Watch the video above on YouTube. This guy has determined to build his own personal replica of Stonehenge in his backyard.
By himself.
With no mechanical equipment.
This guy is a freaking genius. Whether or not this is how Stonehenge was actually built, the fact that this man came up with this ingenious way of moving and lifting insanely heavy objects amazes me. At first I wasn’t too impressed, until he moved a barn 300 feet using this method.
Just when I thought customer service could not get any worse, along comes Memorex Electronics to prove me wrong. To read the story so far, click here.
Okay, so guess what I received in the mail today? My Memorex iPod dock. Besides the fact that I never got the e-mail confirmation that I made sure to request, the fact that it came in at all is good news, right?
Okay, I got it back, and the problem that I had sent it in for was that none of the buttons would work. This is called a clock radio. What are the two main functions you would think necessary, going by that?
Well, the buttons to set the time still don’t work. They shipped me the same freaking unit, in the same box, with the same problem. The time from first service request to the present is 40 days now. I have to say I’ve honestly never had this much trouble with a warranty replacement from any company before, ever.
So I get on the phone again, call their (non toll-free) customer service number, and listen to the mind-numbing propaganda of “We Care about your Call” every ten seconds, and finally get ahold of a living, breathing, (not necessarily sane) individual. He asks for my phone number, and after a give it to him, I can honestly feel the tension build up in whatever room he’s in over there. It’s the same guy, I’m pretty sure he remembers me now.
First thing I told him was that it would be easier if I could just talk to his supervisor. Naturally, they won’t do that, they want to torment themselves by trying to fix my problem themselves. Makes me wonder what really goes on over there. Maybe there’s some sort of neck choker that shocks them anytime they have to request help from an external source, in which case I can’t imagine the punishment for calling a supervisor.
So what is his first plan of action? To send me a paid mailing label for me to ship it back. Well, that’s nice. At least I won’t have to pay for the shipping this time, right? Just check my e-mail, print a label, and send it back, right? That’s what you would expect, correct?
They’re going to mail me a shipping label! Please tell me I’m not the only one who sees the complete irony of this? “Most companies usually just e-mail the label, is that what you meant?”, I ask. “I really don’t know how they do it, or who will send it to you, or when it will be sent to you”, his exact words, I swear on all that’s holy.
“Is there ANYONE there who DOES know?”, I ask. So he goes to ask someone, and comes back to inform me that they’re shipping me a UPS label by US Mail.
What the HECK? To make it better, at this point he informs me that it will take “approximately five days for me to get the label, and once I send it in, close to a month for me to get a replacement”. No way am I going to wait another month to get a replacement for this. No freakin’ way.
At this point I tell him to forget the label, and to send me a refund, and that I’ll ship it back to them at my own cost. “No refunds, sir.”
“Can I speak to your supervisor?” I say.
“The supervisor will tell me what I am telling you now” he responds.
At this point, I completely give up and tell him to just send the label, and that I’ll contact them later. He tells me to have a nice day.
I don’t return the favor.
If anyone would happen to know of any direct contact numbers for Memorex Electronics higher-ups, rather than a customer support line, please let me know them.
Otherwise, my current attempt is going to be to attempt a return to the store I bought it from, and just exchange it for another type of dock, but I don’t know if they will or not, since it’s definitely out of their return period. I’m thinking of not bringing the receipt at all, sometimes they’ll then swap it for store credit, and I can just get another one there.
As for the shipping label, I plan to send a brick with my e-mail correspondence and these two posts attached.
Thanks to Break.com for this really useful paper tip.
I thought this was actually very cool, and actually very useful. You can make your paper appear longer, just by increasing the size of the periods to 14 instead of 12. Just testing it, you get about an extra half page or so on average, unless it’s a long paper (10-12 pages may get you an extra page or two). I honestly think I’ll have to try this tip sometime.
Ethical? Not really.
Useful? Heck yes.
With that out of the way, I’ll now continue. Okay, back in December, I bought a dock for my iPod nano from Office Depot. Well, a week later, it broke, and I took it back and exchanged it for a Memorex dock, because of course, Memorex is better quality, right?
Nope.
So I purchased this dock back in January. Well, come halfway through February, I go to change the station on the radio on it, and I get a huge shock from it, and the whole system is fried. So I send a Warranty Submission to them from their website, wait about a WEEK, and I get a form letter response from them on Feb 20th, asking me for:
Doesn’t sound too unreasonable, right? But wait, didn’t I just send them all of that information? Here’s the kicker: they included, in the bottom of this form e-mail, all of the information that I had sent, that they were now requesting!
