Part of me thinks this was faked/exaggerated at the time, except...
Once on Amazon, I ordered an open tent. Basically, it is just an aluminum frame, 12 feet×12, 8 feet high, with canvas, to keep the sun off when presenting things at outdoor events.
The one I received took 5 weeks to arrive, and was supposed to be new.
But it was used, with scruff marks on the posts. I sent pics, and said "Hey, this is supposed to be new! What gives!!"
An immediate "Sorry" with a "We have shipped a replacement." was the response. Really, all I wanted was a discount, mostly to compensate me for the paint I needed to buy.
But OK, I said thanks. And waited.
8 weeks later, I again contacted them. "Where is my replacement? Do you have a tracking number? It has not arrived yet."
Another immediate response, "We have shipped you a replacement..."
Whatever, I think. Scam, I think.
1 week later, it arrives. I notice the ship date, and realise it was the original replacement.
Worried, I contact them, and explain that the first replacement had arrived, all is good, it was just late, can they cancel the replacement's replacement?
I received a response "We have shipped a replacement."
And yes, I now have 4 of the things. I did not try to contact them again, for fear of ending up with more.
I had a similar issue. I really think that it is cheaper for them to write things off, than to receive replacements.
I had an item shipped from China, and it arrived a day past when it was due (actually, it arrived in the late evening of the due date, so I guess you could say it "arrived as scheduled").
In any case, on arrival day, it had not arrived, so I sent in a complaint, and it was refunded immediately (Amazon is actually really good for that).
The problem was, it arrived, and I wanted to rescind the refund.
That's where things got complicated. After trying various things, Amazon finally just told me to keep the item (and the refund).
In point of fact, I felt bad, because I know it was a low-margin mom and pop store (albeit Chinese mom and pop). I don't think it was one of those massive "fraud factories."
But it was actually impossible to return the money.
I have always assumed that for items which are shipped from Amazon fulfillment centers, if stolen or lost during shipment, Amazon is covering the cost not the vendor. But I don't know if that's actually true.
The reality is Amazon rarely pays for anything on the merchant side. FBA gives up an enormous amount of control, and in our experience results in Amazon Customer Service Reps issuing returnless-refunds for nearly every single contact, regardless of the cause.
But, it's a numbers game. Do enough volume and anomalies, including blatantly obvious fraud, don't matter. For smaller merchants though, it can be brutal.
It's to the point where FBA wouldn't be worth it at all for anyone operating their own warehouse and what-not... except for the fact that Amazon "boosts" FBA offers in search results and gives FBA merchant offers a larger share of the "Buy Box"... so you miss out on a considerable amount of sales if you do not FBA. Most of the "real" operations (ones that exist off of Amazon as well) do both FBM and FBA just to cover all the bases, but not be dependent on Amazon. But... I digress...
My back-and-forth with support wasn't as funny as these, but I had the same thing happen with a subscription to the print edition of Computer Music Magazine in 2019/2020.
It took them over 4 months to ship my first issue. With magazines you usually get the issue for the month after you subscribe, so I waited 6 weeks before emailing support. They told me it should have been sent, they would send a replacement. Repeat this every month-ish and after the 3rd try I gave up.
About a month after my last contact I got 4 copies of the April issue. A month later I got 4 copies of the May issue. And so on for the next year. Rather than ship me a new December (or whenever it started) issue, they just kept giving my account a new subscription and calling it a day.
Very USA...
>Really, all I wanted was a discount, mostly to compensate me for the paint I needed to buy.
Ad the time to seal off an area, shake the cans....
Jack up the price, 3 for the price of two, when it all fucks up, give 20% off...they fucking love it.
Save 8.1%. Sold.
Save $10.00 if you buy 3. Sold.
Return the fucking thing. It's not what you wanted.
Or, start the haggle BEFORE you enter into the negotiation.
Thankfully, a company i just dealt with explained/ replied to every question very clearly that if i got fucked, they will pay.
Ha.
I doubled my order.
But, if i need to paint anything....it goes back (the items have to be failsafe).
Or, i would have requested 'sub-standard paint job...no problem".
My credit card/ bank do not understand 'quality', or 'taste', or 'dissatisfaction'.
I do, and I'm the customer.
Sending the item back requires more effort than painting it. If you don't own a car (which is one of the main reasons you would order things like a tent for online delivery instead of going to your local outdoor/sporting/camping goods store where you could inspect them personally) then you need to somehow get a tent-sized and tent-massed box to the post office. (Remember, this isn't an ultralight-camping backpack tent; more a piece of yard furniture. It isn't necessarily portable.)
