Question of the day.

Hi people! 🙂

What was the last thing you purchased?

My answer:

I went with my parents and Sofi on Monday to do some shopping, Sofi needed some stuff for school and I needed to get myself a larger power strip for all of my newly acquired chargers and cables – to do with the iPhone. The strip I’ve been using for years is not enough for my needs at the moment, as it only has three outlets. I’ve actually purchased a new strip already last week or so, I bought it in iSpot – which is Apple’s reseller – I decided to buy it there as I had to get some accessories from them anyway so I got a discount for the strip – it was called Eve Energy Strip – and, as you could expect from Apple related stuff, the strip I got was smart and compatible with Homekit – so that I could control it from my phone, without having to dig my fingers into an outlet every time I wanted to plug something out or having to guess whether the strip is on or off as I had to with my old strip. With Eve, I could for example tell Siri to switch one outlet on, while all the others would be off, which was not possible with my old strip, which was either on or off, and so if you wanted something not to waste the energy you just had to plug it out. I really liked Eve and the level of control I could have with it, and how easy it was actually to use, but there was one huge problem. Despite the iSpot guy told me that it was going to have six outlets – three normal ones and three USB ones – it had only three outlets. Way too few for me now. I need at least six, ideally seven or eight. So as much as I liked Eve, I had to pack it away, and was going to return it once my Mum comes back from her trip in the mountains. I told Mum about that and she called the iSpot people, and the guy who sold me the strip was very apologetic, saying that someone in the magazine must have made a mistake and shipped the wrong one.

Mum came back last Saturday and we decided to call the iSpot general helpline and have them take Eve, while we would go to our local iSpot shop and get the right one in the meantime. Which we did on Monday. This new strip was called Koogeek and did have six outlets, although its cable was ridiculously short, which was a bit of a problem as the wall socket in my room where it was supposed to be plugged in is under my bed, so that meant the strip would barely stick out of there, and I would hardly be able to use my devices on the bed while charging, which I do a lot. But there was a much bigger problem with Koogeek, as it turned out when we got home. I installed the Koogeek app on my phone to connect the strip, and boy was I surprised by it! I think it must be some sort of a really geeky-techy app because I wasn’t able to do anything with it, absolutely flipping anything. The manual said I had to create a Koogeek account, and yes, there was a button called “Join Koogeek”, but when I tapped on it, it did nothing. Nothing was loading, opening or even trying to open, no communicate or anything. Oh well – I thought – must be something with VoiceOver. I’ve heard from people that some apps are so wonderfully made that when there is some sort of a checkbox, like for example when you have to accept privacy policy or stuff, for some reason you won’t be able to do it with VoiceOver, you’d have to disable it to accept or check whatever is required. I haven’t seen anything like this in my short time with iPhone but thought that must be the first time. I called Mum, disabled VoiceOver and asked her to look at it, but she also couldn’t do anything. There were a few other buttons as well and none of them did anything at all. We sat with it for an hour and both got very pissed, but it wasn’t helping either. In the end, Mum came up with an idea that I could return this shitty Koogeek thing, because even if there is some way for the initiated people to connect it to the iPhone, if there are problems with such a basic thing I probably would have more problems with this strip further down the road as well, and instead I could keep the Eve, which was still here, and get another Eve to go with it, and, with some rearranging in my room, have them both plugged in different sockets. This is some solution and after some thinking I decided it’s not that bad at all. For now I have my most basic stuff plugged into the Eve. Of course I could write to the Koogeek support now asking them for help, but with my luck with tech support people in all sorts of different companies I can’t see it could accomplish much and would be a waste of time.

Only then when Mum thought seriously about driving back to iSpot on her own (previously it was Dad who drove us) she didn’t like the idea. It’s rather far from us, in a big shopping centre, and Mum didn’t feel confident going there, as she doesn’t know the way there very well and she once got lost in that same shopping centre with Sofi as it’s really huge so she has like a mini trauma associated with it. And Dad definitely wouldn’t be up to going this far yet again, for such a trivial reason. So I decided to give the Koogeek thing to Sofi, who was very happy and didn’t care about the phone app and Homekit, and became even happier when she realised that, for whatever reason, her phone charger, which always made her phone act very weird while charging – it wouldn’t let her write what she wanted but would write some other characters or wouldn’t respond to her gestures appropriately – now worked just fine with the new strip. So that’s good at least.

But that means I’ll have to pay for THREE, not particularly cheap power strips, which is quite outrageous, and not fun as I’ve had quite a lot of expenses in the last few months due to the whole iPhone thing, especially with the headphones and speaker. At least I hope the two Eves will be usable for me for a very long time.

How about you? 🙂