I dismissed storm Abigail too soon. A week after the first rash of newspaper headlines about how the UK was to be lashed by fierce winds and rain, it finally was. Or at least the north was. A friend who lives in the Lake District rang about something else and mentioned that it had been raining a lot, and the film footage on the internet of bobbles of sea foam blowing over an unnamed sea front are pretty impressive. They didn't sound so fussed about Abigail in the Scottish islands, though. Some houses lost power but the general view seemed to be First storm of winter arrives, usual strong winds.
In north east Essex it rained all day, but I wouldn't say it was hard enough to count as lashing. I put my coat on when I went to open and shut the gate and the hen house, and a puddle formed at intervals in the driveway, but that was about it. The Systems Administrator was out, probably being rained on, alas, so I took the chance to get on with some Christmas shopping without having to make sure I didn't leave any incriminating screens open or hide away in a locked room when I needed to make a phone call.
It's in the nature of Christmas shopping that you can't really blog about it until after the presents have been ceremonially handed over, just in case your nearest and dearest reads what you've been up to and it ruins the surprise. But I will say that the Systems Administrator's hobbies are all fairly technical, and it took a great deal of Googling and head scratching to get as far as I've got. I'd like to think the SA would be touched by the gesture regardless, while having a dark suspicion that what the SA would really like is for the stuff to be right. Which is fair enough, since that's my view on plants, earrings, shoes, flower pots, and most other stuff.
I have some feedback for small specialist online retailers. A secure online payment facility is essential. Paypal is good, Sage Pay is fine, nobody sensible puts their credit card details into a web page that lacks that reassuring padlock at the start of the address. I don't care if it's got the word secure in the URL, I want to see a padlock. And for bigger online retailers, please do not include a telephone number on your website that eventually connects to a call centre that after keeping would-be customers on hold for a long time puts them through to a member of staff whose knowledge of the products is limited to what's already on your website, and has nobody else to ask, because you have outsourced your calls at weekends. I mean, who does any shopping on a Saturday five weeks before Christmas? We are not talking really hard questions here, just Roughly how big in inches is L and how big is XL? The sizing guide on the website is no use, because while it tells you how to measure yourself, it fails to supply any table linking measurements to sizes.
The Christmas pudding will be coming from the Barn Owl Trust as per usual. It is a very nice pudding, and we always have one every year, and always make the same joke about how it was made by barn owls. I hunted through the rest of their online shop in the hopes I'd find something that would fall into the useful or beautiful category in someone's eyes, but couldn't see anything, so it was just the pudding. I feel as though I ought to know someone who would like a barn owl pellet dissection kit, but can't think of anybody who'd want one, or at least not anyone in the limited circle of people with whom I exchange Christmas presents. The Systems Administrator did not at all share my enthusiasm when I found an owl pellet on the deck under the dawn redwood.
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