Human Pavlov

Too much of Sega Dreamcast (back in the day) has left me with some brain cells configured such that any time I hear Rage Against the Machine's "Guerrilla Radio" I think of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, and whenever I hear Offspring's "All I Want", I want to play some Crazy Taxi. Must figure out how to mark and sweep those from my head...

(2008-02-19 15:00:13.0) // Permalink

So much for being ahead of the game.

I always seem to wait until the last minute to get my wife flowers for Valentine's day, but this year I miraculously thought of it earlier than usual and last week went on FTD.com to pick out something and schedule a delivery for the 14th. Before I submitted the order, I double checked the date and everything, so you can imagine my surprise when I was working from home a few days later and saw a shipment email from Fedex cross my inbox. I scratched my head when I saw the subject. Fedex? I didn't order anything Fexex. Looked at the mail, and it was the flowers - fresh Tulips - being shipped from Miami. Uh, uh oh. Those weren't supposed to be delivered for over a week. And since I was working from home with my wife here taking care of our 2 month old, I couldn't quite ring up FTD and try to fix it. So I did what I could and sent them an email asking them to fix the delivery or refund me as this is kind of embarrassing. I got a canned response from FTD essentially saying "we'll get back to within a couple of days." So yes, the flowers did arrive by Fedex too early. And my wife was definitely surprised, not necessarily how I had planned though. But still no response from FTD. I waited a couple more days, I didn't want to mess them up by calling them while my email was in a queue somehere. A couple of days later I got a message from Paypal - I had used Paypal to pay for the flowers. It was a refund notice. A REFUND! I rubbed my eyes, FTD actually gave me a refund?! I didn't quite believe it 'cause I still didn't get any response directly from FTD. Until a day or two later when they finally responded. They apologized for the service error and said that they did actually refund my order. Kudo's FTD for just doing the right thing. Much better experience than several years ago when I ordered from 1-800-FLOWERS and the flowers weren't delivered on Valentine's day, and didn't arrive until a few days later. And when I complained, the best they could do was give me a partial credit.

(2008-02-10 12:52:57.0) // Permalink