Tangled Mind

I bet you are all eager to hear the continuing saga of my complaints regarding ebook quality. (Previous entries here).

W H Smith have been curiously silent since my complaint, except to tell me that they'll let me know when I can download an updated version.

Mobipocket's customer care is handled by Amazon, for values of 'handled' including 'we trim the useful bits out of your email and forward it'. It has so far taken me over two weeks to get a useful response from Amazon, and the useful response is 'contact Penguin Group'.

So I have.

[intro bit]

I have so far purchased four e-books which I believe are produced by Penguin Books, and two of those e-books have problems.

[details of ebooks, with examples of problems]

If I had bought these books in paperback or hardcover I would return them and ask for my money back: because I've bought them as e-books, I don't have that option and there doesn't seem to be any recourse for a customer unhappy with production quality.

It's taken me several weeks to get as far as being told I should contact the Penguin Group so I'd very much appreciate a speedy resolution.

What I should have included, of course, is how I shall be posting all over Teh Interwebs about how ebooks are Not As Good. I do like the concept, and reading on my PDA, and being able to lug the Baroque Cycle around without permanent musculo-skeletal damage. I like being able to grab all manner of out-of-copyright texts from Project Gutenberg, already in Mobipocket format: I like being able to copy text from anywhere online and roll my own Palm e-Book.

But ...

Why Commercial E-Books Aren't Good Enough (Yet):
- I cannot Bookmooch ebooks or flog 'em on Amazon if I want to get rid of them.
- I cannot even lend them to a friend.
- it is very often more expensive to purchase a new title in ebook format than in hardcover.
- it is apparently impossible to purchase an out-of-print title (e.g. Anthony Burgess' A Dead Man in Deptford).
- there does not seem to be any single online retailer from whom I can acquire all the titles I want: I had to try four or five different places for my Elizabeth Bear ebooks in Mobipocket format for a UK customer, and I ended up buying from two different sites.
- and, most importantly right now: I can't inspect the goods before I buy, and if they turn out to be faulty my rights are unclear.

Southern Electric (who were very good to me, and wrote off some of my final bill) have been nasty and underhand and tried to steal bugshaw's gas / electricity supply by telling her that I requested it to be transferred. (Which: no.)

This is the sort of thing that stresses and angers me a lot, not least because I hate making phone calls. Luckily, anger is an energy.

"No, I did not request a transfer on 7th November. No, I did not provide you with any meter readings for this property, only for the one I vacated. No, I have not spoken to anyone about meter readings for this property."

Sadly they did not give me the opportunity to demand PROOF before they backed down, said it will automatically be switched back as an erroneous transfer, we don't have to do anything, and yes there will be a letter of apology and some compensation (unspecified, but it's the thought that counts, yes?) in the post Real Soon.

Not sure I believe them but this is considerably less hassle than they led bugshaw to believe.

Have just spent an hour and a half on the phone to the nice Legal Complaints lady. She agrees 100% that communication was appalling but feels that most delays were caused by buyers' solicitors. However, she was not in possession of a key document: I have just emailed her the PDF. We reconvene tomorrow. Joy. Suspect I will have to settle for their shut-up-and-leave-us-alone £250.

Shiva has been most helpful with all the paperwork strewn around.

1. The camera thing: just had another letter from Currys saying that they are unable to do anything until I receive documentation from Fuji. Fuji are not responding to my letters. The last letter I sent Currys made it very clear (I thought) that I had moved from asking for help to making a complaint about their service. Am stuck. And rageful. How does one get Currys (in the form of DSG Retail) to recognise a complaint?

2. The solicitor thing: still waiting for the Legal Complaints service to finish looking at the case files and get back to me.

3. The dog thing: I have not been kept awake again by the dogs, yet. Am trying to consider it reasonable for neighbours to have access to their garden on sunny afternoons.

