Category Archives: Bad experiences

Not-so-good exposures to some company or their products

Eaton 5E 850i UPS: belated sign of life; avoid

Accounts, Australia, Bad experiences, Consumer Electronics, Satisfactory outcomes, Tedious processes

tl;dr: If you’re looking for a functional UPS, avoid the Eaton 5E series. And if you want customer service, avoid Eaton.

In an attempt to make my network infrastructure more resilient, I decided to get an uninterruptible power supply, to keep the Wi-Fi on during power cuts. After some comparisons, I settled for the Eaton 5E 850i. It was a mistake.

UPDATE (2022-12-08): After a phone call, and another follow-up message, I finally got the support escalated to a product manager, who was quick to confirm that, indeed, the UPS was defective. It took another follow-up email to get a replacement actually sent to me. Fortunately, this time, it was detected.

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Cadbury Roses Sadness

Australia, Bad experiences, Food, Letters

Dear Mr. Cadbury,

I’m writing regarding the updated flavours in your Roses line, which are disappointing.

A friend told me about a year ago that you had changed them, and that they were not very good, so I subsequently did not buy them again. However, they were on special this week, and I had forgotten about my friend’s warning, so bought a box.

The new flavours are indeed disappointing, and I am horrified to note that some of my old favourites are gone:

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Netatmo Smart Home Weather Station: not as local as they say

Accounts, Bad experiences, Consumer Electronics, Product reviews

Due to heavy fire smoke in the area, we recently needed a way to monitor the outside air quality. Amongst the few devices that caught our eye, the Netatmo Smart Home Weather Station stood out as a decent compromise between features and price.

Until it turns out half the features (including outside air quality) aren’t measured locally, and instead obtained from other data sources.

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Jimmy Stuart: weird smell, poor quality, and terrible customer service

Australia, Bad experiences, Clothes, Tedious processes, Unsatisfactory outcomes,

A few months ago, I received a fancy shirt from Jimmy Stuart for my birthday. I had confirmed with the gifter that it was the pattern I wanted, but we were both quite disappointed with what we found, and smelled, in the box.

We decided to request a return for a full refund but the company refused. Not even the intervention of an NSW Fair Trading mediator helped, and we find ourselves having paid ~$115 in total (with return postage) for a ~$80 shirt (due to second postage), that we probably would not have paid more than $30. Also, the smell is still there.

Lesson learned: don’t buy clothes online without making sure you can get a refund if dissatisfied, as Fair Trading mediators bear little weight against bad-faith vendors.

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HP: Vendor lock-in as a standard, and deprivation of consumer choices

Bad experiences, Consumer Electronics

So I was in the market for printers. Having had good experiences with HP for printing in the past, I looked at their offering.

But then, something struck me.

Cartridges using a non-HP chip may not work, and those that work today may not work in the future.

I feel like, to future-proof my printer purchases, I now need to strike HP from the list of decent manufacturers.

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Australian Geographic: poor quality items, poor customer service

Accounts, Australia, Bad experiences, Online services, Shopping

We just posted this review over at ProductReview.com.au. This experience doesn’t seem to be a rare occurence…

We have ordered from here twice – once the Galileo thermometer, and secondly, a space-projector thing, and both items have been terrible. The thermometer wasn’t actually calibrated, and didn’t go above 28 degrees (useless in Sydney) so was basically something decorative, and the projector wouldn’t actually project onto anything further than 50cm away in a darkened room.

We had no troubles returning the thermometer, but we have been having some problems with the projector. Firstly, they were difficult about returning it if it wasn’t resalable in its original packing – it makes me shudder that they would resell this thing that doesn’t actually work – and then, when they refunded it, they refunded the wrong amount. They rectified this, but have still not paid for return postage. They say that they will only refund return postage if the item is damaged. I would say that not working as one would reasonably expect (i.e. project onto walls in a dark room from further way than 50cm) would indicate that a product was a bit damaged… We will wait to hear back from them regarding the postage, but really, we are not going to order from here again. The products have been a bit crap, despite costing a reasonable amount of money ($70~ and $60) You’d probably be be better off going to your local $2 shop.

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mBox eFax – Just don’t.

Accounts, Australia, Bad experiences, Online services, , ,

I signed up to this company this afternoon, as I had to send a couple of faxes this month, and I didn’t want to go to the the post-office. They had a “1 month FREE use” thing, if you entered your financials, and agreed to have a monthly subscription for $9.95 afterwards – which you could cancel at anytime.  Being that I would have paid to send the faxes, since it was not only saving me a trip out of the house, but to also, to Australia Post, I thought that this was fairly reasonable.

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Buying shoes online – don’t do it to yourself

Accounts, Australia, Bad experiences, Clothes, Good experiences, Letters, Online services, Satisfactory outcomes,

I have been banned from buying shoes online by the resident Frenchman. Why? Because I have had to return 5 pairs over the years, because they NEVER EVER FIT. And then I end up paying extra for postage and more recently, experience anxiety because I worry that they won’t fit.

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