Royal Mail

Day two of lectures was somehow worse than day one - in a purely educational sense that is, from a goodness point of view, it was at worst a waste of time and at best a day off. When I arrived in the lab - which was where I was supposed to be this time - I managed to grab a computer and get logged in, more than a lot of people managed. The lecturer was expecting about 40 fewer students and so the room she had booked was no where near sufficient in terms of numbers of computers to accommodate the whole group. When I eventually found out what the task was to be, I was hugely disappointed to find that the first part was a Matlab tutorial and the second part was plotting a graph. The tutorial was written by my former dissertation tutor who have it to me about three months ago to help me re-familiarise myself with the program. Since then I have gone past the basics and am now writing far more complicated code which meant the simple plotting task was a bit beneath me.

I don't find myself in these sorts of situations very often so I will take this opportunity to brag about it a little. My dissertation is in essence to design and develop visualisation tools and games for teaching Matlab. If I didn't know how to use it by now then I think failure would be on the cards for me. The result was that ten minutes after arriving, I did the honourable thing and left. Honourable in the sense that there was now one extra computer for someone else to use and learn the skills. I have considered that to be my good deed for the day.

I then had to go into town to sort out the eBay fiasco I mentioned here turns out it wasn't his fault and that Royal Mail are supposed to stamp his packages when they are collected. I have since had to fill in a form totally unrelated to the claim I am making - there is only one complaint form apparently so that will have to do. I eventually got the form from the local Post Office but they seemed to be fairly clueless there so I decided to get it checked in the town centre in the hope that they are a bit more knowledgeable and professional. They were, thankfully and although they had never heard of a case like this before, they took all of the information off me and said they would send it to the relevant department.

All I can do now is wait and see what happens. With a bit of luck I will get my money back although if I remember correctly, the last someone claimed compensation (that I know of) they were compensated with stamps. Not the best form of payment but I suppose they would get used eventually. I might just have to start writing more letters.