So, there I was with a couple of letters to send to France and a few minutes to spare. When I went onto the Royal Mail’s website it did warn me that due to a technical glitch, things were running a bit slowly. Okay, no biggie. The first envelope printed out okay, but I did get some strange messages along the way – one of which told me I needed to print out customs forms because I was sending to a non EU country. Given that France hasn’t opted out of the EU so far as I am aware, I guess that was a bug.
It did occur to me at this point that what we had here was the usual upgrade/server change whereupon the user is a guinea pig for bug fixing. The second envelope didn’t happen. I got a permission denied error. I tried again, only to notice that the aborted purchase had deducted my account by £1. Ah, well, onto technical support and several minutes listening to Vivaldi.
To be fair to them, they did sort out the refund quickly and advised me to go to the post office to get a stamp. If they hadn’t closed it, this would have been a five minute walk instead of half an hour…
And all of this was because?
The problems, lasting more than a week, were caused by a migration of online services to a new computer server.
Of course.
XX I needed to print out customs forms because I was sending to a non EU country. Given that France hasn’t opted out of the EU so far as I am aware, I guess that was a bug.XX
Na. With christmas coming and all that crap, they are just pre-programming their service incase the E.U collapses over the holidays.
Had no idea you could even do that. Puts AusPost to shame, though having said that it sounds like it might be easier to buy a real stamp here these days.
I wish I’d known about the technical glitch before I’d pressed the “confirmation” button and got – nothing!. It would have saved me about 10 minutes.
BTW is it beyond the capabilities of the Royal Mail to 1. have parallel running in place during an attempted migration (presuming that’s possible), and 2. test its systems before going live? To be fair, RM is not alone in testing out its systems/products on their customers (as all those condemned to early adoption of Windows Vista – or any new Microsoft product – can confirm).
Umbongo, now you’re just being silly…
So that’s what has been going on. I was trying all weekend to find out how much it would cost to post my meagre two eBay sales but it was down for the whole time.
Did they get the site from mywebs or something?
And how long was wonderful super-private-enterprise “Blackberry” down for, recently?