MrZaius.com

I recently made a purchase from ThinkGeek, shipped to my diplomatic pouch address at the relatively isolated, xPO free post in Kathmandu and was *gasp* charged Virginia sales tax in spite of the pouch zip code’s long-standing exemption. They deserve kudos, however, on three points:

1: Unlike most of their peers, they had a clear email address listed in the email invoice. Doubly nice, the email address was the reply address for the invoice itself. Beats the hell out of trying to get in contact with Buy.com, Amazon, or any number of others.

2: While I did receive one automated message acknowledging my message, everything else received was very clearly and professionally human-written. Not a single form letter or incoherent brush off from some outsourced, illiterate ticket monkey. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a ticket monkey – The devil’s in the “illiterate” detail. A refund was quickly offered and every message was written in a manner that demonstrated a complete grasp of a not at all common complaint.

3: Although it did take one additional poke to get to this point (rather than a half dozen emails to management), the customer service rep promptly and professionally acknowledged that the problem should be brought to the attention of their developers. Gotta love a customer service or tech support rep that’s not above pestering the people who built their systems.

Kudos, kudos, kudos.

PS:These things are great: Utili-Key 6-in-1 Tool — Bought a couple at the Spy Museum in DC before coming out here, as I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get them shipped to me in time. Regretted it ever since, though, as the newer model sold in shops has had its bottle opener filed down to a useless little stump. Granted, OSHA probably wouldn’t be a huge fan of a device where you have to hold firm to the saw blade to use the bottle opener, but you wouldn’t believe how annoying it is to lose that feature once you get used to working around the safety flaw.