And so it begins...

I'm blogging! Again... It's been a long while (since the 360 days - remember that, folks?) since I've blogged at all and I've got to say I'm rather excited to be back at it. I belive my blog title (A Taggard's Tangent) to be quite on the mark since I fully intend to menader and flit from thought to thought, lazily typing wherever my fingers tell me to and not concerning myself with the mundaneness (not a word, I'm sure, but whatever...) of staying "on task."

Prepare yourself, gentle reader, (as Miss Manners would call you - man I can't stand that wanker!) to find quite a mish-mosh of topics here. I may be a restaurant or product critic one day, a poet the next, and nothing but my silly ol' self with something anecdotal the rest of the time. Today I shall begin with this: a criticism (and warning) against Overstock.com.

Recently, I purchased a "Bed in a Bag" set from Overstock.com. Lovely to see on the website picture, I was quite disappointed when my $80 purchase arrived in person and was rough to the touch and quite a course fabric. Additionally, it was of such a shiny and fancy material that it looked out of place in my humble abode, and thus it was immediately repackaged and returned. Imagine, if you will, my surprise and frustration when today I received an email letting me know my item had been received by the company and that a credit of $30 some-odd dollars had been credited to my account! Where was the other 40something!?

So after some deep breathing exercises to calm my mind and restore a normal heart rate, I called Overstock.com, bent on understanding why the money fairy had robbed me. Come to find out, the items had been reported as "unrestockable" because it was "dirty." I explained that this item was out of the packaging it came in for about 12 minutes, during which time it was inside my home on the bed, which is clean and quite un-dirty, and then was immediately re-packaged and shipped. After hearing this explanation, the benevolent customer service representative told me that since I was such a "valued customer" they would credit my in-store account for the amount that was missing. Hello? In-store credit. I said I silent prayer to the god of tounge-biting and told him I appreciated the gesture, but was not in the least interested in anything but the actual money I spent on the item and, at long last, I was awarded the money I was out.

So...all's well that ends well I suppose, but in the future if I'm looking for bedding, you can find yours truly at Target, Sears, or Garden Ridge, but I think I can safely say that I will let the overstock.com boys keep it on the shelf.

Taggard out.