The Saga of the Mug
I should have blogged about this a while ago, but I was a little distracted with various other things, so I’m going to tell you all about it now. Some of you will already know, but it might be new to some others.
The saga begins some time ago with subscription services being available on SourceForge. Being a regular user of SourceForge’s download services as well as their project hosting for Towel, I decided that what they were asking was very reasonable indeed and coughed up. Especially since it included a free T-shirt from ThinkGeek who make some very cool T-shirts indeed.
So I signed up, got the information to claim the T-shirt, toddled along to ThinkGeek and chose one. If you’re interested, it’s the ‘Will work for bandwidth’ one and it’s lovely.
Of course, the T-shirt didn’t include postage and packing, most especially not to the UK, so I decided to get something else as well, because ThinkGeek have far too much cool stuff. After poking around a bit I settled on a /dev/mug, a most suitable thing to drink out of in an office full of geeks.
All thus ordered, I settled back and waited for it to arrive. Arrive it did, and the T-shirt was indeed wonderful. The mug wasn’t. Instead of deep blue, it was black, and it had a large Megatokyo logo on the side. Clearly it was the wrong mug.
At this point ThinkGeek’s excellent customer services kicked in. Their site provides ready-made scripts to report erroneous orders, so I made use of them and soon they promised to send me a /dev/mug. I assumed I had to send the Megatokyo mug back, and was extremely surprised to discover that they didn’t want it.
Much impressed, I gave the Megatokyo mug to Richard, who likes that sort of thing. I then settled down to wait for the replacement mug to arrive.
Arrive it did, and it was a /dev/mug, but there was still a problem: the printing was faulty, with a nasty smear right across it. I got back on the ThinkGeek site and very apologetically told them what had happened. They requested a return of the /dev/mug, so I took it to the Post Office and sent it off, and waited.
A few days later an e-mail arrived from ThinkGeek. New /dev/mug dispatched (as I had expected). Postage charges refunded.
I stared at that for a while. I hadn’t expected that at all. Was worth grinning about though. Although my experience has left me with some doubts about ThinkGeek’s QA procedures, their customer service simply cannot be faulted.
The new mug came in good time, and is perfect. ThinkGeek may not have made any money at all from me, but they do have a very happy customer. It took longer than it should have done to get one, but they’ve done it. This is how all companies should be.
More power to ThinkGeek.
It’s really refreshing when a company does something /good/ isn’t it?
I suppose it’s a shame, really.
Comment by Carl — Thursday, 11th March 2004 @ 23:25
Why’s it a shame?
Comment by MaW — Thursday, 11th March 2004 @ 23:41
It’s a shame that it’s a refreshing change when people do things right, or it sometimes seems like that. People do good things all the time, but we don’t always realise it.
Comment by Mike Nolan — Friday, 12th March 2004 @ 10:02
People do, but the bad experiences seem to carry more weight, perhaps.
Still, it’s worth mentioning the good things and making a noise about them, maybe it will encourage more of them…
Comment by MaW — Friday, 12th March 2004 @ 10:06
This reminds me that two days before Christmas, I was at Blackwell’s in Oxford and picked out four books for myself, all volumes of a series, the volumes being named:
Pharmacology
The Nervous System
The Endocrine and Reproductive Systems
The Musculoskeletal Systems
For ₤5, I requested that they be shipped to me at uni, and was informed I’d receive the books in 3 weeks.
4 weeks passed, and no books arrived, so I phoned to inquire and was told to give it another week due to the Christmas rush. When I phoned again in the 5th week, they helpfully put in the order for me again since they could only assume the books lost.
The very next day, I got my books– the ones I’d had shipped 23rd December….
Two weeks later, I got the second order. When I opened the box, I found:
The Nervous System
The Nervous System
The Nervous System
The Nervous System
Not quite what I ordered, and can you imagine how long it would’ve taken to get my books if the original set had never turned up?
So I now have a total of five (5) copies of The Nervous System. If I keep one for me and donate one to the uni library, that still leaves three more to unload. _
Comment by iliana_sedai — Saturday, 13th March 2004 @ 1:24