cannot believe what Ebay is doing. Now it uses bots (which it calls “hey hi”) to do things that demand users do real work, to “respond” to the bots. They also send lots of SPAM. It gets worse over time.

Someone in Gopher complained the other day: “Ebay themselves have also become increasingly annoying over the years in a whole host of ways, which I don’t have time to detail.”

Same with Evri.

Stop using bots to “save work” when in fact all those bots do is give unpaid work to your customers, whom you piss off.

t looks like many people currently quit or quietly resign from the hired guns who misuse a contempt application to curtail criticism of themselves [1, 2].

They bullied not only me and my wife; they also bullied our representatives.

Let’s hope that some insiders there finally recognised that bullying is not a legitimate way to make a living.

understand that based on fairly recent public statistics, about 2% of people in the UK (definitely over 1%) rightly reject skinnerbox ownership. It’s not that they’re unable to afford it and not having one can lead to problems only because of the wrong assumption everyone has one or must have one.

The other day some company was asking persons in training sessions to give input, in effect leaving feedback by scanning a code. It was making the assumption everyone has the ability to scan a QR code (barcode for skinnerboxes). By doing so, it was leaving out people who don’t want to waste their lives with a “mark of the beast” (religious term) or beacon or similar.

Please don’t be one of those companies.

wo days ago we decided to carefully try to use the underwater lights we had acquired virtually for free (for context, there’s a home project this week [1, 2, 3]). I first tried them outside the water. All OK, no problems. The next step was, try the same inside the water. Oh, no. First, it was very hard to attach the darn thing to the glass. It kept floating upwards. I tried to use the water filter to force it down (in tandem), barely managed to do so. But worse yet, after some time in use we started to see the lights flickering a bit, then bright lights if not sparks came out from the socket. In the process it caused disruption to other appliances, including Rianne’s laptop. OK then, totally not worth the risk! Took it out of the socket, let it dry up for a few days. Today, in the laundry room (away from other valuable appliances and with its own distant fuse; the fusebox splits up the rooms), I plugged the thing back again. Lights not coming back up. None at all. Hmmm… try another socket. Same outcome. Try in the kitchen. Same. Just give up.

“Come on, Roy, you cannot just force it to work…”

My guess is that the fuse blew at some point. Good. Rightly so. Fuses blow up for good reasons, they’re a protection mechanism. I won’t bother replacing the fuse (I have spare ones and know how to handle these).

Whether the lights were not functioning “OK” or the goddamn thing was no longer water-resistant… who knows, right? I’ll never know. Either way, the thing was rendered unsafe to use, either underwater or outside the water (I was prepared to let it be used exclusively as the latter).

Some things are cheap for a reason. Having said that, all the other things we acquired are very good, they just needed a lot of very stubborn cleaning.

Let’s see how long those other things can last. I’m not counting on 5 years, let alone a decade.

My trust in “modern” electronics is waning. I still use appliances older than 30 years old. They still function perfectly.

think I’ve already said enough about why Evri is Evil and deserves a boycott. It uses bots, those bots make mistakes and then it responds with more bots. They also use chatbots to insult customers and it smells like a scam whether they mean to or not.

Today they sent another message and it seems like a template, but this time (unlike before) there is a real name on that generic message. As before, they respond to an incident that does not exist or make wrong guesses about what this incident is about. It’s not about a lost parcel. It was never about that. Any person who can comprehend basic English would know that. Here is the message sent:

Support Incident Update

Response By E-mail (Siliziwe Msengana) (07/09/2026 08.18 AM)

Dear Roy Schestowitz,

Thanks for getting in touch with us about parcel number C00HHA0641395122

We’re so sorry your recipient hasn’t been able to locate their parcel. We appreciate that this is not the outcome you were hoping for, however, we do offer cover to assist in this situation and we will happily support you through the process of making a claim.

As your parcel has received a final delivery scan, a signed Denial of Receipt letter is required. Please use our standard Denial of Receipt letter, which can be downloaded when filling in your claim form, to send to your recipient. Ask your recipient to complete and sign this letter and return this, to you, to attach to the claim. If a scanner is not available, you may take a picture of the letter and attach it before submitting the claim.

