The world needs to know: Town Fair Tire accepted the receipt I gave them for the two new wheel covers, and will be sending me a check in the mail. Good job. But it seems like they have to reimburse people all the time, so it's odd that they don't maintain a relationship with a parts company and get discounted supplies. Their problem. Well... actually it's partly my problem. I have to do the work to get the parts.

Another customer service experience I had recently: I was innocently in my company's break room watching the local news station, and I saw that BJ's was recalling the Wellesley brand of mushrooms bought at their stores between February 11 and 19, 2007. I briefly searched BJ's website and saw nothing about a recall. Shouldn't they inform their customers? Those mushrooms were leading to E.Coli illnesses!!! (E.Coli is a type of bacteria that actually resides in our large intestine, so I don't know why ingesting it would hurt us, but it does!) Since I bought those mushrooms during that time, I took them back to the store. We had already eaten some (cooked, in a pasta dish) so the customer service person looked at the package kind of funnily, but I told her they were being recalled and wanted a refund. She didn't say anything but her look indicated that she didn't know about the recall. She said she'd have to give me a store credit, which I was okay with, and I got my $1.99 back. Well done on her part. But I think the store has records of our sales. We have to scan a card when we shop, which means they have our addresses. It seems to me that they could have sent a letter warning us about possible death. But that's just me.

One final mention: you may recall my angst about doing any business with HR Block. The saga continues. We were trying to get them to re-do our taxes from last year. We delivered all the paperwork they would need about 3 weeks ago. We gave a detailed list of the things they didn't do right. We were told we'd get called in a week... we called back this week, and no one had looked at them yet. In fact, after some phone tag (which shouldn't have been tag - we clearly told them to call our work, not our home), we were told that filing separately would have been better than filing our taxes jointly. What?! Isn't that something you should have known the first time? Oh, but that's not all, folks. The word right now is all the documents we dropped off are missing! That's right - gone! They have some of our info in their computer system, but I'm not sure how much at this point. And maybe the original forms will pop up somewhere in their office, but I'm not that hopeful. They've also misplaced, for the second time (the first time was when we originally did our taxes with them), how we need to divide up the time we lived in 3 states. In short, we've been lied to and dragged through the mud so many times I can't count them all.

"There won't be any fees for upgrading your IRA with us." - Wrong.

"We'll get you the best refund possible." - Wrong (unless you count their willingness to lie on our tax return).

"We'll call you in a week." - Wrong.

"We'll call you at work." - Wrong.

"We'll be able to take care of that today." - Wrong.

"Your basis is your selling price." - Wrong.

"You'll need to go back to the original office to get that taken care of." - Wrong.

This one nightmare may require its own Customer Service Part IV article.