I opened two tickets with Evri recently.

Both tickets had the same reply.

Both got the reply wrong.

One can only conclude that: 1) no actual person looked into them. 2) they send the same reply to everything.

What is the point contacting Evri if nobody reads and the replies are bots without any logic?

I am documenting below what the bot says to all or most tickets (identical words):

Exactly the same as the last.

wrote to Evri today, early in the morning to be more specific, opening a second ticket after they had made an error by automation. Finally, after a week, I received a reply. Only after opening two tickets and further chasing the first (unhandled) one.

However, it seems to be a template and it refers generally to a lost parcel incident, which isn’t even remotely what this was about! So I wonder if this too is a bot reply. Notice the generic (no name) signature:

Update

260817-046188

Hi Roy,

Thank you for your reply regarding parcel reference .

I’m sorry to hear your parcel still hasn’t been located and I have escalated this with the courier’s manager to be investigated and to ensure this doesn’t happen again. We will try to retrieve the parcel however at this stage it is likely the parcel is unfortunately lost.

I’m sorry that this has happened, we will liaise with the sender to inform them of this outcome. I would recommend you also contact them as it is within their gift to discuss next steps and consider the options available to you.

Once again, I’m sorry for the inconvenience regarding your parcel delivery.

Kind regards,
Evri Customer Services

From what I can gather, they send false bills to many people and hope that some fools will pay the false bills, knowing it would be cheaper than spending half an hour calling them and then spending a lot of money in phone bills (more than the “worth” of the false bill).

Just reading the above generic (and false) reply is itself further waste of time. It speaks of something that was not even reported!

Enshittification as standards lowered.

wrote about 10cc last night. It was a local band that reached international fame and had very creative number-one hits.

By 1974, they had a large enough portfolio to put on a good show on BBC. Despite it being 52 years old, the music has aged well and the talent extends from instruments to vocals (they have both). Earlier today my father agreed with me that music has gotten a lot worse and simpler – and not in the flattering sense of the word “simpler”. He too misses some of the old music.

This music is still available – for those who wish to access it.

We also spoke about the hospitality sector and how competitive it has become (again, not in the good sense of the word “competitive”). He told me that the health club he once managed had in it a member who was the mother of the owner of a local (nearby) hotel and a wide array of similar hotels worldwide. It’s now hard to compete with those “giants”. Back in the 90s the consolidation and ripoff that follows wasn’t so bad.

Prices of things will continue to soar, global warming will make life harder for many, and the media hardly even mentions climate change anymore.

The media too has been subjected to “consolidation”. A lot is now owners by the biggest polluters. Human civilisation does not matter to these people.

HE weather here has cooled down considerably, so I am back to drinking hot coffee and researching for upcoming articles.

This coming week I’ll stay indoors more; I expect writing capacity will hence increase.

y webhost since 2003 is having issues with bots, but it has blocked Tor instead. We’re working to undo this.

If raw Web stats are to be believed, the main domain (not subdomains) of schestowitz.com got a million visitors last month. AWStats isn’t good enough at classifying bots, so this is overly flattering and… just false.

The state of the Web (noise as traffic, humans being a minority of the whole) is truly worrying. It wasn’t like this in 2003.

I am really not happy with the direction the Internet has taken.

Incoming:

believe that of all months, at least here in the UK, August is the hottest (I could check to be sure). This year heatwaves began in May and even in April we had some hot days.

This is global warming. Maybe it’s “fun in the sun” sometimes, but what about the impact on agriculture, the price of water, and the safety of animals?

August in the UK seems like Spain several decades ago.

nshittification is not a term that I used, but here it is for everyone to see:

Some time ago I wrote to you regarding a cyber issue. I appreciated your response and it seems like you took my input seriously and changed accordingly so as to alleviate concerns about online scams and communication over E-mail.

Today I want to give some input regarding your branch at Manchester City Centre (Market Street).

In a nutshell, my wife and I had a 9:30 appointment and spoke to an employee whom we liked and has been very helpful to us in the past. We appreciated how she solved an issue and even communicated with us several time, by landline, to ensure the issue had been solved.

Today it seems like when handling us she was being supervised from the desk to us (accompanied from afar), where a person we assume to be her manager eavesdropped on our communication and threw mildly demeaning remarks our way (if not microaggression, definitely micro-managing the lady who served us, based on our intuition). The lady we sat with wanted to offer the services that we scheduled the meeting for, however this was interrupted by the other lady, who insisted we needed to do it using an “app” (which we don’t have) on our own. It was rather unpleasant, probably not only for us but also for the lady who served us.

After this appointment my wife and I spent some hours discussing this matter in a coffee shop down the road and decided to write to you about it. We want to be heard and we amicably ask for our input to be humbly considered. We write with good intentions, no bad faith here.

To keep this tidy, I wanted to take this opportunity to raise a number of pertinent concerns only partly related to this appointment (some are more general). The appointment started OK, but ended with some disappointment, not appointment per se.

1. Online Pressure and Discrimination Against ‘Offline’ Banking

When online banking was phased it more than 2 decades ago we were assured it would mostly enhance services rather than exclude or discriminate against people (e.g. things exclusive to some customers, not available to those who don’t opt in; some cannot feasibly opt in, see point (3) below).

My wife and I are both Computer Scientists and prefer for banking to be done in person. We know why. We know how computers work. Herding clients into “apps” and Web sites is not only unsafe; it’s also a risk. It is possible that things will not be done correctly, then blamed on the customers. Instead of saving time it might end up costing the customers a great deal of time, even distress.

2. In-Branch Services

We were told that there is guarantee of access to a branch, however the branch where we both opened out accounts more than a decade ago literally became a casino (the branch got closed, only to be replaced by a gambling shop near Piccadilly Station) and it looks like senior staff – i.e. people who know us and vice versa – was removed over time, only to be replace by much younger people who are less experienced and very dependent on colleagues. That slowed things done. Things that can (or could) take just 5 minutes would take up to an hour, sometimes even longer.

It moreover seems like every year more things become “online-only”, thus we are led to assume the end goal is for the bank to just become some “app” and Web site with no physical presences, no staff to approach, and no collaterals or assets with which to back savings. This seems like a risky gambit and a worrying trajectory that does not inspire confidence.

With banking, it all boils down to trust and confidence. People need to sense that they can confidently withdraw their money. They need to feel like the money is in safe hands.

3. Accessibility

For the sake of people with disability/ies (all of us are likely to become at least partly disabled at one point our our lives) it is crucial to maintain in-person services and imperative that assurances to this effect are given. Contrary to this, the impression given to us today is that such a commitment is gradually being phased out and banking with a human touch (as such) will be only temporarily available, leaving clients grappling to face persons who are qualified and familiar with the particular processes.

Please, can you investigate and clarify these matters? Our aim is not to belittle or insult anybody; we just try to do our best to improve the service or the perceived customer experience. We felt like we witnessed today competing interests: the profit motive against the clients’ genuine interest.

4. Customer-First Approach

In 2000 I was already a very early adopter of online banking, but now I partly regret what became of it; it seems to be means of outsourcing labour from bank staff to the clients, both at the expense of staff and clients and at risk (accountability) to staff and clients, for neither stands to benefit from this role-passing, i.e. it’s detrimental to us all, even your own staff, whose future seems increasingly uncertain. There is no lack of manpower (there are many people out there eager to find a job), there is just a race to the bottom in terms of filling up positions (or simply deprecating them altogether).