It depends, obviously, but sometimes return shipping costs are too much (when factoring in original shipping costs, product cost, margins, etc), so the merchant may opt to send a replacement without a return, or issue a refund without a return.
I wouldn't assume this is how an issue will be handled, since it depends on the merchant and what the specific issue was.
Those mattress-in-a-box things on Amazon are notorious for this. Once you get it out of the box, there is nearly zero hope of getting it back in. Shipping a full sized mattress would be very expensive due to it's irregular shape and dimensions - so I've heard even minor defects result in refunds. Ripe for abuse... so it's best to steer clear of those sorts of products unless you can absorb the loss.
This is an excellent addition to HN and I hope that devs and product managers alike see what happens when everyone tries to do as little as possible without taking the time to understand the bigger picture or even the underlying problem.
This could have been solved so simply at any step of the journey.
Hiliariously, my PM brain that can never be at-rest was thinking about how this whole interaction could be improved. Hampered, of course, that this was dated in 1997–now hotels have magical things like in-room tablets.
That's a huge problem. This situation is not something that requires "improvement". It's a well defined, easy to implement, no frills request. And which is particularly tried hard not to be delivered. Any of the parties which are to provide the solution do not use one modicum of brain to solve this. They ignore clear and concise communications and try to play dumb and by the book. Which was the all ask. “Don't play by the book, ignore this part which I particularly don't need“.
Flashbacks of most long support threads I've been on...
> Hi I'm $insertNewName and I'll be taking over your case. Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Despite 10 other interactions suggesting the same thing :facepalm:
That and just finding whatever support article comes up when they stuff a few keywords into their search, no matter that the same document has been linked multiple times before in the thread.
I suppose if you have a Galactic Empire sized business, maybe something like SOAP (or EDI) to really nail things down makes some sense. Otherwise I'm not so sure.
Not a year goes by where I’m not convinced that things would be easier if as a community we used a modern version of the soap protocol, maybe with JSON instead of XML. RPC is such a clean design compared to REST, and it we had auto-generated client code 15 years ago, something the likes of swagger are still catching up with.
Auto generated client code is nice in theory. In practice I find it only really useful as a starting point. There are enough choices to be made in writing even a simple HTTP api that its unlikely that a generic tool will generate useful code for a given application. This could include library usage (http client, serialization, logging, DI integration), async vs sync, logging requirements, tooling support for generated code. If you are in a language which has established std libraries and patterns this is less of a problem, but in something like Java that has evolved in all these areas over the years it can be a real problem.
Thrift seems to have a really nice solution of providing only types that eventually break down into scalars. And only for exchanging data - it doesn't dare prescribe the rest of that. I liked working with it.
SOAP was OK in theory but many implementations left something to be desired. In particular I generally found it worked OK if the client code was autogenerated from the same SOAP implementation that the server used, but if you could not use that autogenerated code (such as when your client was using a language that the generator did not support) it was a lot more iffy.
I found a great book at Safari Books Online on SOAP that said that it was written because the author had been bitten by those issues and other things caused by some less than brilliant decisions on the part of those who made the SOAP standard (he was considerably less polite than I have phrased it) and wrote the book so the rest of us didn't have to waste as much time figuring it out as he had.
I don't remember the name of the book or the author, and when I needed a SOAP book a couple years after that it did not show up when I searched.
At one point I got tired enough of the quirks of making servers work with clients not using the server's client generator that I wrote a little proxy that would sit between the server and client. Then I'd write a client using the server's client generator that would just go through all my services and log the communications.
For example lets say I had a server to look up VAT, which takes a sales price and a country code and returns the VAT rate and the VAT amount.
I'd do that through the proxy two or three times, which would save the XML the client sent to the server and the XML response. I'd then compare the XML from the different client requests to see if anything changed, such as timestamps.
I'd then open the client XML in an editor, replace any timestamps with "___TIMESTAMP___", then search for the price and country code to see how those were stored. I'd replace them with "___PRICE___" and "___COUNTRY__".
For the XML from the server, I'd open that in an editor and search for VAT rate and amount. For those I'd figure out a regular expression that could find them.
Then on the client I could dispense with using a SOAP library. When I wanted to look up VAT I'd just use the normal HTTP library of the client language, using the edited client XML as a template. I'd use the normal string or regex client library to replace "___TIMESTAMP___", "___PRICE___", and "___COUNTRY___" with the correct values, send the XML to the server, then use the regex to pull the answers out of the response.
From there it was a simple matter to make a library to handle this. Input was the client XML template, URL of the server, and a list of name => value pairs, and a list of name => regex pairs. It would look for "___name___" in the template for each input name and replace it with its value, call the server, and then for each name in the second list, use the corresponding regex to find the result, and return a list of name => value pairs with those results.
