The Chair Saga, Part II

So here's an update on the chair saga, simply because I cannot believe that a single shop can display this level of incompetence.

I decided to keep the chair and fix it up myself, but phoned the salesman to let him know that I wasn't happy. He insisted that I must be happy, and that they'd send a new chair. I explained (again) that I am at work all day, and everyone else is sick of coming over to my house, and sitting around wasting their afternoon waiting for a chair. So he said he'd arrange a special delivery for me on Sunday; I said Saturday would actually be better, he said okay, he'd come back to me.

He never came back to me.

Sunday, I get a phone call from him with a confused story about the chair going to Belleville, even though it had his name on it, so it wouldn't be delivered. Not that he'd told me it was supposed to be, but at this stage that's a minor quibble. So he said he was going to speak to the big bosses, because (quite indignant, here) this whole story was giving him a bad name. I said no kidding, it's giving Tafelberg Furnishers a bad name, and that this is their last chance before I tell them to just come pick up the chair and give me my money back. No, no, he's sure it'll work out; he'll speak to the big bosses and they'll sort it out and he'll get back to me.

Today is Monday; as yet, mid-afternoon, no phone call from either the salesman or the big bosses. I can't say I'm surprised.

At this rate, they should leave me the chair and give me my money back. I paid cash up front, which means they've had a lot more use of out my money than I've had out of their chair.

The Saga of the Chair

I've been thinking of buying a recliner for a while now. Eventually, just after christmas I went looking around, found one I liked at a reasonable price, but it was in some odd colour, I forget exactly what it was. This was at Tafelberg Furnishers, by the way, in case you ever consider buying anything from them (although, to be fair, I have bought stuff from them before with minimal problems). I asked them what other colours it came in ... after lots of waiting while they phoned their warehouse, they told me they had it in black. I had some other places I wanted to look at, who turned out not to have very much, so a few days later I came back and said I'd take one in black. "Black? I don't know if it comes in black, let me phone the warehouse". Eventually - "we have it in purple (purple!) and navy". Hmmm. You get navy, and navy. I was undecided, as my lounge suite is burgundy. Not a problem, though, they could get one from the warehouse for me to see the colour, and then I could decide. It should take about a week, but they'd phone me when they had it. About two weeks later, my parents happened to be going past, and they stopped in to see if they would be getting it soon - and there it was, in the showroom. Okay. So that Saturday I went down, they said they had left messages on my cellphone. Odd, because I hadn't got any voicemail, but maybe someone copied the number down wrong. Still, the chair looks nice, yes, I'll take it. Can they deliver in the afternoon? Sure, they'll deliver the Monday afternoon, and seeing as it's close by they'll waive the R60 delivery fee. Cool.



A little bit later Saturday morning, I see I have a missed call on my cellphone. Check my voicemail - I have two voicemail messages, both from Tafelberg, one from a few minutes before, one from a few days ago. Okay, obviously they did leave at least one message, but the voicemail thingy didn't send a message to my phone to tell me. Wonderful, but not their fault. The second voicemail was recent, though, so I phoned them back. Sorry, delivery for Monday is actually full, can they deliver on Tuesday. Fine, as long as it's in the afternoon, and they phone first (I'm at work, so my parents will go over to my house to open up for them, but my dad works during the morning).


So Tuesday they deliver the chair - but it doesn't work. You pull the little lever thing, and nothing happens. Luckily my mom tried it out while they were still there, so they could take it back with them. Phone the salesman; sorry about that, he can get me a new one and they'll deliver next Monday. Fine, but please make sure that you check that this one works. And only deliver in the afternoon.

Next Monday now (yesterday). They've had my money (in cash) for over a week, and I'm still waiting for the chair. At about 11 they phone - they're just about at my house. Sorry, no-one's there, you're supposed to deliver in the afternoon! Okay, they'll come back between 4 and 5. Phone the salesman to complain, and check that he has checked the chair this time. Thank you for reminding him, he'll go and check it now. So my parents go over to my place (again), and at about 4:30 phone the salesman to check what time they should be delivering. Oops, he's gone off sick, but the dispatch manager says the paperwork is on his desk and the chair isn't on the truck. By now we're all really pissed off, and we figure that the chair wasn't on the truck because he found that it's also broken. So I decide that this morning I'm just going to phone him and say cancel the whole thing, I just want my money back. Anyway, he was very apologetic, didn't know why the chair wasn't delivered, they'll deliver today. Umm, no you won't, I'll have to try to get someone to be there first! Seeing as how I work all day ... Anyway, phone my parents again, yes, they can be there (again!) but try to get them to give a fixed delivery time. So I phone the salesman again, fine, you can deliver today, but it must be between 2 and 2:30 otherwise no-one will be there. He was obviously tired of dealing with me and passed me on to the dispatch manager. He said he'd do what he could, and should he phone me if they could only deliver later? By now I'm even more pissed off, and say nope, it's between 2 and 2:30 or not at all, because I've just about had it with Tafelberg Furnishers. Okay, he'll say what he can do.

2:30, still no chair. No, the bakkie hasn't come back from town yet, but it should be here soon. Eventually they deliver at 3. Yay, it even works. So I get home, try it out, yes, it's comfortable, looks good, works fine. Start moving furniture around to find a place for it - and notice that the backing is torn away (where they staple the backing to the frame of the chair). This is the last straw. And of course, by now everyone's so fed up with this damn chair that all the fun of buying it has been sucked out of it.



