out of my control...

Today's post is somewhat of a blog reply to a couple of other blogs I follow and the thread amongst them is similiar. Each of them have written about or had things happen to them that they have had no control over.

link hijacking

I'll start by mentioning something I found highly amusing yesterday evening. I followed a link on a craft blog I really love and got a bit of a shock. The link was wrong, or I suspect hijacked, and it diverted to a fairly innocuous porn site. Although I was shocked somewhat I did find it very funny particularly as the 'proper' link was to something very Christmassy and I had a vision of naughty elves keeling over laughing as they played a joke on Santa ... anyway a quick heads up to the blog owner put things right. Now I say I was laughing BUT aside from the fact I know this would have been highly offensive to some people the question I am now asking myself is .... How many of my links have been hijacked? Hopefully none! But, unless I go and check them all I won't know unless some kind person tells me.

inappropriate blog comments

On a similar note I experienced my first bit of porn spam on this Chubby Mummy blog last week in the form of a comment. So I have instigated comment moderation for a while which will stop anything nasty getting posted without me knowing. Unfortunately when I choose my blog name I didn't think about any 'adult' connotations - silly me !

inappropriate google ads

I recently brought the domain chubbymummy.co.uk to start listing my shop items in. As with all new sites there was a short delay waiting for it to be activated and it was parked by the domain suppliers in a holding site with google ads but unfortunately they were porn site ads . Of course you had to click on the ads to go to these sites but non the less I was horrified. Unfortunately at the time there wasn't a great deal I could do about it. A sharp letter afterwards to the domain supplier MAY have helped but I decided it wouldn't be worth the hassle of writing as I only experienced the problem for a couple of hours before the site was activated.

Some of you may have noticed I have google ads on this blog - I don't select the ads - google does that - and on occasion I have seen some odd ads come through - like band saw sharpening when I blogged about rotary blades. Obviously the google algorithm for selecting the ads is based on blog content so I am apologising now if any inappropriate ads come up on this site because I have mentioned the P word, but rest assured IF they do I will be taking action this time!

So lets move away from the problems of unsolicited porn and onto something else ... The POSTAL system ... not blog posting ... real letters and parcels!

lost parcels

A few weeks back I read a blog posting about a lost shipment from a quilt shop. The issue here was not so much about the lost parcel but more about the attitude of the shop owner to it, which in brief was very negative. There is no excuse for a negativity however I would like to respond to this from the shop keepers point of view.

As you know I have a little online shop. I am not a big concern and when I get an order I am ecstatic and jump to the shipping process straight away. A short while back I got an order from a lady in the US at 1.30am UK time. By 9am UK time I had wrapped, packed, invoiced and shipped this order ... it was in the royal mail shipping system and out of my control now! Yep .. it got lost. Well I'll restate that .. the royal mail went on strike and all deliveries went to pot. Now I will qualify by saying in the past I have always experienced good service from the UK Royal Mail and deliveries to the States normally take 5 working days -- which I think is pretty good. So when I placed this particular parcel in the mail I was confident it would be delivered. To this day I have no idea IF the parcel has reached the lady because she has not responded to my email to let me know, although she was very happy to email several times with short sharp (but not rude) emails to advise the item had not arrived after 10 days.

The point is this, both the lady and I choose to accept that the mailing system would work. We both accepted a system that was out of our control.

Now, there were things we both could have done to bring that system more into our control - but we didn't. The lady brought the item and accepted my shipping method. She didn't advise me she needed the item by a certain date or that she wanted (and was willing to pay for) a tracked system. I also accepted the method would work. I don't use a tracked system or a signed for system because it adds significantly to the price. It costs £3.75 extra to have an international parcel signed on receipt. This is a significant adder on a £10 item. It also doesn't mean the item is assured of being delivered BUT it also doesn't include tracking - that would have been £11.25 extra!

The whole issue of mail and shipping is worthy of a separate blog posting maybe to be covered later.

So, todays blog is a bit of a mix but its all about CONTROL. Accepting that some things are out of our control is difficult particularly when you are a bit of a control freak like me but I'm going to follow Yoga Santas lead here and 'chill out' a bit!

Happy Christmas everyone!

p.s as I've been listening to Ricky Tims Christmas in a small Town while I've been writing. You can listen to the whole album for free for 24 hours today - go here to listen. Its a lovely album! Thank you Ricky!