The Calculator Notebook

And some good news to report.

Last Friday both my DM15c from Swiss Micros and a Nagoya 16 inch whip VHF/UHF antenna were delivered to my home. The calculator, as noted in my earlier post, was meant to be a Christmas present and was ordered from Switzerland weeks before, but was held up somewhere with Canada Post and came about 2/3rds in January.

The antenna is a highly suggested addition to my Baofeng 5RM handheld radio that I have been using to get familiar with traffic and repeaters in my local area. The antenna itself is wonderful and works very well. Now I am slowly working on my amateur radio license so that I can engage in some of the interesting nets that happen regularly. So far I've been tracking a Canada-wide net that takes place across a series of repeaters every weekday morning at 8 am in addition to a local net with repeaters all across the island. These nets are great because people give a short blurb about what they are up to for the day or what the weather is like where they are which is particularly interesting, even just to listen to. Another one that I've found and have enjoyed being around to listen to each evening is the Insomnia Net which takes place on a network spanning the whole continent called the WIN system. They do trivia starting at 10pm every single day of the year and people from all around Canada and mostly the United States check in and share answers. There are regulars that are fun to listen to and wait for checking in and newcomers every night. I can't wait to be a newcomer myself and check in whenever I am available.

The calculator is truly wonderful. It is a credit card sized version of the hugely popular HP15C RPN advanced-scientific calculator. It is not as thin as a credit card, you cannot fit it into a wallet and no would you want to really. The height and width of the device is credit card sized, roughly the width of the LCD screen from the original device. It has very nice upgrades include a new, much faster processor that emulates the old NUT processor of the HP device. You can also choose two different speeds for this processor to extend battery life when not doing intensive calculations. The LCD screen is a very large and clear dot-matrix display which several font options designed by the Swiss Micros team.

Even more wonderful is a two-line display option that shows two of the four RPN stack registers on the display at all times. This is great because you can see the two figures being manipulated by an operand and I like to use the two-lines for answers that programs produce to provide more context. For example, for my g-force braking program, the user can input speed in km/h and the desire g-force experienced by passengers and the program produces the time in seconds for the brake event in the y-register and the braking event distance in m in the x-register. Both items are useful for learning and planning and both can be displayed upfront and clearly in a two-line display.

The calculator also has a library of units for conversions and common constants used across several scientific disciplines. This is an exceedingly nice feature packed into such a small device. Which brings me to the whole point. I already own a DM32 RPN calculator that has an even more beautiful and large four-line display and a way more processor with way more precision for intense mathematical calculations in the palm of one's hand. But the DM32 is not really meant for the field, not for me at least. It it a home device or an office device but not an in the bus, on the road, out and about kind of device. But the very small DM15c is such a device. The perfect everyday carry that packs a very powerful punch.

And that's all about that I have by way of good news for the moment.

The title is going to be a little melodramatic, but I do not care. I am upset right now and I am going to share why here.

The reality is that right now I am supposed to be tinkering with both a DM15c calculator from Swiss Micros and a Baofeng handheld radio. Both were ordered for Christmas. The calculator was ordered well before Christmas by my partner. The radio was ordered on Boxing Day with some cash that I got from a family member.

Both items originated outside of my home country of Canada; Switzerland for the calculator, mainland China for the radio. Both items snakes through their origin countries with ease. It took a day and a half for the radio to move from an in-land warehouse in China, to an airport on the coast, to Hong Kong and finally to Vancouver, Canada to meet Canadian customs. The calculator took a little longer, about five years to snake through Europe and eventually land in Toronto, Canada. And this is where the case of each item diverges.

The calculator ends up in Canada about 14 days before Christmas. I live on the west coast so not close to Toronto, items shipping from my family in Ontario typically take a week by Canada Post. The calculator however just switched to a status from in customs to in transit yesterday. Yesterday! The Europeans can get the device to move through their entire continent in a handful of days, but it takes weeks upon weeks to move within Canada.

The radio is even more egregious. It lands in Vancouver which is very close to where I live. Things typically in Vancouver take a day to ship to my home on Vancouver Island. However, the radio company uses a last-mile shipper and in my case this is a terrible company named Firefly which used to be known as Intercom. A quick search online reveals hundreds of reviews of people losing their packages, having them damaged or destroyed or in one case several customers getting the same proof of delivery imagine (indicating a potential fraud where packages are being stolen in the system). I have no control over who delivers the radio. So what happens with mine? It gets delivered in a reasonable time, according to the tracker within two days of landing in Vancouver it is in a delivery van en route to my location. SanderheepA. is the driver who leaves my package under a drain pipe during rainy season (according to the super grainy and blurred photo I was sent in my email) to a home that isn't mine. And surprise, surprise isn't any home on my short little road in my neighbourhood. I do not know where SanderheepA. has delivered by package but it is nowhere near my home.

So I call customer service. It is a three hour wait to talk to someone. When I first found out about the bunk delivery I was at work and was not finishing my shift until 8 pm (when their customer service offices are closed). Same for the next day. I try on breaks but because of the long wait time I get no further than listening to broken elevator music while being reminded every few minutes that the service representatives will not tolerate any abuse (because when you're running a theft scam, you're going to have a lot of upset people). At any rate, got in touch with them this morning. And know what I was told? Sorry nothing can be done three days have passed and because I did not call within that window it is no longer their responsibility. I now have to contact the seller (a company in China!) and try and get a refund.

So that is the state of my country. China and Europe can move items within their borders in a reasonable amount of time. A basic requirement one might assume for a developed nation. Canada on the other hand cannot. We either have to deal with inefficient government services like customers or very poor state-run postal delivery services like Canada Post. Or, and this is what really burns me, we have scam companies like Firefly starting up that are designed to fraud people. Because we do not have an efficient and effective government (slowly more and more resembling the very countries people like SanderheepA. have left) we cannot stop these things from happen or people from being scammed by them. It is a shame.

So now I do not have either Christmas present that I supposed to get. And even though the items are international and you might assume oh they must be taking a while to get here, no they are here, it is my own country, my supposed own people who cannot move small packages within our own borders. That is sad. And since I do not have the calculator or the radio I will just sit here and stew.