How NOT to ask for a refund…

July 23rd, 2010 Posted in Business, Customer Service, General
19 Comments »

I really do believe ‘manners maketh the man’, so usually when I get approached for a refund on an item, or an exchange for something bought by mistake, so long as I’m asked nicely, I have always obliged.  Recently, I didn’t (a first time for me), and it was because of the way this person asked for the refund.  Here is the notecard she sent me, and a classic example of how NOT to ask for a refund:

“I’ll make this brief & quicky..I was buying the demo skins..To try on & see if I like any of them..As I was doing so..I accidently bought the fatpack!!!!!!

Here’s the date: Sat Jul 10 04:16:19 2010…As for the transaction number..I don’t have a clue…I would like a refund back AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!!! ..I don’t think that’s too much to ask for please!!!

B.S. If I seem panicy or angry…It’s because i am…So, if you would so kindly as to get your sl butt into sl and give me my money back please!!!

I hope this is direct & crystal clear as for you…I’m usually a nice person in sl…Just not right now…Don’t dilly-dally or keep me waiting..I’m not a patient sl woman..Ms. AtomicBambi.
I’ll be IM’ing you as well…So, you’ll get the notecard from me.”

I think she meant P.S. instead of B.S., but BS is exactly what I was thinking!  Lol.   Well it got better…

[7:36]  AtomicSparkle Skytower: I’m sorry – I don’t give refunds for no transfer items.

[9:11]  [Angry Girl]: Well, if you don’t give me my money back…I’ll shall make a complaint to LL!!! …And fyi ppl should be allowed to have a refund no matter if it’s transferred or not…Otherwise you’ll have unsatified customer’s!!
[9:11]  [Angry Girl]: And for your information..I was angry with myself & panicing too…..Now, i’m angry with you for not giving me a refund. If you’ve heard of ppl giving other ppl reviews in rl..Well, I’m sorry to say..I’m going to blog in secondlife & give you a very very bad review…And btw half the skins you sell…Would be good for prositutes that are vampires..Have a nice day :-)
[7:30]  You have muted this resident.

Here are my Top 3 tips for How to Ask  for a Refund:

1.  BE NICE! Ask nicely, and you might just get somewhere.

2. Always have your transaction number.  If you want me to pay you for your own stupidity, then the least you can do is dig out your transaction number.

3. Don’t be rude or threatening to someone you are asking money from – duh.

Enjoy x

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Creepy? Check!

July 10th, 2010 Posted in General, Reader Submission
13 Comments »

Ready for a SecondLife horror story, boys and girls? Yes? Well then, read on!

Warning: This story contains an extremely creep-tastic story about SL ‘stalking.’

I have a bad habit of using GIMP , Plurk, and SL at the same time. Quite often, I don’t pay attention to all three very well. Last night was one of those nights. Well, at this particular time, I was focused on Plurk and GIMP. I was laughing it up with some friends on a plurk about God-knows-what and I saw a small box pop up in the corner of my monitor’s screen. An e-mail. Strange since I don’t use my Yahoo e-mail address for anything other than Flickr. But this was from someone specific: Alisa Menna. Out of curiosity, I clicked on it to open it up in Firefox. At which point, pictures of me in my private skybox on my residential land explode onto my screen as well as, and I quote, “and one can also expect to see a video of your interestingly decorated home here sometime in the near future” with a link to her youtube account.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I figured that turning off flying and rezzing, and placing my box at 1800m would be enough security from sim visitors and that residents would have enough respect to not cam around.

I was wrong.

I immediately returned to my idle SL window to look frantically for this person, frightened to no end. Who was this Alisa person? How did she get pictures of me? In my home? And how did she get my RL e-mail address?

I looked around my box quickly. No one. I cammed outside (benefit of having a draw distance of 512m) and didn’t see anyone floating around my box via someone else’s nearby parcel. However, by chance, I saw ‘Alisa Menna’ sitting 20m above me on my boyfriend’s building platform, next to his TARDIS. This freaked me out. How did she get up there? When? How long had she been there? I didn’t know. I shot an IM at her with a barrage of questions. What did I get in response?

“*** IM blocked by sender’s viewer”

What? Great. No IM. At this point, when I’m about to respond to her e-mail and demand to know answers…SHE DROPS INTO MY HOME! Ok, so first you take pictures of me while I’m in my home without my permission, then you come into my home without my permission? What are you thinking?!

Angrily I respond to her e-mail, feeling completely violated, asking her all sorts of questions. Her excuse as to why she did this? She has a draw distance of 1024m, she was bored, and she saw that I was a photographer.

Again: what?!

Ok, so you profile creeped me, too. That’s nice.

But my dear readers, it gets worse! Read on!