It looks like I'll be able to fix it - glue the edge down, maybe put in some upholstery nails (the ones that look like studs, so it looks like it's meant to be there), and it should be okay. Not that I should have to fix my brand new chair, but at this point it's less hassle than sending it back again. I'm going to phone the salesman again today, to let him know. And I'm writing to the head office to let them know how seriously unimpressed I am. Oh, that was the other thing he said this morning - he was very apologetic that it wasn't delivered yesterday, and next time I buy from them he'd make a special plan for me - I told him that honestly, I very much doubted I would ever be buying from them again. And that's even more true now than it was this morning.

I'm running out of titles

I haven't been blogging much lately - surprisingly, there wasn't much to blog about over Christmas (I got some kind of stomach bug on Christmas Eve, so my Christmas was not a terribly pleasant one - although compared to the tsunami on Boxing Day, I guess a stomach bug is really minor). And New Year was pretty much a non-event - my parents and I watched the count down on tv, which wasn't very spectacular, there were a couple of fireworks and flares outside, and then everyone gave up and went to bed :-(

There just hasn't been much to blog about in general - work's been pretty hectic, as we're doing testing on our entire system - some of the guys are doing component testing, I'm doing system testing so that's keeping me quite busy. It's pretty interesting, although it can get frustrating trying to track down errors in components that other people have written, but on the plus side I'm really learning a lot about the system internals (I had been working more on the peripheral components, such as the crypto side). And strangely enough, I'm actually enjoying it - I actually tested a couple of things after I got home after going out Friday night, just because I was curious to see what would happen. Actually, that sounds rather sad - but it's really just because it's interesting :-) But then I really do enjoy my job in general - the work's interesting, the
people are cool, and the vibe is nice.

What else can I say ... it looks like the Zanzibar trip isn't going to happen, unfortunately. The package was advertised for R6200, per person sharing, but their price for a person travelling alone is at best R9200 - plus about $60 for a visa, $25 airport tax in Zanzibar, R520 airport tax in SA, as well as malaria medication, yellowfever vaccinations, and travel insurance. So that's quite a bit more than the price they lure you in with, and I think that for that amount of money I can probably go somewhere more ... well ... somewhere you can actually drink the water, eat the food, and not have to sleep under a mosquito net, if you know what I mean.

Ah, here's something to save for posterity (and later reference). I've finally figured out to en/disable the hourly chime function on my watch. You see, every now and then I accidentally switch it on (normally while I'm trying to switch off the alarm in the morning, while I'm still 90% asleep), and I have no idea how I switched on or how to switch it off - since the watch didn't come with one of those tiny manuals that I always thought was totally useless - until now :-) And although it's really irritating during the day, it's surprisingly easy to sleep through your watch going "BEEP" every hour. Eventually, though, I'd accidentally hit on the right button combination to switch it off, but I never knew what I'd actually done. And it doesn't have an indicator to show whether it's on or off, either, so you either have to keep resetting the time to just
before the hour, to test it, or you have to wait until the next hour. It was getting quite embarrassing - I'm an experienced software developer, I have a MSc in Computer Science, but it took me a week to figure out how to switch off the hourly chime function on my watch! But, finally I not only managed to switch it off, I actually know what buttons I pressed to do it! So, because I know I'll forget it again, here's the secret: you have to press the left bottom button to get it into stopwatch mode, and then press both the bottom buttons at the same time. So that's my contribution to the sum of human knowledge for this week.

Zanzibar!

I'm thinking of going to Zanzibar on holiday this year. I saw an advert for a package that includes all airfare, return transfers, meals, drinks, snacks and various activities, 6 nights at the Mapenzi Beach Club, and 1 night at the Dhow Palace Hotel in Stonetown. I did some quick searching on the net, and it looks like a really nice place. The Mapenzi Beach Club looks like a great place (I thought it might be a dinky, small East African kind of hotel, but it looks really smart - light and airy, with palm groves and white beaches and air conditioning in each room). And Stonetown looks really interesting - an old, Arabic kind of town, really historic and just plain cool.

The down side is that it's a malaria area, and apparently you shouldn't eat or drink anything that hasn't been boiled or otherwise thoroughly cooked - no salads, no unpeeled fruit, and only drink sealed bottled water (apparently some bottled water is actually just used water bottles refilled with tap water!). And they recommend that you have yellow fever and other vaccinations. so it's a bit scary from a medical point of view :-( Oh, and you need to get a visa.

But overall it does sound really cool and exotic - apparently you fly in to Tanzania, then cross to Zanzibar by boat - hydrofoil, dhow, or catamaran. So I think that on Wednesday I'll go to the travel agent and find out a bit more - the price looked pretty good, especially since meals and things are included, but things like visas and airport taxes aren't, so I'd have to find out how much they are; also, the price quoted is per person sharing, as usual, which really annoys me because it doesn't help much if you're travelling alone! I'm sure that there are a lot of single people who go on holiday by themselves; it's a bit unfair to assume that everyone is travelling with someone else! But anyway ... I'll find out some more about it, and go from there - I might as well go somewhere interesting on holiday; I may even go during my birthday in July as a present to myself :-)