First off, you may have noticed distinct a lack of posting these past couple of weeks. I’m not going to apologise, because I’d rather only post when I have something to say, rather than just because I haven’t said anything for a while. Thankfully, I’ve got some things cookin’ away that should be ready to blog about in the next month or so. As for what I’ve actually been up to, that’s been mainly programming and playing the shit out of Caesar 3 (why is it that the best computer games are always the old ones?) – nothing you guys would be interested in anyway.
We’re always surprised by the lovely emails and comments saying how pleased people are with Coffeesh0p‘s service. They’re not surprising because we think we do a terrible job, but we just thought what we do was pretty standard. We get orders, we post them, we answer customer emails. That’s pretty much it, so how can we be doing a remarkable job? I suppose because we’re a small company, we can always ship orders on the same day, and the Royal Mail certainly earns the cost of a stamp, since most of our smaller orders get there the next day. But surely there’s more to it than that? Well, we’ve done a bit of shopping on the internet recently, and it turns out everyone else is just shit!
I’m not slagging off this industry in particular, it’s just my online shopping experience as a whole has been a bit terrible recently. Firstly, I bought a copy of Professional Javascript about a month ago from a third party seller on Amazon. I figured that since I’m recoding Coffeesh0p pretty much completely, that the drag ‘n’ drop shopping basket could use a bit of a tweak. Amazon’s delivery estimate came and went with no sign of the book. Thinking it might have gotten lost in the post or something, the misses emailed the seller who told us to “check with the Post Office” because sometimes “the postmen don’t bother to leave a card if the parcel is too big for your letter box“. Straight off, we thought this was horse shit, but just in case this guy had some secret insider Post Office information, we thought we’d check with the guys at our Post Office, who confirmed our suspicions. This guy was flat-out lying to people! Further communications ended up with him telling us to wait another couple of weeks. If I don’t have it by next Friday, I’m going to write some Javascript to smack him round the face remotely.
Next up was a Bridesmaid’s dress we bought on Ebay (If you’ve just tuned in, me ‘n’ the misses are getting married). First off, we got a money request from PayPal, because the particular vendor couldn’t just accept normal payment as they’d reached their transfer limit or something. A week or so passed without a dress, then the person got in touch and requested that we get that payment cancelled and send a cheque instead, because apparently their PayPal account had been compromised… A few emails later and we’re still waiting.
Finally, one of our wholesalers has been a complete pain in the arse. When we moved house 3 fucking months ago, we placed an order with them (and paid in advance) and I emailed them to tell them we’ve moved. So a few days later, a package turns up at our old address and I have to go and pick it up. When I got it open, there was half the stuff there we ordered and an invoice with “Rest will follow” scrawled across it. Since then, I’ve emailed a million times and we’ve still not got the rest of this pretty substantial order. Apparently, they’ve been short staffed, had trouble with customs and all sorts of other shit. Truth is, I couldn’t give a crap, since I paid nearly £40 for shipping! The icing on the cake though, is that they’ve apparently sent the rest, but they’ve sent it to our old address despite three separate emails with our new address in to at least two different people! Arrgghh!
So, yeah, I suppose that does make us pretty awesome by comparison. 
Mini Competition
I’ve still got three more Bamboo Shotgun Pipes to give away, so I reckon it’s high time we had another competition. To cheer me up, this competition will be to create the best drugs related cat macro.
Here are some examples:
At the end of the month, the best three, as judged by me ‘n’ the misses, will get a pipe. To submit your entry, attach your pictures to my Contact Form. Make sure you actually submit the form, though…
Good luck!.