DABS.com is really starting to piss me off. I ordered a new hard drive for my laptop, along with an external enclosure for some of my other hard drives lying around. Now when I ordered the drive I knew it was out of stock, and thought that DABS would order in a new batch when I placed an order, as they usually do. Wrong. 18 days after placing my order, I decide to contact them to get some status on the thing.

Now to get in touch with them, you have to send them a message through their forms on the web. They simply don’t do telephone service at all, nothing, nada. So I go through their help system in order to try and find an email form and eventually find one that kind of suits my query, then send it off. A couple of days later, I receive a canned (i.e. templated) email with just the same information I read through their help system and no details relating to my query. I cancelled my order.

I then set about finding an alternative supplier, which in this case happened to be Misco. I placed an order on Friday evening, had the order confirmed over the weekend, and the hard disk enclosure was shipped Monday morning first thing, and arrived on Tuesday morning. The hard drive was listed as having a 5 day lead time, so no surprise it hasn’t arrived yet, but I thought I’d tempt my luck and phone up their customer services and see if I can get some info.

I phone up their number, and I hear just a couple of notes of hold music before being put onto an operator. She puts me on hold to contact her colleague who is in charge of that particular batch of items, but she isn’t picking up her phone. So what does she do? Takes my email address and emails her colleague for the information.

Now that, my friends, is customer service. Bye bye DABS!

First things first, Happy New Year!

I upgraded to WordPress 2.0 earlier today, and while the upgrade seems to have gone very smoothly indeed, there might be teething problems! So, if you encounter any trouble please let me know by leaving a comment below!

Yesterday, Jess, Alex and I went to see the new Chronicles of Narnia film. We went to a cinema in the small seaside town of Lynton, because we fancied going for a bit of a drive; it was a bit cold though, Alex still hasn’t had his heating fixed! Once parked, we make our way up to the tiny little cinema, which consists of an entrance hall with snacks, a ticket booth, and a door into the screening room.

As soon as we got into the room and sat down, we were faced with a very cheap-looking yellow nylon curtain and the smell of the 1960s. While we were waiting for the cinema to fill, they played music that can only be described as carousel music, the sort played off an old electronic organ. As people poured in, it became apparent that everyone knew everyone else. The time of the showing was approaching.

The curtain was peeled away perfectly on time, revealing a decent-sized screen. No adverts or trailers were played and the film began straight away. To our great surprise, the quality of the screen was amazing, giving an excellent picture and not distorted around the edges at all. The sound, while not THX Digital Surround (or whatever it is) was much better than expected.

We all loved the film. I didn’t remember much of the story at all, and was reminded as the film played on, so I can’t comment how faithful it is to the original story. The effects were very good and entirely believable, and the battle scenes really sucked you in.

That’s a film I’d like to see again at some point, and we will certainly become more regular users of that cinema!