Buy Nothing Christmas

Dreading the holiday season? The frantic rush and stress? The to-do lists and sales hype? The spiritless hours trapped in malls?

This year, why not gather together your loved ones and decide to do things differently? With the simplest of plans you can create a new rhythm, purpose and meaning for the holidays. Why not take the spirit of Buy Nothing Day and morph it into Buy Nothing Christmas?

With catastrophic climate change looming, we the rich one billion people on the planet have to consume less! And if that’s too extreme for grandma and the kids, try for a Buy Less Christmas. And maybe a buy local, buy fairer, buy indie Christmas. Whatever you decide, ’tis the season to reclaim our year-end celebrations and make them our own again.

If you want to go one step further off the consumer treadmill, consider one of these actions from previous holiday seasons:

• Give your friends and family a “gift exemption” card
• Ask shoppers “What Would Jesus Buy?“
• Get some friends together (or go solo), dress as santa and meditate in the middle of a busy shopping mall
• Check out buynothingchristmas.org to check out more actions (or inactions) you can take this holiday season

Been buying Nothin’ on Chismas for several years now.

p.s. don’t get me nothin’ either.

Three Business Days Later…

Monday, November 22, 2010, 06:41 PM PST

…or five earth days if you count the weekend.

On Saturday Wizard’s CustHelp contacted me. They informed me that it was a problem with Paypal. Because the payment was over 60 days ago (which is a DUH! because it was a yearly subscription) the refund was refused. Why didn’t they know that? Why weren’t they informed the first time? Why did it take a month for them to figure it out?

So, OK, what next? It was a weekend so I didn’t bother prying.

An email from Digital River disguised as Wizards Customer Help arrived this morning. It asked me to confirm my address so they can send me a check. They also noted that the check will take 4 to 6 weeks. Simply amazing. They have a paypal account, don’t they? They could have just paid me through the account. But they choose to use snail mail, paper and now I’ll have to go to the bank to deposit a $9.90 check.

Thanks, WotC. Thanks a lot.

I find it crazy how a business can take their time with your money, while if I owed them $9.90 and took as long as they did, my balance would have probably went to collections with all kinds of service charges and interest. But as an individual I don’t have a team of lawyers to do any suing.

Wouldn’t it have been easier for them to send me a voucher or subscription code for a couple months like I asked in the first place?

…or why I won’t be spending another dime on D&D.

I requested an extension for the two months that there were no updates to Character Builder. This was around the same time the forums were heating up about the lack of updates, my subscription was expiring and they announced that a new Character Builder was being produced. I wanted an extension because I had an existing subscription, and I didn’t want to pay an extra premium (a full price re-subscription) to try out the new web-based Character Builder. I thought it was a fair request, it was denied even after several attempts to reason with them. I finally gave up and accepted the 2-month refund. That’s when I attempted to deactivate the Auto-Renewal. The system wouldn’t allow me to access my account, so I reported it to Wizard CustServ. On their own they disabled the auto-renew, but didn’t fix my account access. (Although I think they should have fixed it and allowed me to unclick it myself – but that’s fine.) 10 days later, as they stated (it would take 5-10 days,) I checked on my status, and they said I was refunded for the two months, but that was not the case – I checked both my Paypal and Bank Account. I re-opened the case and they insisted that I was refunded. I got busy and check 10 days later, still no refund. I re-opened the case again. This time they did note that it didn’t go through, and they resubmitted for the refund. I either missed that notice, or wasn’t sent one. So I checked again three days later, no refund and to be safe I tried to check my account information with them. My account still reported a server error message, which I copied for them – just in case.

Three days later I get a reply stating that it has been reported to the “department” that handles these type of issues and if I didn’t hear from them (them being Digital River, as I found out) in three days to call a number with a ticket number. I called the number today, because I didn’t hear from them. The support agent on that end looked up my information and told me that they don’t handle refunds, and that I have to contact the supplier (WotC). They’re obviously not on the same sheet of music.

It’s been a MONTH since I accepted the refund, only to be giving the classic run-around. I have to wait again up to three days to be contacted by Digital River. 

Since I started this process, a month and a half ago, I’ve been denied a simple request and had to basically give in to accept a partial refund, only to be given a run-around for a month. The lack of communication, questionable policies and just plain customer service is disappointing.

I have tons of great customer service stories that I would to share, to show what I expected of WotC. I’ve work retail for 3.5 years, and IT for the past ten. I know what customer service is.

WotC doesn’t seem to have a clue. 

I’ll be back in three days.

A public rant on WotC Customer Service.