Thursday, September 10, 2009

Be careful what you say, fate apparently reads this blog... and she's vengeful

So, remember a couple of posts ago when I got a little too big for my britches and talked about how life tried to win one over on me, but I prevailed? Yeah, I guess I spoke a little too soon.

To sum up: I've been working on a birthday present for the best nephew in the world... and it hasn't been going well. I lost all my work once, but I was gleeful that I had taken screenshots, so the second attempt would be a matter of copying my work rather than redoing it completely.

I attempted it again the other day, again spending a couple of hours to complete this thing... only to have it not work again. And to discover that, despite saving my work every few minutes, it hadn't actually saved. I called the company, who was able to find that half my work had saved. And then they told me I'm using a browser not compatible with their Web page and that's why I lost my work. What?!? Nowhere on the site does it list which browsers are compatible and no one told me that was the problem after I lost all my work the first time.

I complained enough to get them to credit me some of the price, but I also got a lot of attitude from them. When I (nicely) told them it was ridiculous to have this happen twice, to not list compatible browsers and to not tell me it was a potential problem when I called, two different people responded with, "Well, it's a beta site so you should expect it might not work."

Uh, no. Actually, when I go to the Website of a reputable company and use their Website to create something that I will be paying them good money to create, I do expect it to work, beta or not. Or, if it doesn't work, I expect to be able to find out why by reading the site or being able to get in touch with a customer service representative who knows how to say something more than, "Oops." Is that too much to ask? (I will be attempting to finally finish this gift today-- the kiddo's birthday. Wish me luck!)

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