CompuServe Thread

Mike, First let me say that I'll look into this and get it taken care of immediately, whatever needs to be done. Now I'll adress your specifics, I think there are some critical misunderstandings here. Your, ours, I don't know all of the details at this point – but let me lay out some issues for you and we'll go from there. > I called the 800 number last week on Wednesday and they said my copy was going out that > day by 2-day mail. There is no "2-day mail" service we provide. USPS first class is the mail method, and in the words of our immortal postmaster "It'll get there when it gets there" when shipped by first class. The sales people won't say it'll get there in two days if mail is the method, they most assuredly know better. If you specifically asked for 2-day UPS (United Parcel Service) and were willing to pay the additional price premium for that, then perhaps that's what you remember as "2-day mail". The sales people (who I dragged into a quick meeting about this today) tell me that _they_ think what was said is something on the order of "it'll ship by mail within two days" and you have misremembered that as "it'll ship by 2 day mail". You've misremembered something, anyway, because as I said there is no such service. By way of general informatin about shipping and shipping policies, when customers talk about 2-day service with the sales people, either ordering it or just as a topic of discussion, the shipping method – even if it's overnight – doesn't mean that we'll ship it right away. It means that once it's in UPS's hands, it'll go overnight. Usually… they aren't perfect, either. We'll ship it as soon as possible, but normally we ship in the order that we _receive_ the orders, so there can be many people ahead of that customer. They wouldn't want us to put someone else ahead of them, and likewise, we aren't inclined to put them ahead of anyone else, either. We're pretty firm about it – in fact we've refunded orders because people told us we "had" to put them ahead. Sometimes it's better just to avoid the whole problem when it gets real sticky. > BTW, my credit card was charged on January 14th, something I really dislike if the product > doesn't show up a few days after. We've been swamped trying to deal with the massive overload of orders – our disk duplicators have been running all day and all night for weeks and we're just now coming out from under. This happens dependably with each new release. Then, for a couple of months, we have sales levels which can be handled within a few days. We're almost back to that now. This release had additional complications of having some last minute features added (the plasma suite) and the critically important removal of LZW code to avoid nasty legal complications with Unisys corporation. I do apologize for the long shipping delay in any case, but I want you to understand the dynamic here. With regard to the date of the charge to your credit card, our practice is to charge the card when we're (a) sure that the product is shippable, and (b) as sure as we can be that we can ship within 30 days. 30 days is the time that we have, by law, to ship the product from the time we charge the card. FYI, we don't get paid by the card company for several days after the charge is "made" to your credit card company, so there's an additional little bit of looseness in that date above and beyond the charge date itself. There is no intent to cause you any problem, and in fact, your credit card company always provides a final recourse in case of serious dissatisfaction, you can contest the charge and they'll take it right out of our bank account for you. Things don't normally get this far out of sync. I will see to it that your order is handled (or has already been handled) ASAP. Thanks for being as patient as you already have been with us. Ben Williams for Black Belt Systems

Chuck, ALL pending orders will be shipped by this coming Monday. ALL of them. So you should have your copy by the following Friday. I'll not go into the various jumping through hoops we've had to do for this release, I will simply say that no one at the company is trying to deceive or otherwise say what they think you might want to hear. They're honest, hardworking people and they truly want to get things right. Ben Williams for Black Belt Systems