Tag: books

Amazon returns…

Like, I suspect, most people I have mixed views regarding Amazon. On the one hand you can have practically anything you wish for delivered to your home, often the next day, with ‘free’ delivery. To make it even better, within 30 days you can return it, no questions asked. It’s a really good service.

On the other hand there is the issue of the amount of tax Amazon actually pay in this country. It’s not good – they have clever accountants! For example their European base is in Luxembourg, where different rules apply.

But what happens if the widget you’ve bought from them breaks after the 30 day period? (As happened to me recently).

Well on the face of it, the service is very poor. There’s really nothing on the website to help much; you very quickly find yourself going round in circles and getting increasingly angry and frustrated. Very often, as obviously intended, the customer gives up.

What you really want is someone to talk to. The phone number of a real person, perhaps. Well, it’s not obvious, but it can be done. The following worked for me.

  1. Find the customer service page. This gives a range of options for things you might like help with. These simply take you to other web pages – not a lot of help.
  2. Click on the ‘Something Else’ box. This brings up some more links, including a ‘Contact Us’ link.
  3. Click on the ‘Contact Us’ link; this brings up a Text Chat window.
  4. Write something like ‘I want to talk to a real person’.
  5. Eventually it gives you the option to ‘Talk to a Customer Service Associate’. Click on this and you can request a phone call. They ask for a phone number – which they probably have anyway – and they ring you back.

By doing this I found myself talking to a very helpful Pakistani gentlemen who sorted out the problem, and arranged for a refund and a collection of the faulty item by courier the next day.

Excellent – result.

The Right Music….

… or in this case the completely wrong music. To explain:

I was tired last night, and so spent the evening gawping at the TV. There wasn’t much on, but I did take a look on BBC4 at “Rome: A History of the Eternal City”. (Another repeat from many years ago). It was, as the name suggests, a history of Rome and inevitably the Vatican state and the Roman Catholic Church featured quite strongly. It was pretty standard TV history fare.

But just as the presenter was discussing St. Peter’s Basilica I heard the faint strains of familiar music in the background. After a few moments I identified it as part of Scheherazade, a symphonic suite written by Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1888, and one that I took quite a shine to when I was a boy. It’s based on the medieval story, ‘The 1001 Nights’ (or The Arabian Nights), in which the heroine – Scheherazade – tells her new husband stories to keep him interested in her, so he doesn’t have her executed the following morning. (The husband in question was Shahryar, a fictional Persian king whose 1st wife had been unfaithful to him and he had decided to execute each of his subsequent brides after their wedding night so they didn’t get the chance to do the same).

So why is this the wrong music? Well firstly, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was a member of the Russian Orthodox church, and relations between the Orthodox church and the Roman Catholic church have often not been particularly, err, ‘Christian’ in nature. Secondly, the music is far from Italian or even European, having a very middle eastern flavour, and thirdly, medieval Persia was an Islamic state, and so Shahryar and Scheherazade would both have been Muslims anyway.

OK, I’m being a bit nerdy here, but it does matter – music has always reflected its historical setting and getting it right can wonderfully enhance the experience. It’s a shame they get it wrong so often. For example, I recall the Kate Blanchett film, ‘Elizabeth’, concludes with Mozart’s Requiem, written 188 years after her death! I’m sure there must be some Italian or European music that would have been more appropriate!