About 4-5 days after arriving in Regensburg I finally remembered my PDA’s cradle was still stowed deep in my rucksack, and the thing itself was running out of charge, so I fished it out, plugged it in, and stuck the PDA in it. The green light that usually lights up when it’s charging spectacularly failed to light.
Looking around the back of the cradle, I noticed that the power cable was lolling halfway out of the socket, so I attempted to rectify this by pushing it back in. The socket promptly gave way. Oops, looks like it got damaged in transit.
So onto eBay I went, looking for a replacement. Getting one direct from Palm or Amazon.co.uk is guaranteed to cost 10 times what it costs to make the thing, and there are always people on eBay with spare cradles. I found one for sale in the UK for 1p, he says he can send it to me for a couple of quid more than the UK shipping price, so I place my bid and win the auction. 1p for a Palm cradle, not bad :)
I saw that other people in my hall have put their names on their letterboxes. I am told that even if the address on the package is right, they won’t deliver it unless the name on it matches the name on the letterbox. Being a busy (har har!) foreign student, and having in fact received a couple of letters addressed to me, and being skeptical that any modern postal service can really be that backward, I hadn’t thought this important enough to get round to putting my name on my letterbox.
Two weeks later, the cradle still hasn’t arrived. But in this instance I think the seller has sent the thing off and Deutsche Post haven’t delivered it. Why? Because I still hadn’t got round to putting my name on my letterbox. So this package, as well as my bank card (though, weirdly, not my PIN slip), have been returned to sender. Gah! How can any postal service really be that backward?