Where in the World is Rebecca Today?

I’ve talked about this in a few places, but not given much detail. Tim has a Canon EOS 300D. I, do not. I tried using his camera in 2008 when we were in Wales and I thought his camera was too heavy, and so I gave up on using it…but recently he encouraged me to play around with it. I love it. I took all the photos in Wales exclusively with the SLR camera, and even took loads in manual focus.

Does this mean I don’t want my new Olympus mju 3000? No way. I’m so excited for my new camera my mom and aunt gave me for my birthday. I love having a portable camera, and I can’t wait to try out the new settings. Sometimes, a small point and shoot can take just as nice photos as a big SLR.

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What a few days it has been for me.

Last week, I decided it was time to upgrade my phone. I’m an Orange customer, and when I bought my phone it was originally to use as a visitor only, so I picked up a barebones phone (a Sony Ericsson W200i. In pink.). Now that I’m living here full-time, I wanted a phone a little bit more like my old us phone (Verizon – a LG EnV), since I was very satisfied with it and if Verizon had used SIM cards, I’d have just gotten my US phone unlocked and popped the Orange SIM in it. Verizon doesn’t use SIM cards, so I had to purchase a new phone.

About a month ago, I went into the Orange shop to browse phones and talked with someone in the shop. I explained the three important things in a new phone:

1) better camera (my old phone was a VGA, I wanted at least a megapixel or 2)
2) the ability to send pictures to facebook
3) a QWERTY keyboard

The sales person recommended the LG KS360. I said thank you, and filed that bit of information away until August, since Tim and I had discussed my new phone being a birthday present.

While I was checking my balance last week, I noticed the phone I wanted was now on sale for £35. With the £14 I had saved up in my “phone bank”*, the phone would only cost us £20. I happily ordered it.

…and then the fun began.

The phone arrived on Tuesday. Since I wanted to keep my current number, I had to call to get things activated. I got sent to a call center in india, where I was told it would take 24-28 hours to activate my new SIM with my old number. Then, he revised it and told me 30 minutes after I expressed shock at it taking so long.

30 minutes passed….no phone active. Called back, got India again. This person reiterated the 24 hours to activate. Fine.

24 and a half hours later….no phone active. Called back, got India. This time I was told that “it hasn’t been 24 hours yet. You didn’t call until 5:59PM yesterday, and it’s only 3PM”. I explained that I had actually originally called at 2:30PM, and the person I spoke with changed the time I called to 4PM. She promised me a call back at 5 to make sure the phone was active.

5PM….no call. I called, FINALLY got the UK call center. And guess what? It only took 2 minutes for the person on the phone to activate the SIM.

Problem. SMS and MMS was not working properly. Called back, got India. Their attempt to fix it didn’t work, as picture messages still were not working.

Called back, got UK. Fixed it in a few minutes.

So, my new phone was now active, and the UK person even told me how to transfer my phone numbers onto it from my old phone. When the new phone imported everything, it dropped characters off of people’s names, so the place I volunteer, Cancer Research UK, became “Research U”, The British Transport Police became “Transpor”, and Welton Family Surgery became “Surgery”, to name a few. It also didn’t thread multiple numbers for people, so it would have something like “Tim/M” and “Tim/H” right in a row. It also deleted email addresses, such as the mobile@facebook.com address for sending pics. I figured this was the kind of stuff I could fix manually, so I went into the address book only to discover that a) you only can have 1 number per entry b) the name space is very short and c) there was no place to add an email address.

Went to bed. Thursday morning, Tim and I went into town so I could return the phone to the high street shop. Person in the shop told me he couldn’t help me b/c it was an online purchase and I would need to call it in. Ok, fine. Each number I called told me they were not the number I needed THREE TIMES (so, three wasted phone calls) until I finally got someone (in the UK!) at the right number. This included a call to the India call centre who told me I couldn’t return my phone!

In order to return the phone, I also needed to return the new SIM. This meant getting my old SIM re-activated. I went through all the steps of returning the new phone except for the last step, because I needed to get the SIM re-activated first. I called the number to re-activate the SIM, got someone in the UK, and guess what? It took only a few minutes. I was told that it should have never taken 24 hours the first time. Nice, right?

So, We’re done with the tale, yes? Old phone is working again, and new phone is ready to be returned, right? No.

My old phone was no longer receiving texts and pics.

Called it in, got India. I was told he was sending an update to my phone. He told me it could take a half hour.

30 minutes later….no texts. Called in, got the UK. Again, the woman tried to send the update to my phone and said it sometimes does take a while for the system to make it go, and said she would call me back in an hour.

No call. I called in, and the person I spoke with said he knew how to fix it, but the problem was I was calling from the phone, so he would make a note on my account for me to call in this morning to get it fixed. We speculated that maybe I also wasn’t receiving phone calls, so he told me when we hung up he’d try to immediately call me and if it didn’t go, we’d know it wasn’t receiving calls, either.

