Emotions, Necessities, Material Things and Photography

Well, I have all kinds of other subjects discussed on my blog besides photography, so why not tell you this?

This year was the year of a few big purchases for us in the house and for my business. A piece of furniture for the kitchen that had been missing for 10 years was finally purchased. Norton Security for my laptop expired. A new set of house windows needed to be replaced (the builder did not prime original one, so they were practically destroyed by moisture and sun). Finally, the lease expired on the business car, so we needed to get a new vehicle.

My general question is, "What happened to customer service these days?" I am not clear, but having major issues 4-5 times in a row that is for sure not a coincidence. Whether you want to hear it or not, I will tell you anyway, especially, how much time I wasted with each issue.

Kitchen furniture, which took 3 months to deliver, finally arrived in the 6th month due to their backlog and a whole bunch of corrections. So then we thought we had designed a custom piece that required extra work; however, the maker still did not do what we asked for, and they were not able to revert as per blue print. I find this a lot lately: we ask for one thing, and we get something else, and then the seller doesn't tell you; they just go with the flow and hope you will accept. We did.

Norton Security 2007, miscommunication again, and someone from India trying to resolve the problem on my laptop for 8 hours straight. Then on the end they stick in our face that it is our computer problem. Clearly it was not.

House windows: we went for one that was better quality and we paid extra. The biggest price tag was on the arched window, which was also the most expensive window. Negotiating down did not work because the salesman had explained to us how difficult the job is. We caved in. Okay, at least the arch will be a one-piece, but it wasn't. It was installed as two pieces and in addition - misaligned, with a big joint in the middle hard to ignore. All this, in addition to non-matching trim to other windows - our other argument. And, they will be replacing three pieces of glass due to coating defects. This has been going on since the beginning of August and is still going on, with us calling them all the time. So far, I've had people come in and out of the house to look at it. How about fixing it one day?

We are starting to lose hope, but life goes on. We returned our last leased vehicle having minor issues with the car and dealership. Don't need to worry, we don't have to deal with them anymore. We have decided to go to another car dealership with a supposedly high-end service. To our surprise, vehicle pick-up is delayed by five days because first they did not clean the outgoing vehicle properly, or so-called detailing. The car also had a broken sensor linkage, and then transmission oil leaked on our driveway. In the end, it was all a minor fix, but five days of wasted time and an oil stain on the driveway. We are still waiting for compensation and an extra key. Still waiting for the survey to come along—oh, I will be investing my time into this survey; just watch me. This vehicle was a demo; therefore, sometimes it is expected to have minor issues, but they did not inspect or clean it before giving it to us as promised. The best part was that the vehicle was not cleaned, so the sales guy brought the service guy and told me to tell him where I wanted it cleaned and he would do it now. This looked to me like a 5-minute job, and if they want to play like that, I told them I am taking this car home and I will wipe the car myself. You wouldn't believe how clean the car was the next day. But still, on delivery, we found some nice chicklet candy between the seat and the seat belt. It took us a while to take it out—maybe it was the angry cleaner. Before I forget, the funny thing was that after their first mistake, they gave us baseball caps to apologize, which still had the store magnet attached. So that day we had two things in the house: a car we could not drive, sitting on the driveway with a transmission oil leak, and a baseball cap with a big magnetic bar attached to it—try wearing that, LOL.

Today is the day when I completely lost hope for customer service. We kept getting automated messages from the last leased car credit company. I kept ignoring it because it was the computer calling us: "please call the company at 1-800-...," and that's it; no nerve to leave an appropriate message. Finally, I called today, and they asked me what the problem was: "I said you tell me, you called me." The reason I ignored the messages was because everything was done properly upon return: all the payments (24 of them) were completed, and the vehicle was returned the day it was due. The story is that it took us all day to talk to them (4 people in total, from clerk to team leader and 1 dealer) and try to convince them that for a 2-year lease there are 24 payments and not 25 payments. And this is a true story: they were reading the contract incorrectly and wanted 25 payments because some other person gave them the incorrect return date. Funny, they did not buy that when we told them to check that part. The best part was that they already marked me for a bad credit rating and charged me an additional 2 dollars of interest. The day concluded with the apology call and excuses on their part, which I was just too fed up with to argue with.

After all this, let's look at the bright side. I purchased my 100-400mm Canon lens this year, and knock on wood, so far, so good. The bright side is that I do sometimes care about these things, but most of the time I don't care because it all will be sorted out in the end, and for that stuff I have the ability to separate myself and just go to sleep like nothing happened. Sometimes I just talk about it, but then, oh well.

Today's photo does not really reflect my emotions because when I do photography and enjoy nature, I ignore the less important parts of my life. These are just material things that, unfortunately, are necessities sometimes; however, they are not worth my stress. But, they are worth telling. BTW, there is nothing wrong with the bird; he is just scratched his head and is cleaning his beak after eating. However, my sister thinks the House sparrow is possessed. I took this photo last November from my kitchen window.

~ Anna