[Stitchawl]

Rant Mode: ON

I contacted an excellent company called Homespun Taps, Ltd., with whom I've done business in the past. The produce and sell instructional videos for many different instruments, predominantly strings, and mostly in the folk music genre. Excellent company with great products. I purchased three videos to be sent to my house, and two others that were offered as "Instant Access." And that's when it hit the fan...

It turns out that AFTER you pay for the "Instant Access" videos, you learn that you have to install special third-party software from a group called 'PlatformPurple' to download them. That made me angry. I don't want to install special third-party software into my computer. Had I known that I'd have to install unknown third-party software, I never would have ordered it. To me, instant access means just that; you pay your money and you get a URL to a download site, and instantly begin downloading what you've purchased.

But I'd already paid my money so I installed it. Then I tried to download the videos... and got an error message saying "Error. Can not find .dll, contact tech support." I also got a socket error message. OK, I contacted tech support at PlatformPurple and they told me that the .dll in question really wasn't theirs, but belonged to QuickTime. OK... software often shares with other programs. And I guess it's their standard policy to blame someone else. They told my that my version of QuickTime must be bad and to re-install it. That made me wonder... QuickTime seemed to work just fine when I needed it to. But I re-installed it anyway, tried to download the videos, and got the error message again. I contacted tech support and they said, sorry, the problem is with someone else's software. I told them I had no trouble with that other software, and only got the error message with their software. That seemed to piss them off. Their next suggestion was that I let them into my computer...

Now... call me paranoid, but here's a company that
1. I never heard of,
2. that never said a word about needing special software installed until AFTER I gave them my money,
3. blamed an error message received when running their software on someone else,
and
4. now wants me to let them run around inside my computer?
That just doesn't sound right to me. (By the way, they never so much as mentioned the socket error problem.) So I went looking in my computer, found a copy of the .dll that was missing, and copied it to their installation folder. Can you believe it? The software actually ran... If tech support had simply said that in the beginning I'd have let all this slide.

But, at the same time, I was still getting a socket error message which I had the temerity to contact tech support about. Their suggestion again: Hey, let us inside your computer... How many tech supports have requested control of your computer on the first date? That's a last-ditch hail-Mary play.

I wrote back that I wasn't happy at all with this company and its policies from the very beginning. They wrote back with the following;
We are very sorry this happened, because 99% of the time, everything works perfectly. But in this case, all we can say is that this couldn’t have happened to a nicer person.

For all you customer support people out there, who have wanted to say something like this to a customer, but didn't because you realize what the results will be, this is the result in action... And it's being cc'd to a dozen different forums around the Internet. Company's name is 'PlatformPurple.' The support person was Mabel. A word to the wise is sufficient; don't do business with 'PlatformPurple.'


Stitchawl