The Sad Saga of the SAD lamp

My SAD lamp arrived yesterday via courier.  The courier rang up to my apartment but by the time I arrived downstairs he had managed to persuade someone to open the door for him and had left it in the foyer.   There was an ominous tinkling as I picked it up and when I opened up the box there were small shards of glass, a USA power plug (not an overwhelming problem as I could easily buy an adaptor from over the road but nothing to tell me what the voltage was and because I had ordered it from Amazon I assumed that as an international supplier it would match the goods to the country of destination.  OK  -  so I had only ever bought books from them before ...  silly me!

However, the lamp was broken and rather than throw good money after bad by ordering another light tube I decided to return it so I packed it carefully back into its box, downloaded the return label after going to the site to explain why I was returning the lamp and took it to the Post Office to post it back.   The helpful lady behind the counter pointed out that Australian postage is very expensive but I figured that anything less than what I had paid for the lamp would put me,  if not ahead, at least not totally out of pocket.

Amazon has promised to refund the cost of the lamp plus $15 towards the cost of postage.  The postage back to America came to over $100 Australian  -  ouch!  But I will still be about $100 ahead of where I would have been if I had just dumped it out with the rubbish.  So I will have about $200 USD returned to my bank account when the lamp returns to sender.

I took my little 'hotspot' which I bought to use at COTA back to Telstra, since Windows 10 will not accept guest connections to the internet, because it was not working and was told that if I had not used it within six days of buying it the connection would not work as it was deemed to be 'uncharged'.  So I had it charged up again and was promised that I now had a connection for 365 days and that I would need to pay out more money annually to keep the contract going  -  same as with my mobile phone which I pay $20 for every November.

I am happy to say that the hotspot now works perfectly and my Surface Pro 3 with Windows 10 reverted seamlessly back to my modem afterwards so I have no fear that my clients will have difficulties when they get home after a lesson.  To ensure that I didn't have any problems I inserted a Recovery Point before I tested the hotspot but didn't need it after all.  We are supposed to be starting back at COTA in the second week of February but goodness knows what sort of configuration the computers which we use will have.  Watch this space ...