No call. *sigh*

After Tea with Lynne and Jan, I figured I had better ring Tim to let him know that I couldn’t receive messages, just in case he needed to reach me or had been trying to. A few minutes into our call, I got cut off. I tried to call back and got a message “you do not have enough credit for this call” and was advised to switch to the “reserve tank”**. I didn’t understand this, because that morning I had checked my balance and I had over £5!

Annoyed and with the resolve that I was going to switch to O2 in the morning, I went to chorus and then home to bed.

This morning, I called back into Orange, and got a lovely woman in the UK named Emma. Emma is why I am staying with Orange. She looked in my account and saw the notes from the previous night and was able to fix it. Then, when I explained to her that I was thinking about switching over to O2 because I was upset with the number of calls I had to make to Orange in the past few days, upset with the India call centre not being able to help, PLUS the calls all coming out of my credit she asked me to hold, and then came back on the line and told me she was giving me some credit (which most of it had to re-pay the reserve tank, but still). Then, she chit-chatted with me as we waited for my phone to start receiving the messages from yesterday, and even talked me through the process two more times when my phone kept losing messages.

Would you like to know the problem? Apparently a single tower was down yesterday and my phone had been programmed to use that tower, so all they had to do was swap me over to a different tower.

I won’t go into what happened when Emma had to (apologetically) send me to the India call centre to finish the return, since once again, the India call centre proved to be useless (and told me again that I couldn’t return the phone, when the paperwork clearly stated “7 day return”) and I had to call back yet again (to the UK) to finally get it handled.

So…I’m sticking with Orange. Because of Emma. Because of finally getting someone who was competent, friendly, and able to understand my frustrations.

Emma, if you’re reading this….Thank you!

(They are sending me a mailbag to return my phone in. It can take a week for this bag to arrive. I have 30 days to send it back now that I’ve called to return it and the credit will go back to my account when they get the phone back, including the money from my phone fund, so while I will be researching some of the other phones available through Orange, I won’t be purchasing anything until the credit goes back on, and I probably will purchase the phone directly at the store to save all the hassle.)

*Phone Bank is an Orange gimmick. For every £10 you top-up by, they put £1 into a phone fund for purchasing a new phone.
**Another Orange feature, where they give you an extra £2.50 in credit you can use if you go dead, and then when you top-up, it repays the reserve tank back.

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I contacted Boots via email about the face wash, and got a very nice apology email and was asked for my mailing address for them to refund the cost of the original product. Imagine my surprise when I received a gift card in the mail for £15 – twice the amount of the original product!

I have to say, Boots went over and beyond the call of duty on this one. Both times I spoke with someone from Boots – in store and in email – I made it clear that I had purchased BOTH bottles with £5 vouchers and both times I was refunded the full price of the product and then some.

I have switched to a different No. 7 face wash that does not contain “Acer”. It doesn’t feel as nice as the foaming wash does, but it does the job. Now I just have to figure out how to get rid of the bumps left on my face from the old facewash!

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A few months ago, I went into Boots in search of face wash. A few friends of mine from us2uk recommended the No. 7 line, so I went to that counter first. The woman I spoke with suggested the Gentle Foaming Cleanser, so I bought a bottle. Since I had a voucher for £5 off, I bought a second bottle before I was finished the first one.

I started breaking out on my chin badly. Regular pimple cream wasn’t taking care of it, but some antibiotic cream did, so I was really confused as to what was causing it. I got to the end of the first bottle of face wash, and was separating it for recycling when I noticed “contains maple”*. Uhmmm….so I scanned the ingredients list (which I had looked at in the store) but still didn’t see maple listed. I was frustrated, but glad to find the source of the spots.

I decided to start googling all the ingredients listed, and sure enough, the scientific name for a sugar maple tree was listed. Because, doesn’t everyone know the scientific name for everything they are allergic to? I sure don’t. And I found out that every type of maple tree has a different scientific name. Fortunately, they all start with “acer”, so I should be okay in the future.

Fortunately, the Boots store let me return the unopened bottle and I purchased different face wash, but I’ve learned an important lesson:

Always read the little blurb on the back of bottles. Even if it is full of adjectives telling you how nice the product is.

*Maple, along with oak and sycamore, make up the bulk of my allergies. Really, I didn’t even think the UK had maple trees!

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I wasn’t going to write a public entry about my issue with Walgreens. I posted something on my private Livejournal to my friends about it to let off steam, but then a friend of mine replied telling a horrible encounter she had, and another friend said “I’m boycotting Walgreens just because of that, and I’ve never shopped there”, so I thought I’d tell the tale.

Walgreens has been doing a 7 days of 7 deals thing with their photolab. Nearly all the offers have been free items or really cheap items (25 photos for .25, free 8×10s, free 4×6s, etc.). The freebies are posted all over the web, at blogs such as Deal Seeking Mom, Moms Need To Know, and at least a dozen other mom or frugal related blogs. So, the coupon codes went pretty viral.

I went in to pickup my free pictures in one large lot and was informed by someone claiming to be the “assistant manager” that he was going to charge me for my pictures. I did try to argue with him that since the website says to charge me $0, he should, but no luck. So we walked out. A few hours later, I received a notice that my order was canceled. I forwarded it to Walgreens Customer Service department along with a note explaining what had happened and this is the reply:

Thank you for contacting Walgreens.com customer service.
This is in response to your email regarding Walgreens.com photo
order xxxxx.