In the game of e-mail tag that she and I began to engage in, she began sending me pictures of Batman (all of which I ignored, finding them rather irritating, to be frank). All the while, I noticed that she was growing arrogant, as if she had a right to do what she did.

While awaiting her responses, I went back to her pictures of me and I noticed something odd: my house was empty.

I had finished decorating it and even had the builder over within hours of purchasing it. How was my house empty? Even stranger yet: I had changed since I had decorated my house. Green shirt to red shirt. I was in a red shirt in her pictures meaning they had to be taken AFTER I had decorated. Also, I’d like to point out that I was wearing sculpty sunglasses and have sculpty stairs behind me. Had these pictures been taken from Alisa’s home on the sim adjacent to mine? If so, the sculpties would not have loaded perfectly while the rest of the house, as seen in her pictures, remained barren. How long had she been camming me for? It’d been a few days since my house had been empty like in her pictures…had she been watching me since I moved to the sim? I don’t know.

Here are some pictures for your viewing pleasure. The first is my picture showing some friends what the house looked like as soon as I finished decorating. The second is my picture showing the house as it is and out I am in when I recieve the e-mail from Alisa. The third is Alisa’s picture of me that she sent to my RL e-mail address.
Me on the day I set my house up.

Me yesterday evening during the e-mail tag.

Alisa's picture of me, sent to me in the e-mail.

See what’s missing?

So. Next time you decide to live on a public sim–make sure you don’t have happyfuntime or run around n00d.

You never know who’s watching you, my dear readers.

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Fashion Fest, Go visit.

July 6th, 2010 Posted in General
9 Comments »

A very special and kind person asked me to remove this entry because RFL is near and dear to her heart.

So go visit.

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Should Second Life Fashion Bloggers Adopt “News Style” Writing?

July 2nd, 2010 Posted in Bitch Please, Lizzie, Op-Ed
8 Comments »

News style (also journalistic style or news writing style) is the prose style used for news reporting in media such as newspapers, radio and television. News style encompasses not only vocabulary and sentence structure, but also the way in which stories present the information in terms of relative importance, tone, and intended audience.

News writing attempts to answer all the basic questions about any particular event – who, what, when, where and why (the Five Ws) and also often how – at the opening of the article. This form of structure is sometimes called the “inverted pyramid,” to refer to the decreasing importance of information in subsequent paragraphs. -

News stories also contain at least one of the following important characteristics relative to the intended audience: proximity, prominence, timeliness, human interest, oddity, or consequence.

Journalistic prose is explicit and precise, and tries not to rely on jargon. As a rule, journalists will not use a long word when a short one will do. They use subject-verb-object construction and vivid, active prose (see Grammar). They offer anecdotes, examples and metaphors, and they rarely depend on colorless generalizations or abstract ideas. News writers try to avoid using the same word more than once in a paragraph (sometimes called an “echo” or “word mirror”). – Source Wikipedia.

I WUZ JUS INFORMD DAT SECOND LIFE FASHION BLOGGERS SHUD BE WRITIN IN MUTCH MOAR PROFESHUNAL MANNR. NO USE OV SLANG OR ABBREVIASHUNS R APPROPRIATE 4 USE IN DIS LOFTY PROFESHUN. I SAY PULL TEH STICK OUT OV UR ASS AN LIGHTEN UP PEEPS. DIS AR TEH 4 FUN – Y MAK IT ALL SERIOUS. 4 SUM BLOGGIN IZ BOUT HAVIN CERTAIN STYLE AN IF DAT STYLE IZ FULL OV SLANG AN COLLOQUILISMS DAT SO BE IT. WHEN TEH NYTIMEZ CONTACTS ME AN ASKZ ME 2 BLOG PROFESHUNALLY 4 THEM, DEN IM GONNA BECOME MOAR, LULZ, “PROFESHUNAL”. TIL DEN JUS CLOSE TEH PAEG U R HATIN ON AN PROCED 2 TEH NEXT BLOG.

Hey Blog Critics perhaps you should make yourself familiar with the concept of Gonzo Journalism before snubbing your nose at certain bloggers. And if you don’t know what that is perhaps you should google it (nice use of colloquialism there).   For me in particular I make grammar mistakes all the time.  I misspell words all the time.  I may even leave out a word or two as well.  My use of punctuation SUCKS!  But guess what?  I have a bachelors degree and have completed coursework on the masters level in Social Work.  I ain’t a dummy but I do make mistakes. I am tired of people in fashion trying to impose standards in regards to what is a good blog:  This uppitiness ranges from criticizing their grammar to deleting their blog from a feed because their pictures aren’t good enough.  For god’s sake why add them in the first place?  Lighten up folks – end this virtual snobbery now!  Okay end of rant.

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