Yesterday was an interesting day, but for all the wrong reasons! I
started the day with a nagging thought in the back of my mind, namely,
“What’s happened to that order from Australia.”
Ten or so days
ago I placed an order for an Oxycheq helium/oxygen analyser kit and
various other bits of dive gear with a company called Scubaroo Diving Supply.
I had no means of tracking the parcel, so after ten days passed with no
contact from NZ Customs to say how much duty they wanted before
releasing the consignment, I got a bit worried about its whereabouts.
Best thing would be to contact Scubaroo and ask for a tracking number, I
thought.
Having quickly composed a short email enquiring about a
tracking number, I paused for a second before pressing the ‘Send’
button. A thought had entered my head about how it would be typical for
the parcel to arrive before Scubaroo had time to reply with the tracking
number. I dismissed the thought and pressed the ‘Send’ button anyway.
As I watched the ‘Sending mail’ progress bar race across my screen I
heard the sound of a person getting out of a vehicle outside my window.
“Bugger!” It was a courier delivering the parcel. “Spooky coincidence”, I
thought as I signed for it.
In the blink of an eye I moved on
from the whole spooky coincidence thing and entered the ‘new toy’ mode.
The superbly packaged goodies were extracted from their bonds and
carefully spread around me in an arc so I could survey them all at once.
I finally could no longer resist the temptation of opening up the
analyser kit and playing with the analysers.
Inside the box, in a
pre-moulded foam tray were three small objects. One was a charging
unit, and the other two were the oxygen and helium. I proceeded to turn
on the oxygen analyser. Nothing happened, the display was dead. I tried
again and again but it wouldn’t start up. Okay, time to see if the
helium analyser would show more signs of life, but it too was
unresponsive.
Not beaten, I looked out some tools to remove the
back of the oxygen analyser. The voltages of the three AAA batteries
inside all carried a full charge. Dead batteries was not the problem.
Time
to get in touch with Scubaroo and advise them that the analyser kit was
‘dead on arrival’. Thoughts of overzealous postal workers throwing the
poor analysers through an x-ray machine with the power setting set to
somewhere between fry and incinerate raced feverishly through my head as
I composed a frantic email to Scubaroo. It was all too much to take, so
I sent the email and quietly abandoned the analysers in their box.
…
Both
units had the same power-on switch marked clearly with the letters
‘Pwr’. My instinct with new things is not to force anything where it
doesn’t feel like it wants to go. In this case the switches were pushed
in a left/right motion, no movement. Pressing the end of the switch
caused the switch bar to sink into its housing and then return to its
previous position, but the units would not power up. I even tried
various lengths and sequences of pushes. Nothing.
…
My
wife came home and opened the box containing the analysers. Seeing the
‘Pwr’ switch on the oxygen analyser indicated where the power-on switch
was and she turned on the unit. The display gave an indication of the
oxygen cells reading in all its yellow back-lit glory.
It appears
that I was a ‘slow maze learner’ that day. Apparently the switches had
an up/down action, not a push or side-to-side action! “IDIOT!”
Both units work extremely well when powered up.