I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. You
have contacted customer service for Walgreens.com website.
Although I can not address your concerns directly, your
satisfaction is very important to us. According to our records,
your photo order was submitted at your local store. For
assistance, please contact the photo manager at that location
at xxx-xxx-xxxx.

If you have any further questions or need additional information
regarding our website, please reply to this e-mail, or contact
us at the toll-free number below.

We at Walgreens.com look forward to serving all
of your prescription, photo and drugstore needs.

So, their solution is to call the store that you already have an issue with. Nice. Well, I’m not about to do that, but I certainly won’t be taking anymore orders into Walgreens.

To cinch the deal for me and a few of my friends, let me tell you what happened to my friend, J.

J’s brother passed away and her family wanted some pictures of him to display at the funeral. J happened to have some digital photos from her wedding that included her brother, so she took the disc into Walgreens to get some prints made.

The person she spoke to at the Walgreens photo counter accused her of trying to re-print copyrighted photos and then when J explained the situation about her brother dying, she got accused of lying about the deathl in order to get the store to print her photos. Obviously, she walked out without getting anything printed.

I hope between my story and my friend’s story, you might consider not taking your photo orders into Walgreens, no matter how good the deal looks.

I’ve been seeing the commercials since I got back from the UK for a new energy drink from Ocean Spray called Cranergy. Cranergy boasts 50% fewer calories and less sugar than “traditional energy drinks” and contains “green tea extract & B-vitamins”. First, I need to correct something. One serving of dragonfruit flavoured Vitamin Water (the bottle is technically 2) also only has 50 calories, and Vitamin Water now makes a new 10 calorie version. If you purchase the 4C brand Vitamin Stix or Energy Rush, those actually have 0 calories. But we’ll forgive Ocean Spray.

I love anything cranberry flavoured, so I really wanted to give this a try, but at over $3 for the large bottle, I wasn’t willing to purchase it in case I didn’t like it. I was going through the coupon offers on coupons.com on Friday, and I discovered a $1.00 off ANY Cranergy item coupon. Then while we were at Weis, I saw the 4-pack on sale for $2.99, making it only $1.99 with my coupon, and each bottle only $0.50.

So we picked a pack up, and I cracked open one of the 12 oz. bottles around 10PM when I was feeling a bit tired and still had a lot of work to do. The first thing I noticed was the overly sweet taste of sucralose. As I said above, I love cranberries, and what I especially love about them is how tart they are. It goes without saying that I was a little disappointed with the sweet taste of Cranergy. It tasted just like the Diet Ocean Spray (a product I dislike for it’s overly sweet taste). I couldn’t taste the green tea or the grape juice the ingredient list claims it contains.

As far as the vitamin content goes, it has 100% Vitamin C, but it also lists 70% for Niacin, Vitamin B12, Vitamin B2, Vitamin B6, and something called Pantothenic Acid, which I’ve never heard of before. A quick search on Google tells me that it’s simply another name for Vitamin B5. The only other vitamins mentioned on a regular bottle of Ocean Spray are 1% Iron and 1% Calcium, both missing from Cranergy. The small print on the side of the nutrition facts also tells me that due to the green tea content, Cranergy has 83mg of caffeine. A strong cup of hot black tea contains between 50-100mg of caffeine to give you a comparison.

Around 11PM last night, I decided to go to bed. I was still tired, and was going to chalk up the Cranergy as just another gimmicky product. But as I was checking e-mail and other things for the last time before bed, I started to feel a bit more awake. I got into bed and started watching Season One of Eureka and stayed awake until past 2AM. I blame this entirely on the Cranergy, as I’ve been in bed lately by 11 or 12!

Today, I foolishly drank 2 bottles – one this morning at breakfast, and one in the early evening. I completely forgot it was an “energy” drink and grabbed it for the cranberry flavour. Whoops.

So I think I would recommend this drink if you can handle the sweet cranberry taste and are willing to wait an hour or so for the energy boost to kick in. I still think the regular price for the bottles is a bit steep (the large bottles are smaller than regular bottles of Ocean Spray, yet cost more), but if they plan on offering $1 coupons more frequently, I’ll continue to pick up the 4-packs. But if you’re looking for a beverage that will provide energy and more vitamins (and still don’t mind the taste of sucralose), I’d go with Vitamin Water or 4C Vitamin Stix, personally. If you’re looking at it purely in terms of cost, Vitamin Water frequently on sale for 10 for $10, making it the same cost as the Cranergy 4-pack at regular price. Vitamin Stix are sold 14 to a box and cost around $4 for the box, making it less than $0.30 per bottle. Of course, with Vitamin Stix, you have to have a bottle of water to mix it into, and if you don’t have a bottle to fill with water, you could wind up spending more than $1 on a bottle of water, which would significantly up the cost.

Wonder how long I’ll be awake for tonight?