I swear to Christ...

I don’t know if you watch Deadwood on HBO (and I’m fairly certain most of the foreign readers of this site will say “nope” to that) but the second to last episode of last season, there was occasion for one of the main characters to complain about a customer, and one of the other main characters says the following:

“Commerce. Every fucking hump above ground is your enemy.”

Now, I’m not going to vent here about any Audio Damage customer in particular, except to say that I’ve just had a two-week long brawl with stupidity that boggles the imagination. Someone purchased a plugin, thinking that it does one thing, and in fairness, it does sort of do that one thing, but not really, you know? So he complains mightily, and I resist the urge to point out that if he wasn’t so fucking stupid, he’d know what he was buying in the first place and not have these problems.

A metaphor wouldn’t be out of place here. I’d liken it to purchasing a new car, because you need to keep your beer cold. A car _will_ keep your beer cold, to a certain extent, but it isn’t very fucking good at it. It is, on the other hand, good for driving. You see where I’m going with that?

(That entire concept springs from the fact that my new car has a little refrigerator sort of thing in the glove compartment, but it only works when you’re blasting the AC.) In any case, after an exchange of a dozen odd emails on this subject, the substance of which I won’t bore you with here, I finally say “okay, fuck it.” I offer a refund. Then comes another long go-round because the customer can’t remember how he purchased the product, and can’t manage to give me any information that I could possibly use to determine the fact on my own. Today, I got to the bottom of it, when I discovered that the customer in fact purchased the plugin almost exactly one year ago.

Like I said, I swear to Christ.

I mean, we’re so liberal in our return policy it’s almost ludicrous. But that’s neither here nor there. At what point do you say “okay, enough. You’re taking advantage of us?”