An Oxymoron...
Well, what a month it's been. And just my luck, to be on RL holidays and actually miss all the excitement.
The best laid plans, etc... as they say - I fired up the geriatric laptop, upgraded all the releases I'd missed, connected it up and tested it out, checked with the destination hotel ("Do you have high speed internet access?"), pondered the sheer tragedy of my life when I considered that the first question I asked was not "Do you have room service/in room massage/spa bath/free champagne", decided the hell with it, I LIKE my second life, and was relatively confident that heading off to the Nation's Capital was safe, only to discover.....
No Internet Access. "It's being upgraded, madam,but we do have dial-up from your room." Dial-up? I'm in the capital city of my country, its 2008, and someone is telling me they even know what dial-up is? There aren't words to describe my reaction, though incendiary, and incandescent are both great words. And fairly accurate.
On about Day 5 of my stay - and it's production week at RUNWAY, a week in which going away was dangerous even in a best case scenario which this was rapidly turning out NOT to be - the hi-speed wireless came back.
But ONLY in the breakfast room, a darkened place in which I sit, dear reader, at 9pm at night, thinking that it is somehow appropriate that the October issue of RUNWAY, which I'm assured will be dark and mysterious (much like internet access at my hotel) is contributed to by myself, sitting in the dark discovering that despite hi-speed wireless internet in a 2.5metre wide range in the breakfast room, I still cannot connect to Second Life.
So I had to read online, like much of the rest of the SL world, that RUNWAY magazine has just passed the 50,000 readers mark for the September issue. Lucky them. Clearly I'm the only person in the world with DIAL UP ACCESS in my hotel. Hah.
I had actually intended to talk about customer service this month, as opposed to my complete lack of an RL, evidenced by the tic in my left eye and obsession with finding a hi-speed connection. And I shall still continue down the path of pondering the vagaries of customer service in a virtual world despite the fact that I'm sitting in the dark, alone in a strange hotel.
As regular readers of this column (seriously, if we have 50,000 readers, SOMEONE must have read my column at least once) will know, my tolerance levels for bad behaviour are low at the best of times and doesn't even register when particularly nasty trangressions of decency and good taste occur on the nearest planet to me. And so it is that my tolerance for poor customer service is even lower in SL than it is in RL (and at the moment, the owners of my hotel chain ought to be shaking in their boots.)
I've lost count of the times I've not received an item that I've purchased in SL, and can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that the seller of the item in question has replaced it without an argument, or ignoring the first five IMs, or indeed ignoring the request at all.
It seems to me that a virtual item is even more important than an RL item. After all, in RL, you watch the shop assistant pop the object of your current desires into a nice bag, wrapped in rustly tissue paper and full of the promise of eternal beauty the second you get it home and onto your person.... so the opportunities to be deeply disappointed when you open the bag and find it missing, are somewhat limited.
In SL, the chances that it won't be in the bag by the time you get home are significantly higher, depending on the day, the Release Candidate, the number of people on the grid, what your sim owner is actually doing to the sim that day and whether or not Linden Labs have decided to upgrade some peculiar router-hooky-looking-widget thingy that holds the synapses of your region together.
So it was with utter amazement that I logged on (BEFORE I was silly enough to go on holidays to an alleged Centre of Excellence for my Nation) to discover an extraordinary Customer Service Event.
Other regular readers (I am still operating on the assumption that I'm sitting typing in the dark for SOME reason) will recall
that I am a bit of a silver-haired afficionado, and I had discovered with great joy that Novocaine Hair made a style not only particularly fetching but in several shades of grey, silver, and things euphemistically named Pearl and Silk that I deeply desired to make my own.
And did so, only to discover when I got home that the box I'd purchased didn't contain the colours I quite thought it would and that it actually wasn't an absent-minded moment on my part - a highly likely event - but a small faux-pas on the part of the seller.
Having dropped the usual notecard, expecting never to hear from them again, I was beyond amazed when I logged in and discovered that Novo Zimerman had, without fanfare, note or other self-serving comment, just dropped me the entire colour range for that style. And, when I wrote to say thank you, again didn't need to reply telling me how fabulous they were. They just are.
Congratulations and well done to Novo Zimerman and Novocaine Hair. There should be more like you - and I sincerely hope there soon will be.
Bravo. Now, if you could just have a quick chat to my hotel chain? I'd really like to be able to log on again soon.
