What a wild week!

What a wild week!

A bonus post for all of you lovely people. I had a crazy week, I won’t go into a ton of details (I had originally had a whole long rant about customer service) but I will do highlights and spare you of all my boring diatribe.

Customer Service

So I was expecting some packages on Monday, needless to say while it said they were delivered I had nothing to show for it. After a few calls to the delivery carriers and to the companies who sent the items to me there were unable to be found. The experience with notifying the police was even surprising to me, I tried to call in a report and was directed to call 911. I feel 911 needs to remain for emergencies only as I don’t want to tied up resources when someone maybe in a life saving situation. Through backchannels I found an alternate way to contact the police. They took the information but have had no other reports of any stolen deliveries in the area or that day, and as I had never had a problem I doubt this is the case as well. Oh well, I have done my duty and reported either way.

Now one company, who I have just started doing business with and do not have much of an established relationship with, quickly apologized and is processing a replacement shipment for me. They have even graciously waived some of their standard stocking fees, to which I didn’t ask for. So by far they blew me away.

The other company for whom I am a loyal customer with for many years now and even qualify to be in one of their tiered customer programs, they were a different experience. I was on the phone, email, etc with them for the course of 3 days to no avail. Their policy is strict and apparently there isn’t anything they can do nor do they seem concerned on doing right by the customer. I have to wait 10 days from “delivered” date and then they will refund my money. There is no offer to replace the package, no offer to fulfill the order, nothing. If I actually want what I ordered I have been told to place a new order (at my expense) and when the 10 days are over for the original order that will be refunded for me. What? I already gave you money with nothing to show for it, I am not about to give you more. It has made me question whether I will continue to do business with them. Oddly enough when I woke up this morning I had a survey from them to see how I liked my order. Really? Okay so I let them know in this form how unimpressed I am with their policies.

I also was having trouble with my website, yes I’m still working on making it look and feel the way I want to, and no I am not there yet. I was noticing that the home page wouldn’t update and clearing out the cache did next to nothing. Positive experience is my hosting company worked with me, figured out the problem and resolved it quickly, and helped reassure me that this shouldn’t happen again. Some pesky setting in the background wasn’t configured properly.

Summary is customer service goes a long way with me, if you go above and beyond I will be a loyal customer. If you do not show any sort of regard for the relationship you are proving to me you do not value my business therefore I will not value it in return.

Prep

So I am heading to Africa in a few weeks. My good friend is living in Tanzania for a year, beyond wanting to see her and her family, we have talked for years that we need to plan a safari. Bucket list trip for sure. Schedule wise it didn’t quite work out for us to do safari together so I will be doing my long safari solo but excited that with her and her family we will have some enjoyable beach time (which by the way is one of our favorite trips to do together).

So I have been planning on what gear to take, batteries, number of memory cards, etc to take for awhile now. I will do a follow on post regarding what gear I take and my experience with everything when I return. So this weekend I am planning on testing out my gear, make sure everything is calibrated, any new batteries/cards function, etc.

So far, a newer lens I have (an upgrade from a lens I have replaced), I tested it out and it seems very off with initial shots. So I will need to spend some time to do some calibrations to ensure my shots are sharp. I really hope it is just a calibration needed versus I just got a bad lens (there always is a bad one or two out of the batch). Most people have had really positive things to say about the lens and the few cases you hear a bad review is due to a bad one out of the batch and when its replaced the review is positive. So cross your fingers for me it just needs a good calibration as I won’t have time to replace it if it is a bad lens.

Beyond that I am prepping for the non-gear items. I hear that with the dust you would want to carry a pillowcase to throw your camera in to protect from the dust while driving on the game roads. I also have bought this bug spray they recommend to pre-treat your clothes to protect against bugs/mosquitos. So I just need to figure out what to pack in regards to clothes so I can make sure I have time to treat the clothes and they dry before I need to pack.

Storms

This morning I woke up, all chip and cheery. I went downstairs with my excited minons for breakfast. I live in Minnesota and in summer it gets bright quite early, this is around 7 AM and it should be full sun (golden hour is more around 5/6 AM). It is quite dark out, storms are a brewing so I have full lights on. I head into the living room and see the sky looks quite green. If you live in areas that are prone to severe thunderstorms and tornados, you know green sky means tornado potential. So this should mean hey take necessary precautions and maybe take cover. At this time there are on tornado sirens, but if you are unfamiliar the sirens typically blare when a tornado is spotted rather than a warning, so that doesn’t mean too much. The sky was so unique to me though I had to check it out. I grew up with a curious family and yes when severe weather hits we feel the need to go outside and check it out.

Thankfully I had my camera already out, so out I went and I was in for a treat. There was this break in the wall cloud so there was this straight line of blue between the wall clouds (I joke the good clouds versus bad clouds). Right as the rain started to splat down I went in, and soon the hail came, power was lost and we were hunkered down until the storm passed. Cooper was good and stayed by me and curled under me for protection at time and Jimi hid under my bed, refusing to come out and was crying the whole time. I kept trying to coerce him out so I could bring him downstairs in case weather turned from bad to worse but no luck he was not budging. I joked with them afterwards that we need to work on our storm emergency plans.

The storm passed, we survived and are safe. The house is in decent shape, the siding is all torn up and every screen on the west side of the house is shredded. It was like winter outside as you couldn’t see the road it was covered in so much hail. Apparently my town had enough of it the snow plows were out to clear the hail so the storm gutters didn’t get clogged with the downed leaves/branches, etc. In the end, alls well that ends well and my neighbors and I had a good time chatting and really getting to know each other as we really don’t have much opportunity to hang out.