Consumer vent
Dec. 16th, 2007 11:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
littleheavenI know this is trivial, but I am PO'd and I have to get it out.
Vent the first. I have a string of fairy lights on my Christmas tree. Normal, clear bud lights, that have 8 different flashing patterns due to the wee control box down by the bottom of the tree. They're old, but I love them because they have a nice twinkle pattern. When I put the tree up last Wednesday, I noticed about a quarter of the bulbs were out. This didn't mean they had all blown - it's the type of light strand that, if one bulb goes, it knocks out the rest attached to that particular wire, right to the end of the strand. Replace the dud bulb and all the rest light up again. No problem, I thought, I'll just go buy some more bulbs. I went to The Warehouse, Farmers, The Christmas Heirloom Company, 2 Cheap, Mitre 10, Briscoes ... all selling Christmas lights, but none selling replacement bulbs for them. The Warehouse did have some, but they were coloured. Heirloom had ditched the bulb lights totally in favour of LEDs. It's like Toyota selling cars but not stocking the replacement parts, for goodness sake. I simply could not believe it (OMG I sound like Victor Meldrew). Finally I found a bulb testing device at Bunnings, with a set of coloured replacement bulbs. I used the tester to find the 2 dead bulbs causing all the fuss, replaced them with good ones from the back of the tree, and replaced those with the yellow bulbs from the coloured set. Finally my twinkle is back, but next year I'm getting an LED set to avoid this issue again. It just should not be that hard to get your tree to flash.
Vent the second. I recently ordered a photo book from Snapfish, the Hewlett Packard-run photo printing site. It was part of a free promotion on the Good Morning show, so all I paid for was the postage. A photo book is a professionally printed book with your own photos in it, kind of like a coffee table book. Okay, it was free, but when I got it, it was printed wrong. The font on some of the pages had gone screwy - it was printed in a font that wasn't even available for that style of book, so I knew it wasn't something I'd done wrong with my order. I emailed them and they very kindly offered me a credit for another photo book, since they couldn't simply re-print it. Fine, I sat down and re-created my book (to ensure the error wasn't repeated), the credit was automatically applied at the checkout, and I thought that was the end of it. Until this morning when they emailed me to say I'd already used my Good Morning promo code and therefore they'd cancelled my order, and if I want another book I have to pay for it WTF? Needless to say I sent them back their emailed offer to replace my free but faulty book with another free book, and asked them if it was their policy to offer people credits and then withdraw them. Honestly, this is not the way to go about winning new customers.
Some days I just feel, in the words of Edmund Blackadder, like the path of my life is strewn with cowpats from the devils own satanic herd. *dramatic sigh*
Vent the first. I have a string of fairy lights on my Christmas tree. Normal, clear bud lights, that have 8 different flashing patterns due to the wee control box down by the bottom of the tree. They're old, but I love them because they have a nice twinkle pattern. When I put the tree up last Wednesday, I noticed about a quarter of the bulbs were out. This didn't mean they had all blown - it's the type of light strand that, if one bulb goes, it knocks out the rest attached to that particular wire, right to the end of the strand. Replace the dud bulb and all the rest light up again. No problem, I thought, I'll just go buy some more bulbs. I went to The Warehouse, Farmers, The Christmas Heirloom Company, 2 Cheap, Mitre 10, Briscoes ... all selling Christmas lights, but none selling replacement bulbs for them. The Warehouse did have some, but they were coloured. Heirloom had ditched the bulb lights totally in favour of LEDs. It's like Toyota selling cars but not stocking the replacement parts, for goodness sake. I simply could not believe it (OMG I sound like Victor Meldrew). Finally I found a bulb testing device at Bunnings, with a set of coloured replacement bulbs. I used the tester to find the 2 dead bulbs causing all the fuss, replaced them with good ones from the back of the tree, and replaced those with the yellow bulbs from the coloured set. Finally my twinkle is back, but next year I'm getting an LED set to avoid this issue again. It just should not be that hard to get your tree to flash.
Vent the second. I recently ordered a photo book from Snapfish, the Hewlett Packard-run photo printing site. It was part of a free promotion on the Good Morning show, so all I paid for was the postage. A photo book is a professionally printed book with your own photos in it, kind of like a coffee table book. Okay, it was free, but when I got it, it was printed wrong. The font on some of the pages had gone screwy - it was printed in a font that wasn't even available for that style of book, so I knew it wasn't something I'd done wrong with my order. I emailed them and they very kindly offered me a credit for another photo book, since they couldn't simply re-print it. Fine, I sat down and re-created my book (to ensure the error wasn't repeated), the credit was automatically applied at the checkout, and I thought that was the end of it. Until this morning when they emailed me to say I'd already used my Good Morning promo code and therefore they'd cancelled my order, and if I want another book I have to pay for it WTF? Needless to say I sent them back their emailed offer to replace my free but faulty book with another free book, and asked them if it was their policy to offer people credits and then withdraw them. Honestly, this is not the way to go about winning new customers.
Some days I just feel, in the words of Edmund Blackadder, like the path of my life is strewn with cowpats from the devils own satanic herd. *dramatic sigh*
