I think winning an argument or more a dispute against a company when you’re the consumer and they’re the big company out to screw you is a great thing! In fact its so great that I try to win these kind of victories often… It puts you on a moral high ground thats quite unlike winning other things!

Recently I have been unfortunate (or maybe fortunate) enough to purchase a pair of Shure E2C headphones (or even earphones) that happened to break not once but twice. The first time was fair enough, just claiming under the warranty and you should expect them to replace it free of charge no questions asked, which is exactly what happened. When it happened the second time though, and much sooner that the original fault I was fairly annoyed! I was annoyed to such an extent that I complained that the actual earphone design must have some terrible fault if it was to fail so darn easily, with the cable freying and the loss of sound in one ear! These are £60 earphones, things like this shouldn’t happen! Through my complaining about the design of the earphones, they happened to take pity on me and upgrade me to E3C’s, which I’m happy to say are much much better. Though I think I’m lucky, this whole upgrading regime might be normal customer policy, but at least my attempts felt fruitful!

I think that its always worth complaining when something is wrong or not as it seems, as the saying goes, the “Customer is always right.” So I can never be wrong apparently. Even if the product is out of warranty it worth giving complaining a go… In Britain under the sale of goods act of 1979, traders must sell goods that are as described and of satisfactory quality. This means that the goods should last for a “reasonable amount” of time, this generally being a longer period than the warranty, so you are still ‘protected’ after the warranty runs out of you are prepared to argue your case.

On the topic of out of warranty repairs/complaints, I have a digital radio at home that is failing fairly miserably considering it has only been at home for less that 2 years and has been in the same place that whole time, thus eliminating any human fault. The volume control fails occasionally and the volume suddenly increases and cannot be changed… But what is more annoying is the screen, which is damn useful on digital radios may I add, fails fairly often. It might work fine just after you switch it on, but then it descends into garbled gobbledygook with Russian characters!!! The back light then flickers for a bit and then finally switches off, and finally the screen dies and all is silent in the lcd world of the digital radio’s screen. So… Argos here I come to get a replacement/refund/repair!

It is also worthwhile buying at John Lewis because aside from matching prices, they also have an extra year guarantee on electricals, which is very useful!

More consumer victories/tales next time!

A while back I started a set of articles named browser wars where I endeavoured to explain the pros and cons of most browsers currently available. I really should be posting some form of update, but in the meantime, I’d thought I’d mention Flock…

I tried Flock quite a while ago when it was first released and primarily marketed as the ‘Social Browser’. Back then it was still in its beta stages and fairly buggy and I seem to remember that it didn’t really have anything notable about it over Firefox or any of the other browsers for that matter, probably the reason why I stopped using it.

Recently I’ve been getting a bit tired with Safari. As i probably mentioned before, its great in every way possible execpt its responsiveness with the general running of the application, in the fact that it shows the beachball fairly often and then as a result needs to be Force Quit or Crashes! This may be due to the extensions that I have undoubtably installed, but then again, I wouldn’t use Safari to such a great extent without some of those extensions… bit of a vicious circle it seems!

But nonetheless I think Flock has definitely improved to such an extent that it is now usable. This usability also extends to some of its more social features too, such as its in-program Flickr/Photobucket uploading and its posting to various blogs… even this Wordpress powered one (something which I wasn’t able to do before), and its importing of Safari preferences… It even looks nice!

Few problems (i.e. major differences from Safari) are that there are no folders available in the bookmark toolbar thing, the whole RSS reader thing is fairly different and I have yet to find a way to quick search in the address bar by typing in something along the lines of “eb jeans” to search eBay for jeans.

Still I recommend that you at least give it a go as it is free and built upon the (fabulous?) Firefox engine (which is all too apparent may I add, with its Java-isms on the mouse cursor…). Find it at Flock.com.

Hello again!

I seem like I haven’t posted in a while, whell it may even be a week and quite possibly longer, but I’ve been busy having fun away doing things etc.

What I’m annoyed about this time is the general uselessness and general crapness of large record stores, i.e. HMV and Virgin. They stock roughly a million of the CD’s that recently came out, which is more than just fairly pointless as no-one should really buy them. The majority are in fact crap, as they are all aimed at a Radio 1 listening audience, who will listen to any old shit that they are told to and then maybe even make a purchase of this music so it can then be forgotten about maybe a week or two later, and in extreme cases a month later! Read the rest of this entry »