Words you don’t want to hear… “we have lost your package”. Words you don’t want to hear after that… “if after a few more days you don’t hear anything, contact the sender, to ask us to start searching for it”. If you already know it’s missing, why not search now? Oh DHL, why are you so crap? Consistent over the years, I’ll give you that, but still it’s consistently crap.
There is something about DHL, isn’t there! One Christmas they failed abjectly at communication, leaving us without holiday parcels. On Christmas Eve I tracked down the location of the local depot — not disclosed anywhere by DHL — and lucked into finding the last employee still there. He hunted around and found my parcels for me, and saved Christmas in the process.
I think it also depends on who is driving the truck. Saw the same guy now a few times, and since then it is somewhat better here. (There was a time when they would ring the doorbell -or not- and just immediately walk away again, oftentimes not even bothering to fill out the form that they stuffed down the mailbox.)
Another week entirely dedicated to finishing up a client report. The first part I finished Monday, but then I was completely stuck in the second part, and I could not see a way out of the hole I dug for myself. Discussing it with my consortium partners for this project helped a lot, and brought to the fore that the clue to a solution lay in an observation I had already made in the draft report. Once unstuck, I finally could progress. It still took way too many hours, including this weekend, but at least the stress of being stuck was gone. Thanks to Elmine for accepting my weeks long exile in my home office. I even found the time this week to start with the next phase of the project, so that the delay on this part does not carry over into the next stage.
This week I:
Worked full time and then some on the mentioned client report.
Did some bookkeeping, preparing the May invoicing
Had a meeting with our MT
Discussed an ongoing client project concerning a data publication platform
Had two meetings for another client on digital transformation
Planned interviews for the next stage of the EU High Value data study I’m involved in
Had the winter tires on the car changed, finally. We returend from a skiing trip in the French Alps days before the first Corona patient was detected in the Netherlands, and soon after the lockdown happened. This was the first opportunity. The tires won’t have suffered much, I’m already doing 2 months with one tank of petrol.
Received a Philips PicoPix Max beamer. I ordered it last October, or rather two, as part of an IndieGogo funding campaign. Originally planned for delivery by the end of the year, it was delayed until after Chinese New Year. By then the factories were closed due to the pandemic, so production really only started late March again. One received, and first impressions are good. The second one seems to have been lost by DHL…
I dumped Facebook and Whatsapp
How working on the report felt these past weeks