Please note: we can only accept physical or electronic signatures (not typed).

During our claims process, if your parcel is located, we will endeavour to deliver this to your recipient as quickly as possible.

Should you wish to submit your claim, please complete the following online form:

Lost Claim Form

We thank you for your time and patience on this matter and ask that you provide the required information within 14 days, so we can resolve this as quickly as possible for you. We aim to process all claims within 28 working days of receipt.

Non-Compensated & Prohibited Items

As a self-serve company, we do everything possible to encourage customers to check our lists of non-compensated and prohibited items and we try to make this easy and transparent so that customers understand from the outset what we can and can’t carry. Certain items such as liquids are on the prohibited list because they are more likely to become damaged than others and therefore require a specialist carrier.

Please note: should you choose to issue a refund before this claim is finalised then you must do so at your own risk. If the parcel is located it will be delivered to the intended recipient and the claim will be closed.

Kind regards,

Siliziwe

Evri Customer Services

They are clearly not actually reading what I sent them, so what’s the pointing writing any more to them?

I’ve decided that, instead, my time is better spent explaining to other customers (or potential customers) what Evri became.

he noise on the Web has grown to the point where human traffic (not trafficking) can go undetected, not trivially discernable from botnets at times.

A visits spike like the above was likely a combination of real (legit) visitors and bots, but good luck finding which % was junk traffic.

Today’s Web is such a sad mess.

What. The. Heck.

Sold out, so I guess this is what counts as “best” now (coming to Manchester in 2 days).

I want the old culture of music back. I want bands, instruments, and good voices. Not flesh. Flesh makes no music.

The new stuff is awful because the new standards are very low.

oday in the evening (or earlier tonight) I was typing up a rather long article in Techrights, where I am the main editor.

As usual, what typically happens is, strands (or trains) of thoughts quickly become streams of words, and words add up to sentences, paragraphs, then a draft of an article. Then I go through the article, which tends to be coherent as it was typed in one go (after planning, having had some time to condition myself to put together a topic to write about in the ‘correct’ sequence), I correct typos, improve the wordings, add some more links etc. (where suitable and readily available)

I do this on a remote laptop connected over the LAN with Barrier, so if there’s a network glitch it can result in lost keystrokes and long repeated keystrokes.

Not for the first time, the latter happened when I pressed “undo” (ctrl+z), so it began undoing things I edited, in effect deleting amendments made for several minutes (far worse than when it happens with backspace as the cursor goes all over the place). Typically I’d be “hands-off” when that happens, then re-do what was omitted. This time, however, two things went wrong: 1) I did not keep “hands-off”, not long enough anyway; so I could not re-do all the way. 2) I did not press ctrl+s (save) for quite some time, so reverting back to the file on disk wasn’t a possibility either. I tried, I even did so from another laptop.

Shit!

I lost some work.

On the bright side: 1) I remembered more or less 80% or more of the changes that I made and could reconstruct a lot (with slight variation, imperfect replication, maybe even better the second time around). 2) not much was lost (either words or time). 3) it was only the editing/correcting pass, not the writing pass. 4) there was a lesson or wake-up call here. I should take advantage of it.

I will probably still take the risk of writing over Barrier, but I need to save to disk more often and be vastly more prudent/careful when undoing gets ‘jammed’. There should be a way to re-do (ctrl+shift+z) everything and, failing that, there’s a file on disk that maintains a recent copy, not what’s on the screen/buffer.

My editing skills typically use past experience (incidents) to reduce chance of loss/error, so my wife was surprised that it happened to me. Writing this blog post probably takes a lot more time than the time the incident ‘cost’ me.

I wonder if other people can relate to this.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about this (over an hour already), so documenting to myself – and maybe to others too -what happened can be hopefully prove useful.

There is no perfect (error-proof) way to edit text, but there are ways to reduce the risk and the cost of mistakes/crashes.

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.

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!