Coffee Filters and Frickin Laser Beams!

I’m always amazed at how difficult it is to get some businesses to actually sell you something. When we moved we lost a box of kitchen stuff. For weeks we searched, convinced that we couldn’t have actually lost it, and equally convinced that the movers wouldn’t have stolen something as arbitrary as a box full of tongs and cheese slicers. The most troublesome loss was the metal filters for our espresso machine.

After weeks of searching I admitted defeat and decided we’d have to buy replacement filters. I’d bought the machine at @home and every time we’d come across a branch I would ask if they had replacement filters and every time they would say no, but offer to take down my details and call me when they got stock. I did this at about 4 different branches, and after three months of hearing nothing I started returning, weekly, to the same branch in hopes of getting somewhere. Still, 4 months past and I never received a call, not even to say that they were impossible to get.

Our cat loves chasing lasers… Somewhere in the middle of this whole story her laser broke and we were left laserless, which, any cat owner will know, is not a happy place.

I had bought the previous laser for R15 from a street vendor outside Cavendish square. He sold bouncing balls and other bits of plastic whatnots. This was not the pinnacle of retail by any means. Unfortunately he was out of stock but offered to call me when he had stock. I didn’t expect him to… I mean, he’s sitting on a beer crate and has a radio built into a plastic flower blaring badly tuned 5fm. I gave him my number but promptly forgot about our interaction.

2 days later my phone rang. It was the guy from the bouncy ball stall calling to tell me he had lasers in stock.

So, 4 branches and 4 months, weekly reminders and hassling and the big retail store couldn’t even get it right to call me… but a dude sitting on a crate, selling spiderman underpants and cardboard puzzles, called me, knowing full well that the call would cost roughly 10% of the sales price, to let me know he had stock.

I never did hear back from @Home and we eventually found the filters, and all the other stuff, in a box we thought was empty 😉