Coding with Titans

Some time ago I read a post from Jakub Jędryszek about using a boogie board to make notes. The theory behind it was good enough to convince me to buy one from Gearbest.com. And to be honest I also recommend this toy after such a short period of time. The quality of sketches is amazing for daily tasks for such a low price! Although when I gave it to my kids I wish there was a button (second one) to preserve it and save somewhere as a bitmap image.

Anyway… where is my real problem here?

Well, till that day everything I ordered from Gearbest.com I did using a regular mail. I knew the delivery wasn’t the quickest in the world, but at least it was always predictable. And at the end, if not delivered directly too me, I could pick it up from my local post-office after being notified with aviso.

For that particular order I left the default method – i.e. DPD(UK) carrier service without further thinking. It was really express delivery I must admit. So quick that I almost missed it. Why? Because it’s my fault of course. So please, not treat my further description as a complain. I wish rather to explain, what were my mistakes and where to obtain information they will ask you if you start talking.

The story context is - from Gearbest.com I received a parcel number and I was supposed to use another website (17track.net) to keep tracking of the parcel’s status. What I did, simply checking once per few days, not every hour as I expected it to take at least a month. Then after two weeks, I got a call from an unknown number in the middle of my working hours and the same number tried once again on the next day. That’s it. No email, no info, no SMS about anything, no aviso. Even the status on 17track.net was not updated at that time. I didn’t even expect those calls to be related with my order as there are lots of maniacs in Poland that once you establish a company (be even self-employed) and make your phone number public, they constantly call you trying to sell almost anything, especially a loan.

Then I have seen the “failed” status on 17track.net and called back to be sure. And I was assured, my parcel ended up in a warehouse. Now I could only contact with support (PL phone: 225775555) for help. And here is the crisis: Gearbest provided me 10-digits-long parcel number, while the impatient girl on the other end of the line couldn’t do anything for me without 14-digits-long number. She insisted I should contact the seller first to get the valid number and then contact her again. It changed nothing, when I said, the package was supposed to come from China via DPD(UK). She couldn’t search via name, my phone number nor destination address. Madness!

How could I get the extended number? I didn’t see myself calling Gearbest support and even though, I have seen them saying the number was correct. I could have seen the correct status on the website they provided!

Just by pure accident I opened the www.dpd.co.uk website (not the www.dpd.uk) and entered the short tracking number. What’s even more scary – both sites look exactly the same, but the other website was not giving any results (identically as its polish counterpart www.dpd.com.pl) while the first one produced something like this:

And here I noticed the current status (now: delivered) and full parcel number. The number I got from Gearbest was simply prefixed with “1550” and that’s it. I called DPD(PL) again and this time they believed, this package was for me!

Really funny story! Thx.