No, I’m not referring to Nokia’s involvement with Qt, nor I’m going to speak about the N900 (which still tempts me somewhat). I’m speaking about the good old classic Nokia phones and accessories.
Last week a friend of mine tells me about a special code to get a 20% discount on all Nokia hardware, and since I was looking for a pair of bluetooth headsets (one for the Nokia E75, and the other for the Siemens VoIP phone, for when I have to wait for an hour on the phone be it for personal situations or, most likely, business reasons) I decided I could go with either one or two depending on one particular factor: whether Nokia was ready to send me one with an UK power adapter.
My reason for wanting a bluetooth set with the UK adaptor is that since I’d like to go back to London (and actually I already booked tickets and room for going back at the start of November with a friend of mine), I would be needing either to use again the adapter or to get an UK Nokia power adapter… since I have about ten different Nokia adapters home, and they insist on giving me a new one with each purchase, another Italian adapter would have been superfluous, and at that point getting a UK one would have been a good choice, in my opinion.
So anyway, since I’m a registered freelancer with a valid European VAT ID, I wanted to have a proper invoice for the headset(s), so that I could then declare it a work expenses (it is). Strangely enough, while Italian eshops never had trouble with invoicing me, European shops often seem to have trouble; some have different websites (like Alternate and Apple’s); other have no way to send me a VAT-valid invoice, and in the case of Nokia’s, they ask me to call them. Well not a problem for me, calling to order stuff.
Not in general at least; the problem is that the operator who answered was definitely not Italian. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with foreigners, not even with those working on call-centers and the like; everybody got to work, and if they are hired to do that job, I’m fine with that. But at least they should ensure that the guy can understand what he’s being told. In this case, he really had no way to it seems.
First of all, he wasn’t even sure whether he could order me the BH-104 headset with the UK adapter… he seemed to ask, either to someone else or me, whether that could be possible, and then said “No, I don’t think so”. Sigh, well okay, I’ll just get one instead of two then (the other I’ll get once I am in London). I start giving him my data, starting from my name… he asks me to repeat it a couple of times… I finally spell it letter by letter, using the classic Italian method for spelling: city names. It seems like my friend here didn’t know them either… indeed, he wrote down “Iettno” as name, rather than the correct “Pettenò”… not a good start is it?
After 40 minutes on the phone for something that, online, would have taken about 5, I get to do something else waiting for the confirmation email (where I finally see the wrong surname); I open a request at Nokia right away to tell them that they got the wrong name, address (number 155 rather than 125) and even the name for the credit card (which is still my old name, not the new one). I also ask again please if they can replace the SKU# with the SKU# of the UK version, but I get no answer. I’m told a confirmation email would arrive when the order is shipped, so I don’t give too much credit to the fact I read nothing, I expect the order to be cancelled (since Visa should refuse the use of the CC with the wrong name, at least so I thought)…
I read or think nothing about it till today; this morning an ex-schoolmate of mine, whom I have seen a few months backs after probably around ten years, and who lives at 800m from my home, calls me up “I just received a package from the Netherlands directed to you… the courier was going to send it back because they couldn’t find the address… I’ll bring it to you this afternoon”. Now, a couple of words thanking Murphy that at least left one thing right, and to my friend who received the package. Obviously, this was the Nokia’s headset.
And here another bad surprise: not only the name is wrong, but the operator didn’t write down my VAT ID! Which makes the invoice unusable as work expense! Terrific!
Okay, okay, at least the headset looks good, I try to pair it with my E75… to no avail. Maybe I’m doing something wrong? I call up a friend of mine to help me out (since he was coming here anyway) and he tries with his E61 (my old one)… works fine; he tries the same with my E75… nothing. Okay, let’s see with the E71… it also works fine at the first try. Fun ensures.
A quick google around later, I found one interesting forum post with an “out there” trick: deleting the SMS Inbox (and outbox as well). Well, what had I to lose? 500+ messages in my inbox… they are there just because it’s too cumbersome to delete them each time, they have no value to me, so I just clear them out… I try with just the inbox first and… uh it works.
What the heck!
Now, Luca actually brought in a good point: my SMS inbox came ported from the E71; and it passed through a firmware update as well; it’s not too far fetched to expect that the database would be in need for some kind of vacuum or something; or maybe while the messaging application could deal with older data format, the bluetooth one couldn’t. Since bluetooth messages are sent like any other message, it’s possible that the two are linked and that might have caused the trouble. In any case, this definitely shows that there is something totally wrong with Symbian!
Really, are we serious? Nokia you made me waste a non-null amount of money with your mistake. I’m definitely going to complain until I can get somebody to at least explain to me why that had to happen in the first place. I start understanding how it is that this trimester has been negative, if this kind of problems is getting common. I definitely didn’t remember this with Nokia.
