Earlier in the week while Rachel was over we were complaining about all the birds that enjoy crapping on our back porch. The primary culprit, a Mourning Dove whom I have dubbed “The Shitting Bird”, doesn’t care if I walk up within arms reach of him and clap my hands – he’ll sit there, not looking at us, occasionally crapping.
So since there’s nothing to be done I decided to have fun with it. If the birds won’t stop we can at least judge them on their accuracy:
Forest Designs Furniture – Bookcases
Gill and I have been looking for some new bookcases, and we came across this company that seems to offer what we’re looking for. We asked for some samples of their available finishes and we got this thick envelope full of 3.5″ squares of stained plywood. We looked, deliberated, tried them out underneath some books, and decided to have a look at a few of the finishes we didn’t get the first time around.
So today we got another thick envelope full of plywood samples. It’s like we’re opening a new pack of the biggest trading cards, though I have to wonder what kind of candy would come with these cards.
Last weekend Gill was leafing through the latest Organic Gardening when she saw these solar garden lights. Now, they looked very pretty and were on sale when we found them on the website, so we took the plunge and bought them.
Gill was looking forward to these all week, so when they arrived in the mail yesterday she was thrilled. While I looked over the instructions, Gill began to remove the bubble-wrap that covered each individual globe. We set the solar panel outside to begin charging and we began to unwind the tightly wrapped cord when disaster! One of the globes lightly tapped against another one and it shattered.
We were disappointed, but we sat down and discussed what to do next. While we re-packaged the lights we decided that they had to go back; they’re too fragile to keep outdoors, especially with a little kid running around. Gill called their customer service department while I looked around to see if there were any alternatives. And that’s when I went from disappointed to angry.
Wind & Weather’s U.S. based customer service only refunded us the purchase price. They kept the sales tax, and the shipping, and they expect us to pay to ship the lights back to them. This means that we’re paying about $15 for the privilege of finding out that this product, sold as an outdoor accessory, is too fragile to survive being removed from the box, let alone any kind of wind or weather.
I was far too irate to calmly discuss this, so I decided to wait until Monday to try calling them back. If they won’t refund the tax or the shipping I’m not shipping it back to them. We’ll see how this ends up.