I spent more time than I ought to have on an online return yesterday. A package arrived a few days ago, but only one item was in it, when there should have been two.
The company (which shall remain nameless) doesn’t allow you to count something as missing for the first 48 hours. Kinda like a missing person, I guess.
Not that my $3.45 item was a missing person.
I almost let it go. A couple of weeks before a pair of reading glasses did not arrive, and I did report that and received a refund. The difference was, the reading glasses were in a package by themselves, so the reporting was pretty straightforward.
For my hair elastics (oh so important, I know), if you look at the photo of the delivery, you can see that the package had been ripped. I assume the elastics are languishing at the bottom of some delivery truck.
Ironically, even as I was ordering them, I remembered having a bag of them that didn’t work out for me, and I assumed I’d gotten rid of them. The day after I ordered a new bag, I found the old. Naturally. (Word Raccoon never knows what she owns, it seems.)
This time around, the older bands I found in a drawer worked fine. But there was still the question of the lost ones.
I asked online, I asked AI, I asked the vendor’s website how to report that one of two items was missing. I tried all of the tips and tricks. Nothing worked.
It took about half an hour, but I finally found the right magical portal to Customer Service. A few minutes later, the service rep issued me a refund, I thanked him, and was on my way.
Was it worth the effort?
Financially, probably not. There were better, more profitable, activities I could have put my efforts towards. But the survey they asked me to fill out afterwards might have been. I praised the rep but also explained exactly the difficulty I’d had in finding a place to report the missing item.
Will they listen to me and change?
Doubtful. But at least I spoke up.
In today’s world, that is probably the least important place to speak up, but I’m not sorry I did. What if the item had been more expensive or necessary? What if it had been a gift?
I wish I didn’t have the sneaking suspicion that this is set up this way on purpose. I could be wrong. Word Raccoon says she’s suspicious, too.
In the meantime, the sun is shining, I knocked out half of my life “to-do’s” for the week over the weekend, and now it’s time to plan my writing week. The rest will take care of itself.
(A customer at the cafe is mopping up a coffee spill he made. WR, did you knock his cup off the table because he wouldn’t let go of your hand fast enough when he introduced himself? You naughty raccoon. He meant no harm.)
Then someone came in and she and I discussed Victor Hugo: that we have not read him, LOL. But I hear there’s an abridged version of Les Mes, and that might be worth a look. I don’t like long books in the warmer months.
dremadrudge.com 