When it comes to the products/service my wife and I buy/get we almost always get the short end of the stick. Let me share a few examples.

• This past weekend we bought a new storm door for our house. I was nearly done getting it installed and I reached the point where I had to install the latch and handle hardware. This is when I finally notice, the door doesn’t have the hole stamped out for the latch hardware. There are holes for the handles, but not the latch. After some phone calls and a trip back to where I bought the door, it turns out they had received a bad batch of doors. Luckily they were able to find a good one and back home I went.
• I just bought a projector off of woot.com. It is a refurbished unit so I know that I’m taking my chances. I should have known that with our track record, there was no way I’d luck out and get a “good” used one. No, instead I take out the lamp to find that the fans are incredibly dirty and caked with dust. This thing has some SERIOUS hours on it. I contacted InFocus and I guess we’ll see.
• We usually get forgotten about when we go out to eat, or the person just generally doesn’t seem to care or says strange things. Like, “you came in at a bad time, we’re really busy.” As if we care. Well not only have we been forgotten about while out to eat, we were forgotten about when we went in to the hospital for the birth of our first little one. We were brought to our room and no less than 20 minutes went by before we finally thought it was a bit strange and I went asking. Yep, they admitted it, we were forgotten about.

Now I’m not so dumb as to believe that this kind of stuff happens only to us. I just think that’s it’s funny that we seem to fit into that 2-3% that “things happen” to more often than not. It’s funny in the same sort of way that I can sit in my office for five hours and never get a phone call, but leave to visit the mens room and I’ll have two messages when I return. I find that kind of stuff just bizarre.

So what is it about the bad service and the slip ups in quality control that always seem to find their way to us? Are we really that unlucky or are things generally getting worse? People always say things like, back in my day or they don’t build ’em like they used to. How true is that? It is really cheaper to cut quality and deal with the issues in customer support after the fact?