So now, I try to send them a reply telling them they have this information already. A day later, I get a response that my mail was rejected. How nice of them to send me an e-mail from an address that you can’t reply to. So I go back to their website, and find their alternative e-mail address, and send my reply again. I sent this reply on February 22nd. Guess when I get a response?
If you guessed any date in February, you’re wrong. March 2nd. Here was their response:
Need your mailing address
That’s IT! I mean, I guess I should be happy that it wasn’t a form letter, but that isn’t even a full sentence! Not to mention, again, they already have this information!!!
So I assume, okay, they’ve managed to screw up and lose my information. Fine, I’ll send it again. So I send it again, and I get this response (actually on the same day, imagine that!):
SO now you need to follow the procedures that was emailed to you.
What the HECK? They never e-mailed me any procedures! All their original e-mail did was ask for my information. No shipping address was provided, I never got an RA#, nothing. I sent them back an e-mail quoting the original e-mail that said that I was required to have an RA# or it would be refused, and asked them for an RA#. Keep in mind this is March 6th. March 12th, still no response.
So now, (bear with me, I swear this story has an end!) I hunt down their customer service number (conveniently placed nowhere on their website) and call. After waiting 10 minutes, and hearing “We’ll be with you shortly” in about every possible different phrasing possible, repeating every 10 seconds (I kid you not, EVERY TEN SECONDS) I finally get ahold of someone, and explain my issues so far. He then tells me that I do not need an RA#, gives me the shipping address, and we’re off the phone and done in less than five minutes. Great, right? So I go out and ship it on the 13th through DHL, and on the 15th, I get a verification that it was delivered and signed for.
Today, the 23rd, I call them again, listen to the lovely, random “We could care less about your call, please continue to freaking hold.” messages over and over again, and finally get in contact with someone again. He looks up my account, and tells me “Oh yes, that was just finished today!” which is cover-up customer service speak for:
Holy crap, I forgot all about that, let me go grab another product off the shelf and throw it in the mail real quick
He then starts the whole “Thanks for calling, have a nice day” routine, but I cut him off, and asked if they would send me an e-mail upon shipment back to me. He tells me, “you never provided an e-mail address according to the records”, upon which I had an envisionment of me repeatedly kicking this man in the balls, and enjoying it more than I ever probably should, but I just gave him the e-mail address, and got off the phone.
Thank you for reading, your visit is very important to me. Please continue to read, the next available post will contact you shortly. Again, thank you for calling….
Thanks to FOXNews.com for this story. I thought this was hilarious. From the article:
While reformatting the disk drive during a routine maintenance check, the technician mistakenly reformatted the backup drive as well and, suddenly, all the data disappeared.
Anyone who has ever reformatted a computer knows that nagging fear in the back of their head that they forgot to back up something important, but it must really suck to find out that you didn’t, but that you erased your backups, too.
Rhetorical question, naturally.
Okay, so I work at a retail store that has a print and copy center, and that’s my department. We have two self-serve machines for Black and White copies, and a single copier in the corner for self-serve color copies. Usually, people just use the first one that they walk up to, regardless of which type of copy they’re making, and we normally just ring them up for Black and White pricing if they just make monochrome copies on the color machine.
However, we got an e-mail from corporate recently, informing us that any copies on that machine should be priced at the color copy price ($.69 each) whether they are Black and White or Color prints, due to the cost of the ink for the machine. So I got to work and designed a few hard-to-miss signs to place on the machine, to inform customers so that they wouldn’t be unnecessarily charged for color copies. I don’t have an actual picture of our signs, but this is the same machine, and I placed red panels (the actual color of the signs) onto this picture with Photoshop to give you an idea of where the signs are:
Continue reading ‘How Can I Make This Any Easier to Understand?’
Is there a way to align elements on the artboard in Adobe Illustrator, such as centering a group of objects into the direct center of the artboard?
I had originally posted this question on Photoshop Techniques, and found out a few workaround methods for doing this, but it seemed like there would be an easier way to do this, as it’s very simple to do in Photoshop (Select the layer or group of layers, and the background, and click “center”).
Purely by accident, I found out how to do this while working on a customer project at work. I was trying to align two objects along their left margin, and it kept pushing them to the left side of the document at the same time. I messed around with it, and it was actually aligning it to the artboard. It turns out, there’s a simple option, if you pull up the Align pallette. Click the flyout arrow on the Align pallette, and you’ll see an option for “Align to Artboard”.
This may have been something that was well-known, but I wasn’t aware of it, so I hope this can help someone else out there!
Kevin 