reservoir, part of Singapore's Central Catchment Nature Reserve. What's all that mean? A nice park surround the water supply that is part of a larger series of reservoirs in some of the remaining rain forest (secondary forest) left on Singapore. The trail we took in started at the damn of MacRitchie Reservoir, went up to the HBSC TreeTop Walk, and then we came down along the other side of the reservoir to complete a giant loop (trail map here) of about 12-14 km I figure. Kana did fantastic. This was her first large trail hike and I think the combination of friends and a good day helped her make it through without a complaint.

Ice cream at the end helped inspire us all too.

Here are some of the photos I took. I posted some on Flickr including a couple of panoramas.

 

Individually wrapped bananas

Found in the Microsoft Korea office. Not sure why you need to wrap a fruit that has its own wrapper, but there they were sitting.

 

Korean food, always a treat

I’ll have to ask my co-workers for the names of all the food I ate, but once again I have the pleasure of eating excellent food.

Last night Sung Woo and I had dinner together. I love tofu with kimchi so he took me to a restaurant he and his wife like. Yummy.

 

Tonight Good Hyun picked for us and we had a spicy chicken dish. Very spicy. Not in the photo was the additional ginseng chicken and rice stew. I am stuffed! You can tell in the second photo how copious the chili oil was in the stew.

Remote Animal Communication

Over the weekend we attended the Love & Light Festival 2010 at Suntec Convention Centre. The festival was a gathering of cheap booth spaces populated by a good number of healers, Reiki practitioners, the 2010 Psychic of the year, yoga clubs, crystal vendors and others. The set up was sad, and for that reason I felt sorry for all the individual booth owners. The space was on the 3rd floor with good lighting, but the booths were tiny, and basically a wall with flimsy dividers providing no privacy and little quiet for practicing. Imagine how odd it is for the those channeling drawings for customers based on their spirit to compete with a drumming group banging on pots and pans or the rush of people going to attend the workshops on Spoon Bending or “Talking to your Crystals.” Tough spot.

There were a number of interesting practitioners there. I have to say upfront that I am not much of a believer beyond understanding these practices provide positive reinforcement and feelings, which by themselves have been proven to have a positive effect on people, but are probably as effective as a placebo for most and well within statistical randomness for effectiveness.

That said, we try.

I honed in on one of the Animal Communicators named carlie. She has an advanced certificate in Animal Communication and also seems to be skilled in Angel this and that. I asked her to provide some answers on Windam, and for $15SGD we got answers to two questions.

1) What is he talking about all night?

2) Is he feeling in good health?

carlie used a photo on Kyoko’s cell phone as a communication device (though, as Windam doesn’t own a phone we’re pretty sure it went to mental voice mail) and gave us the following insights.

1) He is complaining about an odd smell around his litter box. Something is not to his liking.

2) He has some issue with the area around his heart, possibly not his heart, but in that general area.

 

We checked in with Windam when we got home, but due to his inability to speak English, it is hard to know if the call from carlie really got through. We asked about the toilet but gained no insights ourselves. Kana is convinced now we should change the kitty litter brand next round so we agreed to try that. As for his health, aside from bad kitty breath for the last 15 years, I think he’s doing alright for his age personally.

 

The day was fun. We ended up having dinner that evening at Newton Hawkers for satay making an enjoyable end to the day. Do I believe more? No. But I’ll let you know after we adjust the kitty litter situation.

Lion Dance

Chinese New Year brings scores of Lion Dance teams out for a year's worth of work in two weeks. Numerous businesses in Singapore hire these teams to come and scare away spirits and bring good luck. Yesterday a team came to dance at our office, first at the main entrance on the 22nd floor, and then to each desk that had hung a treat above it (and a small stipend). In our floor area only one of my co-workers did so buy the lions roamed all our desks bringing us luck and left her a good luck message in orange slices.

On our way through Novena Square today we lucked out to catch their yearly Lion Dance. We had been watching for a notice and thought we had missed it, but walked through right as they were setting up. The dance here is fun to watch as it involves two lions, the first who meticulously arranges orange slices and chews up lettuce and tosses it about, and the second lion who does acrobatic jumps a top of poles above the crowd. Really impressive to see the lion jump from pole to pole and swing down to rest its front paws below all while blinking and wagging its tail.

 

In Seoul, South Korea

I’m in Seoul for a couple of days meeting with my office mates and enjoying the food. I just love Korean food and it is always a pleasure to be in Seoul. Yesterday I arrived on a flight from Singapore and made the first bus out from Inchon Airport to COEX City Air Terminal. My hotel, Grand Intercontinental is connected and only a short walk making for an easy airport to hotel transfer.

I was hungry by the time I got to the hotel so ducked down in to the COEX mall to the food court where I had kimchi jigae set for 7,000 won, about US$5.75 or SDG*8.15. Yummy and cheap. Here’s a quick snap.

Tonight my teammates asked what I’d like to eat. My answer was “What is something that you don’t make at home because it is too time consuming or difficult?” Answer? Trotters. Lovely. Lots of meat where they only use the foreleg, not the hind leg. Personally, I can’t tell the difference.

But, it is always a good meal. The table is flooded with kimchi dishes and tons of other good eats. Afterwards I had a drink at a bar and back to the hotel. An early evening with a full belly.

Electrocution causes Limbo

Not a great photo but I liked the graphics. Either you just drop dead or do the limbo. And I like the nifty shuriken looking electricity icons that frame the text.

No Inflammable

Sign on the way in to Microsoft office in Shinjuku. If you speak English you can only bring in articles that burn well it appears.