How Not to do Customer Service

If you're like me, you've bought into the whole "t-shirts are the new bumperstickers" thing. For one, I can spend $15 on a t-shirt and not have to worry about breaking out the acetone and blowdrier later if I change my mind. There's no risk to my paint job, and I don't have that low-level fear that someone will key my car because they disagree with me about "CRUSH ALL HU-MANS." Sum total: I love silly t-shirts. I especially love geeky shirts because yes, I buy into geek pride.

But I hate Nerdy Shirts. I made the mistake of ordering two shirts from there as a present for my boyfriend for working so hard to prepare for finals. I'm not one to write about customer service (I've done it just once before), but cool t-shirts are a topic near and dear to many of us and I want to save you the money and strife.

I ordered on December 6th. I sent three emails to them inquiring as to when I'd receive the shirts, seeing as I wanted them by a certain date (I'd ordered two weeks in advance -- fairly reasonable, if you ask me). Since the initial receipt/email had no personal message, no ship time, no info whatsoever, I was starting to feel uncomfortable. I got no reply until I threatened to contact my card company and reverse the charges. As far as I could tell, I'd just been had.

Finally, on the 19th, I got a nasty response:

If you noticed the haduken shirt you ordered is on backorder and wont be able to ship until later this week. You were informed of this before checkout. Jacob

Well, no. I hadn't noticed, obviously, or I wouldn't have been emailing them three times. My emailed receipt said nothing of the sort, and I sent that along with my third inquiry. I wrote back and asked them to cancel my order. But did they? Of course not. After coming home after my surgery, I found out that they went ahead and shipped my order 5 days later. I wish I had gone ahead and reversed the charges instead of giving them a chance to screw me again.

What's more, it turns out that "haduken" is misspelled. And the (men's) t-shirts which were purported to be XL are actually no more than your typical medium size. The tag may say XL, but they're not even as big as my (men's) L shirts from Thinkgeek. They won't fit my boyfriend, and I'm just so utterly disgusted at this point that I don't want them either.

So, I'm out $42.72 for two shirts and priority (ha!) shipping. I feel so used. Moral lesson: Don't let this be you, when you get a bad feeling, call your bank. And definitely don't let my story be the story of your customers—you don't want to be on either end. I'm still thinking of a way to get them back. Can I just ship them back and demand a refund/reverse the charges? Stay tuned to find out.

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