CS Woes

Wow, customer service has been hard on me the last few days (weeks).

First, I have been trying to get hold of Kenwood to find out if there is another receiver that is comparable to the one that I lost to the lightening strike. Today, after two weeks of emailing them, they finally emailed back to say that they don't have record of the model number I am referring to and that they are no longer going to make home audio equipment for the US...ugh!!! I finally, after doing some research on the Internet had to get on the phone with them so that I could determine if a certain receiver I was looking at buying would be too much for my current speakers. Turns out they do have the model number in question, apparently the online service is not updated frequently. Isn't the point of having online customer service to help keep the company from getting tons of phone calls.

So at least I did find out that I can buy the one I was looking out without having to worry about my speakers getting blown out and I have already made my purchase online...hopefully it won't take long to get here because my entire sound system in the living room is pretty much crippled without a receiver.

Note: I generally do not like to call companies if I don' t have to because my experience has been that those answering the phones have, in many cases, never even seen the product much less know anything about it. They are hired merely to quiet irrate customers with their page turning and "yes ma'ams and no ma'ams".

Okay, on to number two, the spa people...grrr...these people are very irritating. How is it that the more you spend on an item, the farther from reality the customer service people get? As you know from previous posts, our lights, and power supply to the stereo (both in the spa) were destroyed during the lightening strike to the tree in our yard this spring. I have been trying to get an estimate for parts plus shipping from the spa people for over a month. They keep emailing me back that I don't have a certain light in my spa that I have. It is in the manual, in the schematic and on the damn tub!!!! I am about ready to take a picture of it and email it to them. At this point, they have stopped responding at all (don't tell me to call them, did that first and it didn't work either). So yesterday, I wrote a regular letter that I am sending in the mail to the corporation today. I hope it works to get my part list so I can get this thing fixed before we move again.

Lastly, I got an email from Geocaching.com the other day that one of the travel bugs they mailed me has a faulty number on it. They want me to deactivate it, and they will send me a new one with an extra gift for my inconvenience...this is fine, in fact great, if the TB in question weren't the one that I have just finished logging all 64,000 caching miles on....grrr. I emailed them back hoping that they can just change the number on the one I have to the new number on their end so I don't have to relog my entire life of geocaching again, but of course I am still waiting for a response to their email.

Oh well, I have other things I need to do today, so I guess the email and mail can just wait without me...good thing I don't have to be here to supervise it.