Sometimes Byron’s head is too heavy with all the thoughts he has on world events, so I need to give him a hand.
This is the story of shockingly poor customer service, and general corporate shadiness
On Oct 27, we bought Katy a new mobile phone from FNAC (Google pixel 7). The phone was listed as a destocking offer and was 50% off. We bought it, paid by credit card, got an order confirmation and waited for it to be dispatched. We got a notice from the Poste that the package was on its way and scheduled to be delivered on Nov 2.
On Nov 2, I check the Poste tracking website and see that the phone was delivered. I let Katy know, as she was out working, and when she comes back home, no phone. I check the Poste website again and see that it’s been delivered, but to the wrong address. I try and call FNAC but the Swiss service center is closed for the day and I have to wait until the following morning to call. A shit night is had by all.
The next morning, I call FNAC and get a nasty surprise. They “realized” that the phone price was a “technical error” on the website and arranged with the Poste to intercept the delivery. The phone support people can give me a refund, but I need to take it up with the reclamation department to “see” if anything else can be possible. The phone support can’t do anything but follow the script, and the reclamation people are only reachable by email. At every occasion, I inform them that I don’t want a refund, but instead want the phone at the price I purchased it.
Then I get an email saying they issued a refund.
According to Swiss e-commerce laws, once an offer has been made and accepted, once payment has been taken, then the transaction is valid and should be honored unless it’s a clearly recognizable error. Putting a phone on a destocking rebate when the newer model has just been released does NOT fall under this category.
However, FNAC, in their fuckery, have a clause in their general T&Cs that gives them carte blanche to freely cancel any order taken online. This cancellation gives you no recourse other than a reimbursement of the purchase price. I found this out while reading the T&Cs, which is something NO ONE does. So fuck you, come again.
What pisses me off the most is that they had a solid week to inform us that they’d cancelled the order, but didn’t. We had to find out the hard, stressful, painful way of calling customer service, thinking that the order had been misdelivered, when instead it had been re-routed to their main Swiss HQ. I did not need all the stress and aggro this caused.
So, in conclusion, FUCK YOU FNAC, I will actively never purchase anything from you again and ask everyone I know from doing the same.
Hard, shiny, pointy stabby thing
Did the clean-up grinds on the blade and the edge grinds at multiple grits. Next step, handle and sharpening.
Musings on the dangers of “reply-all”
Last week, the IT department switched our corporate Adobe Creative Cloud logins over to Active Directory (AD) Single Sign On (SSO). This is managed by an AD group, containing close to 4000 employees worldwide. During the switchover, one account seemed to develop a problem. The IT department opened a service ticket and in a move they’re probably regretting now, added the AD group email alias to the ticket. Every action on the ticket sends an email to 4000 people.
One person had the bright idea to reply-all asking to be removed from the email thread.
Then all hell broke loose.
People started replying-all with “me too” emails, asking to be removed from the list. (As a side note, being removed from the AD group will also immediately remove your access to the Adobe cloud, as you would no longer be in the authorized users list, so no one from IT is going to do this)
Then other people started replying-all, telling people to stop spamming the list with reply-all emails.
This would ebb and flow, until someone saw their mailbox full of spam and send an angry email about it (replying-all), which would kickstart the process all over again.
Then someone created a 2nd mail thread (consciously adding the AD group in CC) to complain about all the spam. This now meant that people were replying-all, complaining about 2 different mail threads and asking to be removed from the distribution list. Some people started commenting on the hilarity of all of this, again, generating more spam and adding more fuel to the fire. Others were writing about how to create automated filtering rules in Outlook.
Then things really got meta, when one person spammed the list with all of the emails that had been sent, as attachments. Remember, this is an email with several dozen attachments, going to 4000 people. I was openly weeping at the absurdity of all of this. It was beautiful.
That poor exchange server.
Now I am sad. It seems that saner minds have prevailed, and the emails have stopped. At last count, there were close to 100 emails send in this little saga. Zone AMS has just started working and AOA is going to sleep, so maybe there will be more fun tomorrow morning. We can only hope….
NEW KITTEN ALERT!! (Potentially) ((Probably))
If all goes as we’re thinking it will go, this feisty little lady will come live with us from January. Name still to be resolved (but must be Russian).
Halloween 2023
Done.
As always, people had a good time, there were lots of things to eat and drink, lots of happy ghouls and goblins, and we got lots of thanks for organizing it, but this year it seemed to take a lot more energy to get up and get it done…
You’ve heard of elf on a shelf…
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Behold the one-tusked couch walrus
Happy (belated) birthday Byron
Three day escape to Italian wine country
At the start of the year, I bought a QoQa experience, consisting of 3 days, 2 nights in Castiglione Faletto at Il Torre, a really nice hotel, and also including a gourmet 4 course meal and a wine tasting at a local vineyard. Getting there (and back) was a 5h journey each way, with lots of beautiful scenery and… roadworks everywhere. The highway toll system in Italy takes some getting used to, but we managed.
Once we got there, we parked the car and started on the serious business of eating and drinking. The Cantina Communale was nice, but overpriced (seriously!). Dinner that evening was gorgeous, but they killed us with food. After the pasta course, we were already both full, and there were still mains and dessert to come. We struggled through the mains but conceded defeat to pudding. Katy is now officially obsessed with braised veal cheeks in wine. Then… grappa. Oooooh, grappa. It’s a good thing that the restaurant was literally next door to the hotel, otherwise we wouldn’t have made it.
The next day, after breakfast, we walked down into Barolo. We took the goat pass that the hotel had kindly told us to avoid by car, as a shortcut. The scenery was gorgeous. The flies though…. FUEGO!! (didn’t want to keep swearing, so I’d just yell fuego randomly). We stopped at Vite Colte on the way into Barolo and had a tasting of some very nice wines, then carried on towards the old town.
Katy was not impressed with the incline getting into Barolo. Expletives were heard. We were happy to see that the corkscrew museum was open – according to their website, it shouldn’t have been. We then visited the WiMu wine museum, which was really interesting, then had coffee and ice cream before trying to locate the cab we’d pre-booked to get back up the hill to Castiglione for our wine tasting at Monchiero. The wines were nice, but the highlight of that visit was the handmade salame!!
We went back to the hotel, had a nap, and then got ready for dinner at Convino. They again killed us with food, but more gently as we shared the plate of the pasta course. But still so.much.food!!! Katy fell in love with our waitress. She must think we’re completely bonkers.
On Friday morning, we had breakfast, checked out, went to pick up a few cartons of wine from Vite Conte and headed for a quick visit to Marolo – a grappa distillery – for a quick purchase, then Alba before heading home. Sadly, we just missed the opening of the Alba white truffle festival by a day, but it is what it is. We left at 12:30 and made it back to Family Dog in time to pick up a very happy (and very tired) Byron then finally made it back home.