It was a bit tedious. If someone deployed a new SOAP service I had to go generate a client using the same SOAP implementation the server used, call the new service from that through my proxy to get the XML for the templates, and then make a template and the extraction regexes, but it was still usually less hassle than mixing server and client SOAP implementations.
The original story was published by The Guardian over four issues in March 1996 on the 12th, 13th, 15th, and 18th under the following respective titles:
I think I saw a comment, perhaps 20 years ago, saying that this is an adaptation of a stand up comedy routine. A quick search has failed to confirm or refute this, and regardless of the origin it is (a) very funny, and (b) instructive.
But I suspect it shouldn't be taken as real, even if the lessons one can learn from it certainly are real, and it is all too plausible.
It stated that this story is a work of fiction. Funny story, though! (And another instance of “this is so easy to verify, it couldn’t possibly be false!” which I think I need to be more wary of).
This is great, but they're solving the wrong problem. Using soap and shampoo dispensers is a lot easier and more environmentally friendly, but there's still a bit of a stigma around liquid soap coming from a box stuck on the wall.
Someone starts a subscription service for small bars of hotel style soap, perhaps themes of hotel, room type, region, season regional or other soap minutiae, shipped once a month.
Like Candy Japan, but for tiny bars of hotel soap.
I would 100% start collecting these in a bag somewhere and not bother contacting anyone. Things like this are why. Only contact the front desk for immediate, large problems which can be taken care of by immediate personnel.
reminds me of a lot of "support" these days: figure out which script contains words which sound like the problem being described, then follow it, without actually taking the time to understand the problem
I have heard praise of SOAP once. It came from a Sun spokesperson, before the protocol had support on anything on the real world.
I have never heard praise of it again.
To tell you the truth, the autodiscovery part would be really awesome... if it worked. But instead, the thousands of pages long set of standards that create SOAP are not specific enough, so it doesn't work.
Are you talking about 'soap' the tv series?
That fucker took me years to understand, but when i finally did get it, Barney Miller suddenly made a lot more sense.
Especially that one-eyed green guy.
My company has been scaling its way into the realm where the use-cases for things like workload managers and enterprise service busses are just starting to make sense to me. Can you ELI5 the (presumably very enterprise-y) niche where SOAP really shines, above-and-beyond just building regular REST APIs with OpenAPI schemas?
I'll be honest I've never really considered the various drawbacks and benefits against other solutions. It's just something I occasionally run into in a legacy context where I need to integrate to get unblocked.
I think not having used it to any real extent I've not run into the parts people hate. I just get an automatically generated client library that can be treated like normal method calls, more or less.
But I've also not had the opportunity to work with OpenAPI stuff so I'm not sure what the current state of the art there looks like
That's exactly what happens here. There should be some sort of "GPT-3 Summary" of support notes—I've recently had interactions where some problems were documented very clearly by good folks in early notes, but everyone that works on a case afterward tends to only read the most recent 2-3 notes.
I've taken to the habit of just taking all the toiletries and dropping them in my bag because I bring my own. It's not worth arguing with them, and incidents like this are unfortunately commonplace (as a regular traveler, I attest). The hotel toiletries I end up using for future travels, it's not that I have any issue with them, but rather that I don't always stay in hotels so I always keep my own toiletries.
In the same spirit, I'm still looking for the epic, "Dogs in Elk" from about the same era.
I think it was an America Online (AOL) question forum: a hunter brought home a large elk, but before she could butcher it, her dogs got into it, and ate so much they basically passed out, inside the erstwhile ungulate.
Once on Amazon, I ordered an open tent. Basically, it is just an aluminum frame, 12 feet×12, 8 feet high, with canvas, to keep the sun off when presenting things at outdoor events.
The one I received took 5 weeks to arrive, and was supposed to be new. But it was used, with scruff marks on the posts. I sent pics, and said "Hey, this is supposed to be new! What gives!!"
An immediate "Sorry" with a "We have shipped a replacement." was the response. Really, all I wanted was a discount, mostly to compensate me for the paint I needed to buy.
But OK, I said thanks. And waited.
8 weeks later, I again contacted them. "Where is my replacement? Do you have a tracking number? It has not arrived yet."
Another immediate response, "We have shipped you a replacement..."
Whatever, I think. Scam, I think.
1 week later, it arrives. I notice the ship date, and realise it was the original replacement.
Worried, I contact them, and explain that the first replacement had arrived, all is good, it was just late, can they cancel the replacement's replacement?
I received a response "We have shipped a replacement."
And yes, I now have 4 of the things. I did not try to contact them again, for fear of ending up with more.
They got 5 stars though.