Wednesday 30 November 2016

Royal Mail deliveries

I've just lost a day of my life waiting for a parcel from Amazon. The parcel was sent as "Special Delivery Guaranteed" and was due today - 30th November. As it is a parcel which has to be signed for I waited in all day. Amazon and the Royal Mail have fancy mail tracking web sites which are about as useful as chocolate teapots.   They just said "It's out for delivery", no specific time for delivery just - it's out for delivery.  By 18:30 I emailed Amazon to find out what has happened to the parcel. Ignoring the management speak the message from Amazon was "Tough, wait until it's delivered."  Shortly afterwards the status on the website was updated to show "Parcel returned to depot." So currently I have no idea when this parcel will be delivered.

The Royal Mail should update it's website to add some new status messages:

  • It's gone out, but is unlikely to arrive on time
  • We can't be bothered to deliver it today, maybe next week
  • We have delivered it to a post office for your collection, take a 4x4 SUV to reach it
  • Collect it from the sorting office between 0530 and 0630 in two days time
  • The driver was late back from the pub, maybe deliver tomorrow
This nonsense will continue until the Government dictates that any failure to deliver a "timed delivery" will be compensated at the rate of 8 hours of the Minimum National Wage unless 12 hour notice of failure is provided in advance.

As for Amazon? I'll not do any Christmas shopping via them.

Wednesday 23 November 2016

Trouble with WmiPrvSE.exe?

For months now we've noticed a Microsoft process called WmiPrvSE.exe continually running on our PC (Win7 Professional). There was no apparent reason for this but it was consuming a steady 5% of CPU resources on a 4 core cpu. We did a lot of online research but could come up with no reason. 

However, almost by accident, we discovered that if we stop CCleaner running in the background then the problem with WmiPrvSE goes away. I guess there must be some kind of permissioning conflict.