4. Avis, who charged me for three days' car hire in Gran Canaria although we only contracted for one day: still awaiting response, though they did say in their auto-acknowledgement that it would take up to 15 working days.

5. The Estonia thing: am in touch with a nice lady who is taking $OverseasPropertyCo to court for being useless holding onto her deposit; waiting to hear what her solicitor says about pursuing the case in Estonia or just here. Still waiting for any other response, e.g. Daily Mail, message boards etc. Have had terse and unhelpful responses from one of the directors.

I am tired of all this.

In other news, Sam is upset (so am I) because he just tried to jump onto my lap and couldn't do it. He's really slowing down. Because Valentine's Day is all about looking after the one you love, we are off to the v-e-t at 9:15am tomorrow.

I seem to have been atypically quiet, here, for a while. Let's see:

1. I hate the new posting interface with a pure and vivid hatred (it messed up my last-but-one post and lost one altogether).

2. Virgin (who, you may recall, were messing me about while I was away) have been trying to make it up to me. First, they said it with flowers: a huge bouquet -- the cats are still having fun with the box, tho' residentevil666 is scared of it now, hahaha -- and then they wrote me a very apologetic letter, admitting that they were indeed crap and enclosing £30 of vouchers.

3. Have had my first annual review at FabCompany. In fact, my first annual review anywhere for about 12 years. It was very nice. Because they rely on customer feedback as well as boss's opinion -- and because they like me and think I do OK, despite a year of illness and upheaval -- it was very constructive, and I didn't even mind the negative bits. (Decoupled from actual salary review, which is tomorrow.)

4. FabCompany gave every employee a Christmas hamper from Lucy's of Ambleside.

5. I spent the weekend in Plymouth with my sister, and despite (?because of) far too much wine, we had some interesting conversations. And a trip to the beach. And she was quiet for nearly five minutes on Sunday afternoon. (It's not the conversations I mind: quite the contrary. It's the stream-of-consciousness, self-interrupting monologue.)

6. Am feeling cheerful about Christmas, yay! (Helped immensely by the fact that Citilink, who to date have been dishonest about attempts to deliver Big Parcel, have apparently delivered at last -- just in the nick of time.)

7. Have had a lousy stomach bug more or less since Hong Kong. But it seems to have gone at last.

8. Have written all Yuletide thingies. Ho ho ho.

9. Have walked in the pretty glowing frosty fog, in the copse. (It was rose-pink this morning when I sneaked down the M23 past stationary lanes of traffic going elsewhere. Am enjoying this driving lark now. Though less so in the dark.)

10. How the hell have I missed The Sonics for all these years? Glares at music-loving portions of f-list. I've belatedly* discovered the Best Christmas Song Ever, nestling halfway through DJ Riko's Merry Mixmas 2006 ... you can find it linked here.

Oh, and 11. On Christmas Day the days start getting longer again!

* i.e. too late for Yule06 CD ...

And so farewell, dear little purple Sony NWA1000 Walkman. You are so lovely to look at, and your sound quality is excellent: but your Connect software is appalling, slow and buggy and defective; and your website not only doesn't run under Mozilla Firefox, it doesn't seem to run on a machine where Firefox exists. ( apparently you need Internet Explorer to do the Internet )

That's more like it.

Just after Christmas, I had an unpleasant experience with a Lush product. It was Coalface soap, and it had sharp bits in it, and I ended up with a long scratch on my face.

I went into the Covent Garden branch to complain, and they weren't very helpful: gave me a tiny sliver of a different product -- "we can't really give you more, as you're returning such a small bit of the soap" -- and told me I shouldn't have used it directly on my face. Well, duh, I'd worked that out very quickly post-scratch: but it is a facial product. (Apparently the sharp bits were slivers of charcoal. I did suggest that they might put a warning to this effect on the product description.)

However, they did (after I refused to let it drop) give me a complaint form to fill in, and I have just received a fulsome letter of apology, and a voucher for £5. More Blue Skies, I think.