The Earplugs Files – News from Snorestore

True to their word, DHL today delivered us a further huge shipment from the USA, less than 48 hours after we placed the order with one of our suppliers over there. This is a fantastic feat of logistics on the part of the brilliant folk at McKeon’s, the DHL co-ordinator who called yesterday to say the shipment was on a plane over the Atlantic at that moment, and the DHL driver who brought the towering stacks of boxes to our warehouse this lunchtime. A belated thanksgiving thanks to everyone involved.

You see? No sooner did we post that there was a glimmer of hope in the postal strikes than the union calls off tomorrow and Monday’s action. The power, the power …

We’ve written before about how some people love to hand it out but can’t take it from others.

Well we’re thrilled to have received today another missive from, quite possibly, the rudest person on the planet.

Two weeks ago, this person complained in no uncertain terms that their order hadn’t arrived and since we were clearly incompetent morons, the order should be cancelled immediately and a full refund given.

Except we’re not incompetent morons. The “customer” had never paid for the “order” and as we pointed out, we are not in the habit of sending out orders as gifts.

Well that really put the cat among the pigeons.

A real Harry Potter howler of an email whistled straight back, neatly swerving round our spam and anger filter and landing slap bang in the middle of our inbox.

We can’t divulge the contents – we suggest you use your imagination – suffice to say that particular individual has been well and truly crossed off our Christmas card list.

We’re sure we’re not unique in finding the current vogue of ignoring capital letters extremely irritating.
Our addressing software goes berserk whenever it’s presented with a string of words which should, by anyone’s standards, be capitalised. Postcodes in particular get spat back out again and someone (usually me) ends up having to enter the data by hand.
This inevitably means that the order in question gets put to the bottom of the pile and is the last to be despatched, even though it may have arrived before anything else.
So if you want your order tout de suite, best use capitals where required.
Simple rule: if it’s a person’s name or place name, the first letter should be a capital. If it’s a postcode, the letters should be in capitals.
We know this is down to txtspk n we use it 2 sumtimes. But not when we r ordering online.essing,

When half the office is on holiday, as they are this week, it’s asking a lot of the remaining staff to do the holidaymakers’ jobs as well as their own.
So what we usually do is reduce the range of items available on the website. They’re not out of stock and will be restored to full availability once the office is fully staffed once again. In this case that will be October 27th.
In the same vein, we change our shipping arrangements. We cut the options down to the basics (no Special Delivery for example) and we don’t promise to despatch within one working day.
In this way, we keep our staff and our customers reasonably content.