Finally!

[trixtah]

Finally got my router. It would have arrived on Monday, but I had fun and games trying to intersect with the courier. No mention of sending the old one back to Belkin, and this router is about two models newer than my current one. w00t! But check out the bloody packaging here! That's right, that's only two hunks of paper stuck around the sides of the box, and the outer box is about twice as large as the one with the device in it. That leaves 4 sides that are only protected by the device box itself - and the packaging in that is quite adequate, both for compression and crush resistance - so why bother with the outer box? Beats me. Other than creating more waste in the world. 9/10 for Belkin customer service, but only 2/10 for packaging skillz (at least the cardboard and paper is recyclable). Still, yay connectivity tonight.

Comments

[saluqi.livejournal.com]

Yay for getting it all sorted before the Christmas shutdown.

I'd like to think I'd be mildly batty by now if I didn't have internet at home, but perhaps it would be good for me :p

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

heh, I was suffering slight withdrawal (staying to 8pm at work hasn't been strictly necessary this week, new mail servers or not), but I have done a pile of reading. Forget about doing anything constructive, like clean my pit of a flat (two weekends in a row of neglect, bad me).

Yay indeed, tho', for getting it before bloody Xmas. Not having it for more weeks would have driven me batty. There is a limit to what kind of sites one can peruse at work, after all (at least I can still get my L/J fix).

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

Hrmmmm... I've come to the conclusion that "recyclable" is one of the most misleading terms around.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Sure, for a lot of things that are supposedly "recyclable". However, I think paper products and glass are both things that are recycled reasonably efficiently (and reliably), so there's that.

If there'd been those little polystyrene noodles in there as well, that would have been fairly irksome.

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

I dunno. It's sort of the mentality of "well, we can use as much as we want, because it's recyclable!" But recycling is generally lossy, both in quality of output (eg you can make cardboard boxes from office paper, but not vice versa) as well as the energy taken to do it. "Recyclable" puts a sort of green veneer on things that, half the time, shouldn't have been used in the first place.

(Note: this is a criticism of your router providers, not you!)

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, I see what you're getting at; there's always a cost, as you say. It's a shame how often people forget the first two components of the "reduce, reuse, recycle" tag. And yep, those guys obviously don't have a clue.

The Guardian had some fun with a suggestion (http://www.guardian.co.uk/supermarkets/story/0,,1948062,00.html) from the Minister of the environment in the UK to dump excess packaging at the supermarket (following on from an announcement that supermarkets will be "encouraged" to reduce their packaging), but I don't know if that strategy will get the buggers following along with the "reduce" part very quickly. :-)

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Apparently it's because parcel-wrangling companies are slightly less likely to lose a honkin' big parcel than a small one.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

If so, that's fairly pathetic. If the post office can manage to deliver teeny letters and smaller parcels reliably, a courier company that deals with much less by volume should be able to cope adequately.

I personally would have been happy if Belkin had stuck it in the post. I would have gotten it a lot faster. :-/