Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Childe Rolande, Redoux

So, back in mid-October I discovered that the band Childe Rolande had two new CDs out. Being the Impulsive Bear that I am, I promptly opened the Shopping Cart and added 'Ravensdaughter' and 'Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water', and said Buy-Now. I waited for my shiny new music to arrive

And Waited.

I did not get any acknowledgment that my order had been placed. My PayPal account showed that the funds transfer had been initiated, but not picked up. Nothing appeared in the post-box.

In late November I sent a note off to sales@childe-rolande.com.uk asking about the status of my order. The email orbited around attempting for delivery for almost a week before my Mailer quit trying and gave me a 'permanent failure'. I tried band@ (which according to the web-site would post my email to the various members of the band), same result.

By now it's mid-December and I am a bit concerned. I wandered off to whois.net to get an e-mail address for the site owner. I find that they are unlisted; however, the ISP involved was UK2.net. So I opened a ticket with the ISP about the failure-to-deliver. I got bounced around a couple of times by their help/support desk, it seems that 'deliver failure' was not specific enough for them. So I finally forwarded the entire set of headers (1k+ lines) and said 'tada! It really is Your Problem, Now Fix Please'.

This got support@uk2.net off the dime and they actually looked at my problem. They researched; They reported: "We had a problem with out Mail Server configuration. The MX records for childe-rolande.uk.co were pointing to servers that we decommissioned over a year ago. We've fix that, wait 48 hours for things to get cached and try again." That was two days before Christmas.

On Boxing Day I sent off my note to sales@ and got an immediate 'addressee unknown' failure. I immediately opened another ticket with UK2.net. When they got back to me, they explained that there were no forwarding address attached to the childe-roland acount, I should contact the Site Owner about the problem. I pointed out that I didn't have that information, they did; so could they talk to the Site Owner and get a proper forwarding e-mail address? After a couple more exchanges I got miffed enough to point out that after all, the Site Owner had paid UK2 good money to have this site built. The Site was broken and what was UK2 going to do about fixing it? They, support@UK2.net, passed the buck and handed the ticket over to their Abuse Department. (On the theory that I was abusing them?)

For the next week abuse@UK2.net (that's their capitalization, by the way) and I chattered at cross purposes -- I kept insisting that they were responsible for giving Childe Rolande a properly functional web-site, and they kept insisting that it was the responsibility of the Site Owner to ensure that the functionality was properly functioning. I started wondering about the possibility of a small-claims court action against a out-of-state company (way out of state....) under the Last Agent clause of the Interstate Commerce Act.

Then, last week, in a belated flash of intelligence, I ran a Google search for the names of the five band members. Three of them popped up on Facebook, so I sent a "are you the the band 'Childe-Rolande'?" note from my Facebook account. John and Ed responded with "Why, yes I am", and I restarted the dialog.

I now have a price (23 Pounds) and a way to contact someone who can take my money (PayPal still reports the the transfer is pending, by the way) and send the CDs. Now I just need to wait for my mad-money fund to increase to the point that it will cover 23 Pounds and I'm off.

Meantime, I have passed my problems off to John so he can bat UK2 about the ears with a clue-stick. He shouldn't hear about issues with his web-site from his fan-base. And UK2 should have been a lot more interested in making things right (screwed up MX records? for almost a year?? Right.). UK2 should have contacted the Site Owner as soon as they discovered the Mailer problem and offered some kind of restitution. After all, if the site doesn't work, then Childe Rolande is out money from sales that didn't go through.

Sigh, as I have said before , I really don't wait well. I should go off and have lunch so that I can get more quarters to put it the mad-money jar.....