Another wonderful example of how not to run your business.

Back on May 31st, I ordered one of those jars with a magnifying lens for kids to explore bugs.  My 3 year old loves bugs.   I also ordered a magnifying lens for myself.

So I placed my order via PayPal and everything went smoothly.  I received an email from PayPal with a confirmation of the transaction.  They said I would hear from OpticsPlanet.com separately.

That didn’t happen.  So a couple of days ago I sent OpticsPlanet an email basically showing I had processed a PayPal transaction and what was the status of my order.

Here is the response I received today (20 days after the sale).

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 1:43 PM, OpticsPlanet Customer Service <Care@opticsplanet.com> wrote:

Hello:

Thank you for your interest in Optics Planet. We are still holding on this item from Nikon. They should be arriving soon, is what the manufacturer keep telling us, we are starting to get a few orders on hold for this exact item.  I have bumped you to the top of the list, so you will receive the product when they first arrive back into our stock.  If you have any further questions, please do not   hesitate in contacting us.  Thank you for your patience with this order.

Best regards,

Matthew S.,

Sales Team

Here is my reply today:

Matthew,

Thank you for your reply and update.  It is protocol to email the customer when payment is processed (received) to both confirm the purchase order AND to notify if there are back order issues.  Putting the burden of tracking a timely shipment on the customer is not a good business practice.

I’m sure you will agree that OpticsPlanet’s competition is broad and varied, leaving me many choices on my next purchase of similar merchandise.

I trust you will ship my order in an expeditiously quick manner when Nikon gets their act together – being that you have my money.

Regards

Here is Matthews reply:

Hello Samuel:

Thank you for your follow up. We typically charge your credit card when we are ready to ship the product out. However when a payment is made via paypal, the payment is instant and we do not have the ability to charge at a later date. We can give you a full refund and keep your order on hold; however we would have to re-invoice you before we would ship the product out, we can give you a full refund and cancel your order, or we can leave the order as is and ship the product out the same day it arrives back into stock. Please let me know how you would like to proceed.

Matthew,

I mentioned nothing of canceling my order.  Please ship when available.

Whether billed when the product is available or billed instantly via PayPal, this does not address the fact I was not made aware of a back order issue.  You made a noble attempt to explain your BILLING policy, but that has not been my concern.

I would welcome your policy regarding customer communication when products are unavailable – billed or not.

Fortunately the items were not time sensitive.  There is still plenty of summer left and bugs to magnify.  I just ask to be kept informed.  This is customer service 101 folks.

We all know gas prices are criminally high. We can only assume they’re going higher. That said, do our local TV news stations have to make this a “story line” every day? Here’s the typical scenario being played out across the country by local news affiliates:

1. Send a reporter to a gas station.
2. Have the camera man zoom over reporter’s shoulder to show outrageous price on marquee.
3. Listen to reporter remind us, with all of the same reasons, why this is happening.
4. Listen to reporter interview Joe Blow at the gas pump.
5. Listen to Joe Blow give oppressive story: “I was gonna go to our family reunion in Alabama this year, but I’m just not gonna be able to afford it, I don’t think.”

And of course on the National level we get another hard-nosed Matt Lauer interview where he talks to another Big Oil CEO. The same lame excuses peppered with corp-speak are piped through the airwaves into our living rooms. I can hear the producers now. “Who shall we have on next week? Maybe someone from Love’s Truck Stop? Yeah, that’s the ticket! We’ll talk about DIESEL next week to switch it up a bit.”

This is equivalent to news stories in January about ‘the cold’.

Channel 4 in Detroit ends their daily story on gas by posting ONE station with the lowest gas price – in all of Detroit’s 138.8 square miles. Of course this only helps viewers who:

1. Are watching Channel 4 that morning during the six seconds it airs. (’cause the price ain’t gonna be the same tomorrow folks!)
2. Live close enough to that one gas station to make it worth the trip to fill up.
3. Have enough time to wait in line behind everyone who falls under points 1 and 2.

I got an idea. Why don’t we talk about how the average length of grass is going up this summer because it costs too much to mow.

If you don’t realize that gas prices suck large petroleum nut sacks, then reward yourself by moving under a new rock!

This is not news. I pass three filling stations on my way home and do not need anchor people waisting my time with what I already know.

