I don’t understand why we had to shut the shop for week. We could have kept it open with just two of us working. We’ve done that before and it works OK. If we had, we wouldn’t have come back to a pile of emails and a stack of sales. But that’s what happens when you work for someone else. When I was self-employed I could make my own decisions, but the hours were longer and the pay was more erratic. It’s swings and roundabouts.
Though we had a note on the site telling people that we were away for a week (it’s an eBay thing and the message is clear to see) we had several cases of people writing then writing again – “didn’t you get my last message?” was a common refrain from people who are clearly not able to see the prominently displayed holiday message.
Heavily stamped envelope
One man, a German, wrote us half a dozen messages, including one where he complained that he couldn’t understand our replies and that we should write to him in German. The messages he couldn’t understand were the automatic replies set by eBay, telling him we were on holiday. I was very polite, and pointed out that every one of my replies had included a German translation and that if he needed one he could get a translation from Google. I was tempted to mention that I’d appreciate an English translation when he was writing, but didn’t. Strange though, that he should be so keen on me doing something that he won’t do. Generally a translation is little effort, but when you have so much mail to get through, each extra keystroke seems like a mammoth task.
One of them has even gone as far as to give us negative feedback because we didn’t reply within a week. He is returning an item from America, has used the cheapest (least secure) method of postage and, just days after posting it has accused us of ignoring him and trying to rip him off by not telling him the item has been returned. I have news for him – international post is not that fast. As an additional problem he has returned it by ordinary post as he felt the appropriate secure postage rate was too expensive. I look forward to future developments on that when it disappears in transit.
Heavily stamped envelope
Irish Customs are back to normal – they received a parcel in Dublin and decided to send it back as it didn’t have the correct documentation. It did have the correct documentation, it’s just that Irish Customs interpret the regulations differently to us, and differently to the rest of Europe. Nobody knows why and nobody will explain. They say it is due to insufficient information on the customs label, but we fill in every box on the form and most of the parcels are allowed through. I think that they just select some at random and send them back.
Mallard stamp
Meanwhile, after answering all the emails, and all the phone calls, and attending to all the customers who found it necessary to call in on our first day back, we still had a mountain of stuff to send off. That, I’m afraid, proved to be too much for us and we still have nearly half of it to do. It’s annoying, as we pride ourselves on our level of service, but some things are just not possible.
On a lighter note – my new glasses arrived and they seem OK. And we had chips for tea. We both had gruelling first days back and neither of us felt like cooking.
Holidays, are they really worth it?
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