How to give a distie the bird!

I used to inhabit TSC, a previous incarnation of this site, and post there fairly frequently. I thought you might like to see some of the tales I posted there some years ago and to this end followed a suggestion by a fellow inmate of the old site and located them on the Wayback Machine. As and when the fancy takes me I’ll dig some of them out and repost them here to give the site a bit of a kickstart…

A few years ago I ordered a serious-spec. fuck-off laptop from a major UK distributor. When it failed to arrive I phoned them, only to be told it had been lost in transit and that they would dispatch a replacement. So far, so good, the replacement duly arrived and I discovered why the original had been lost. Instead of packing it in a plain outer, the thing turned up with the makers name, specification and a bloody great picture on the box. They might just as well have written ‘PLEASE NICK ME’ on the side of the box….

Anyway, they billed me for both the lost original and the replacement. On complaining about this I was told not to worry – it was normal procedure and the original would be credited as soon as they had received their compensation from the carrier. I would not be chased for payment of the original bill.

Yeah, right….

Needless to say, over the next three or four weeks I received a series of chase letters, each one obviously automatically generated and containing threats of escalating severity until this morning’s postal threat of legal action made me so mad that I phoned their accounts dept.

Now, the guy I got lumbered with on the other end of the phone had obviously undergone a recent commonsense-bypass because all he could do was parrot ‘If a bill remains unpaid for whatever reason we will pursue payment.’ (What, even if I DON’T OWE YOU FOR IT?) Finally I’d had enough. “Look, sunshine, I don’t care what you think, you can EMU this invoice!” I said. “You techs are always talking in acronyms!” he replied. (Oh, joy! He hasn’t met this one before!) Now wearing his customary evil grin, Gromit moved in for the kill. “EMU is not an acronym, it’s a South African bird with a very long flexible neck. This means it can stick it’s bill up it’s arse, and so can you!” .

Oh, I REALLY enjoyed that….