Category: Commerce

Products, services, marketing, names

Chimney cleaning

A job I am happy not to do myself. Removing the “sombrero” to clean the chimney from the top down. The other guy removes the “ceiling” of the wood stove and pulls the wire brush down. Unlike the nearby wood stove company whose owner died a little over a year ago, these guys (Tatton) insist it has to be done this way. How they navigate the roof tiles without breaking them remains a mystery to me.

¿Sin responsiblidad?

We had a small freezer delivered yesterday, and the transit company’s bill is stamped “without responsibility for breakage.” So I guess I should be grateful the delivery guy carried it in, instead of just dumping it off the truck into the driveway?

Ah, Uruguay, after twelve and a half years you continue to mystify.

Lifetime guarantee. Oh sorry, no longer alive.

It wasn’t long after we started buying expensive LED bulbs i Uruguay that I took to labeling them with the purchase date and location. This one lasted 1,125 days. It was in our dining room, and I estimate we use it for an average of five hours a day. That suggests it lasted 5,625 hours, or 56% of the manufacturer’s promised life.

And speaking of life, here’s a sealed bag of cous cous from El Naranjo, expiration date just over two months from now. Lovely. I will be returning it to Macro Mercado, where I bought it. That should be fun!

Remarkable.

A Christmas card received in the end of March. Typical of Correo Uruguayo was my first thought. I looked closer: mailed 20 December, arrived in Uruguay 28 January, and delivered 28 March. Two months in country before it got to our house.

Ridiculous? Look closer. “Caviahue” is the name of our house. There is no city, state, or postal code in the address.

Can you imagine the USPS delivering a letter to an address with no city, state, or ZIP code?

DAC, DAC, DAC

I ordered a book from Amazon in the US. If I lived in the US, I would have received it within three days. But of course I don’t, so I shipped it to Miami whence it was brought by air for USD 12 (under two pounds weight). Plus a few bucks for home delivery.

But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Way ahead.

The Miami shipper delivered it to a local delivery service called DAC. From DAC’s warehouse in Montevideo to my doorstep is roughly 46.5 kilometers, a one hour and five minute drive, according to Google (pronounced google-eh) Maps. So allowing a few minutes for confused DAC employees to fumble around, I could drive there for my package and be back in under two and a half hours.

Assuming an average speed of 6 km/hour, I could walk the same in around 15 hours and 20 minutes.

But let’s go further: if DAC had strapped my book to the back of a giant tortoise and sent it on its way, theoretically (of course the poor thing would have to take breaks) I could have my book in just over 7 days.

(To make it more realistic, we’ll assume the tortoise has more than just one book to deliver.)

Am I being ridiculous? Consider how long DAC took to deliver a package 46.5 km, and you tell me.

That’s over 11 days. The tortoise could have been more than halfway back by the time DAC accomplished its delivery.

Completely pathetic? Maybe not: they were quicker than a 3-toed sloth would have been, given the same task.

Mail, now and then

Ah yes, like the IRS notice giving me 60 days to respond to an earlier notice I never received, which arrived 105 days after being mailed.

Up through January 2007, when we left the US, going away for a few days would result in a bin like this awaiting our return.

Since then, I’m pretty sure ALL mail we’ve received since would not fill one of these.

Fishy calendar

I got my first 2022 calendar recently, from the fish guy. It’s notable for a number of reasons. First is that I never knew the place actually had a name, since it doesn’t display it anywhere. Regardless, I can barely make out the name on the calendar. And they are definitely not open every day of the year, despite the claim. And interesting to note—though certainly understandable—the foods pictured do not include fish.

It does have moon phases, though, which may prove useful.

Ah, Uruguay: not just www…

Welcome to Uruguay. Please type “www.”

Six years ago I pointed out that some large websites in Uruguay required you to type “www” or they wouldn’t work. ANCAP, the national company for petroleum, alcohol, and Portland cement, still requires you to type “www” in late 2021. Honest: ancap.com.uy. [October 2024: still not corrected!]

However, Riogas, one of the cooking gas companies that has become completely annoying in the last few years by driving noise trucks around in a country where absolutely no one who might want to order gas lacks a phone, has outdone itself with web design.

It was probably 1994 when I first played around with web design, and knew about including “www redirects,” as one had to. But almost since then, web hosts have provided that automatically. But don’t tell Riogas. Honestly, check it out: riogas.com.uy. [October 2024 – corrected! Imagine that.]

But it gets better: do you remember GIFs? Not animated GIFs, but the limited-palette color file format released by Compuserve in 1987? Which you probably stopped using by the late 1990s when PNG came onto the scene?

Ah, but don’t tell Riogas. Not only do they use a GIF as one of their header images, but it’s a doozy: measuring 5,228 by 1,801 pixels, it takes up 8.8 megabytes!

There it is, in all its glory. Even if simply saved in an appropriate format (not GIF!), its size could easily be reduced by 80%.

However, I reduced that image to 1920 pixels wide and saved as jpeg at reasonable quality. It’s perfectly presentable and barely more than 1% of the size. In fact, would load 86X faster than their monster legacy image.

Maybe the genius designers at Riogas will figure that out one day?