Not Fake News. Urban Legends

It’s two-nil to PB Tech in the home-and-away online shopping games.

But you know the rules – let’s not talk about the war.

Instead, let’s talk about buying phones online. The fast decline of my old phone started when I pried off the back cover to do some surgery with blunt instruments.

A few weeks later, the sim card slot no longer slid out, and my attempts to wrangle it back into shape resulted in a banana-shaped back cover. Go figure.

With the upcoming escape to Oz, my daughter suggested the inevitable had hit the fan, and it needed replacing.

After poring over specs and costs etc at gsmarena.com, I settled on a Redmi 9 ( no “Note”) , cheap at Dick Smiths.

I bought that online on June 15, thinking that even if it was being imported from Australia, it would arrive in time.

Whereabouts Unknown

Not. When I hadn’t heard, or received, anything a week later, I looked up the tracking. It was nowhere to be found.

Since Dick Smith’s is now 100% online, and one doesn’t get to talk ( even by text chat! ) to a real person, a busyness of emails followed.

They were “opening an investigation”, which may take “up to 10 working days”. After repeating myself a few times, I think it dawned on them that what I wanted was a phone, and not an investigation. Thank you.

They did eventually refund the money, leaving me to scramble about again.

I found a Redmi Note 9T at PB Tech.

They had delivered within two days an SD card I bought soon after the Dick Smith’s Redmi buy.

And so it was with the phone, which arrived less than 24 hours after I’d ordered it.

So here’s to PB Tech, which delivers stuff pronto with no palaver.

Unlike some other outlets. Which suspicious minds might think advertise products knowing that their delivery tracking is broken, and they don’t have to stocks to meet demand.

It’s official –  i’m on my way out of this cold rainy Isle to soak in the sun.

For a bit. Maybe as brief as three weeks, but perhaps for as long as three months or more. I don’t ( yet ) have a return ticket.

Destination ? Cairns, Far North Queensland, in the Land of Oz, where it’s warm.

Maybe the 16-month stint in South–East Asia messed up my thermostat, but this winter – my first in the “Winterless North” since 2018 – has been brutal on this skinny old bloke.

I wouldna thunk of Cairns, except that it kept cropping up in conversation with Japanese students at Engoo.

July 13

is D-Day. I’ll be leaving Whangarei late afternoon, and arriving in Cairns close to midnight.

I’ve got a room booked in an AirBnB house for the first week. I plan to spend most of that beetling around for ( cheaper ) longer-term digs.

I’m told by an Insider in the airBnB game that at NZD 270 / week, I’m getting a good deal. But at that price, a 3-month stay may be a stretch.

But, barring Aussie customs deciding that they don’t want another recidivist Kiwi, I’m hoping to at least dodge the worst of the remaining winter.

“Good things take time,” says the old TV ad – but I’m unsure whether it applies to books as much as cheese or wine.

Rumours from the Pit has been (self-)published by Xlibris.com.

For me, it’s the end of a saga which began nearly 25 years ago. Here’s how.

I’d landed – again – back in my hometown Whangarei. After licking my wounds for a while, I began to look around for something productive to do.

Meantime, my old friend Carl Wyant was talking ( via letter ) about putting together a collection of his newspaper columns for publication.

Around that time, I got my first PC, having used them since the early 1990s in two previous jobs as Joe The Reporter.

And for want of anything better to do, Carl or I – I can’t remember which – nominated me to transcribe his best columns to digital format.

There followed three months or so of slugging away on the PC, in between a storm of letters. These were typed and posted, just like the 1970s. I use the word storm because a fair few of them bordered on … irascible.