I sit at my table at the McKune Memorial Library wondering why I only have 7 subscribers to my blog. An older lady sits down and unpacks across from me. She’s a senior. Not a slow moving, slipper shuffling senior. There’s no evidence of a ‘walker’ with tennis balls on the back legs. She has a quick-twitch, slight of build, errand-running senior vibe about her exuding that aura of someone who wants things NOW. She totes a snappy laptop case. After ripping through several velcro pockets, she pulls out her gleaming white, 13″ iMac Powerbook. A granny with an Apple.

I continued to check email, shuffle files at will and pick through my RSS feeds wondering why everyone else had more than 7 subscribers to their blog. I couldn’t help but notice my table mate was having issues with her cutting edge, wireless mouse. The reason I know this is because she continued to thwack the mouse into the palm of her hand as if compressing tobacco in a pack of Marlboro’s. This was followed by the quick back and forth movement of the mouse on the table top. Thwack-Thwack-Wack. Shuffle, Shuffle-Rub. This went on for a bit and didn’t help her cause. I can only imagine the conversation she’s having with herself.  Something like…

“My son told me if I buy an iMac I wouldn’t have the problems that P.C. users have. That man across from me seems to be doing just fine with his Microsoft driven, dark gray, non-shiny machine. Harumph!”

She must have migrated from the dark side, because she knew enough to reboot her laptop to (possibly) cure her hardware issue. Evidently there is no “restart” or “shut down” option on an iMac. This would account for the incessant opening and closing of the screen in order to shut off and reboot the system. Close Click Wait. Reopen. Close Click Wait. Reopen! Thwack, Thwack, Wack. Shuffle, Shuffle, Slide-Slide. I lost count after 4 such cycles partially as a study to remove myself from things that drive me nuts, but more importantly because I was preparing how all of this would find its way into a blog post – most assuredly propelling my RSS readership into double digits.

Alas my elderly iMac neighbor gave up. Maybe the thought of having to use the TOUCH PAD vs. her battery driven, comatose mouse was too much. The time had come to pack it all in. I wonder who was guilty of planting this Johnny Appleseed of techno-babble into her shiny mind.

“Gleaming white box. Cordless mouse. Harumph!”

With one last round of angry velcro she was gone.

I was late for a conference call today.  About 20 minutes after the call started I got an email from the call leader.  Ouch.  As I dialed into the meeting I remembered I had set up an Outlook reminder for this reoccurring weekly call but nothing had popped up.  Waz up wit dat?

Oh of course!  My system clock is still one frigging hour behind a week after the Daylight Saving Time adjustment.  Since I can’t set my own time it’s up to the System Admin (read: world’s slowest I.T. guy) to do this for everyone via the server.  And instead of him having the server automatically fetch the time off of a nuclear clock via the internet or something, he has to do this manually.  What moron screwed it up for the rest of us so we can’t set our own PC clocks?  The privilege of setting our own time must obviously be linked to national security, leaking company secrets, and hours of lost productivity.   Not for helping us keep track of appointments, I guess.

(Sidebar:  I just looked at my WordPress posting time.  Just ADD an hour to get the *correct* time of this article.)

Frank N. Stein has a funny rant about photo kiosk hoggers over at FuriousFrank.com.  Although I agree whole heartedly that people should pick their favs, figure out formatting, etc., at home before taking up copious amounts of time at a public machine the problem lies in the fact that these same people probably DON’T have PC’s at home.

The scene: Semi-rural Michigan.  Home of late night mailbox baseball.

We recently backed out of our driveway only to realize we had no mailbox AND no post.  No one else down the road had been afflicted so it didn’t appear to be a round of shenanigans.
But with inches of snow covering frozen ground how does one re-post the post?  The mail keeps coming and we had to appease the mail carrier.  That’s where the wife got creative and resurrected an old Black and Decker Workmate.

If you don’t remember this beauty, it’s a bit like a saw horse on steroids.  It’s also the perfect hight to anchor both our mailbox and newspaper box.  With some rope and our finest blue tarp (to protect and disguise), we now have a non-government approved mail and newspaper receptacle!  Now we wait for a good spring thaw in order to do it right.

We also hope that spring comes before some smart-acre has a folly with our blue tarp.

That’s why they make these.

…well, it COULD have.  I didn’t realize how much velcro was on my laptop bag until I sat down to unpack at Chelsea’s new McKune Memorial Library.  Crrruuunch.  RRrrriiiipp.  I had to make the decision to rip fast, rather than pulling it off slowly. The slow approach would have prolonged the deafening sound – due to a strip that is about 12 inches long on the front flap.  I  had enough mind to leave the velcro UN-done, so as to not go through the ordeal when I went to pack up again.