Well, I was expecting this sort of review to go up eventually, so here's the first negative customer service experience I've had in quite a while.
So here's the deal. I've been playing World of Warcraft for nearly five years now. I raid two to three nights a week; my 25-man raid has now taken out Sartharion+1, Malygos, and Naxx. We're still working on Sarth+2, but suffice it to say, I am a pretty darn serious player whose main is covered in 25-man epics.
I recently decided to dual-box, because I want two more characters at 80, and oh, boy, I don't want to have to play through 60 the slow way. If you link a new account to an old account, you get triple XP for both characters when they're partied. Dual-boxing is not at all uncommon; some people have been known to go up to 20- or 25-boxing.
Blizzard offers an online upgrade option; it costs $10 more than buying the games at a store or online. I was actually all set to pay the $10 extra to not have to leave the house or have a box around to store, but the site failed me, and it was out to a store.
I suggested Target; Grant suggested EBX, because the Town Center is marginally closer. I squirmed a little bit -- a girl in a gaming store is always a target for male employees making rude comments -- but said okay, and while he went to a store on ground level to look at something, I went upstairs to EBX.
A quick look around the store, and I spotted the PC games. A heavyset man with a goatee was sitting directly in front of them, eating a pizza; I don't know whether he was an employee or not. However, I was able to squeeze behind him to pick up a copy of the WoW Battle Chest. I took it to the register, but suddenly realized that the box was open -- which means that the CD-key needed to activate the account was at risk, and so I went back to the rack to pick up a copy that wasn't open. I mentioned this to the guy eating pizza, and he said, "Oh, they're all open. It's a trick question."
"What... why are they all open?" I asked.
A middle-aged male employee with brown hair smirked at me and said, "So you won't just put it in your little paisley purse and walk out with it."
Wait, what? No, seriously--what? I come into the store to make a purchase, I know what I want, I pick it up, I have questions about whether the copy I've got is safe or not--and I'm told the reason it's open is so I won't shoplift it?
Also, little paisley purse? What? For the record, the purse in question is paisley, and it is a purse, but it isn't "little"; that was one heck of a demeaning, belittling comment that a man would not have gotten, not just because he wouldn't have been carrying a purse but because it would never have occurred to the employee to make such a demeaning comment to a male customer. It's possible he might have told my husband, "So you won't put it under your jacket and walk out with it," but I doubt it; he would probably have taken my husband's question seriously and said, "We've had trouble with shoplifters, so we keep the CD-keys in the back where no one can steal them." And if he'd said that to me, I wouldn't have had alarm bells go off in my head--but it's not in my nature to trust someone who's smirking at me and making demeaning comments. Go figure. I'm just that crazy.
I was obviously, visibly flabbergasted by the statement--both parts of the statement--and said, "That's a little bit offensive; why would I want to do that?" The brown-haired employee stammered that he didn't think I, personally, would shoplift, and I then asked, "So how do I know the CD-key hasn't been used already?"
"We keep them all in the back," said the brown-haired employee. I shrugged and got back in line, but I was definitely not happy about it.
For the next few minutes, the brown-haired employee looked around the store to find copies of the game, and failed. He asked if he could ring up the game for me while someone else looked for the CDs, and I said I'd prefer to make sure they actually had a copy before paying for it. He responded that he was sure they had copies, and had to ask another employee for help finding them. At this point, he went back over to the heavyset man in the corner, and both of them proceeded to quietly laugh at me for being "offended" by the notion that someone might shoplift. They were clearly misunderstanding two things: one, I wasn't offended by the notion that "someone" might shoplift, I was offended by the fact that he'd specifically said that I would shoplift if the CD-keys weren't protected. Two, I was offended by his rude, dismissive comment about me and my "little paisley purse" -- believe it or not, women play video games no matter what their purses look like, and making dismissive comments about me and the feminine things about me is rude, sexist, insulting behavior.
It occurred to me at this point that having the CD-keys in the open where any employee making $8 an hour could get at them might be just as unsafe as having them sitting out on a shelf where a 14-year-old who couldn't afford the game could shoplift them; employees at gaming stores in the Redmond area have been known to keep copies of customers' credit cards and use them for credit card fraud. Given the incredibly unprofessional treatment I'd been receiving at this store, there was no way I was going to trust them with my credit card information. I said, "Sorry, guys, never mind," and walked away.
The heavyset man with the pizza called after me, "Anywhere else you go, it's going to be the same, guys."
Actually, it turns out he was wrong. We went to Target, where I found an unopened copy of the WoW Battle Chest for the same MSRP as at EBX; I went to a register, handed over the game, my husband paid for it, and the employee asked if we wanted a bag--when we said no, she handed it to me, recognizing without having to be told that if I'd put it on the belt, it was probably for me, and not simply assuming that it was for my husband because gamers are traditionally assumed to be male.
If you ever wonder why storefront retail is doing less and less business, and why specialized shops are doing worse and worse, employees like the ones at EBX at Redmond Town Center are precisely why. One-on-one sales and employee knowledge may be valuable, but if the employees are rude and exhibit blatant sexist behavior, they're certainly not going to get my money, and I'm going to encourage my friends--half of my gaming friends, by the way, are female--to shop elsewhere. A big-box company like Target may not have the selection of EBX, but if their employees are less likely to make rude, sexist comments, I'm definitely going to look there first. And Amazon.com has a far better selection--and has never once asked me if I'm buying WoW to play with my husband, or accused me of wanting to put valuables in my "little paisley purse". (Amazon.com, if asked, will correctly identify my purse as Vera Bradley and offers me more Vera Bradley products, but it certainly won't bring up my handbag if I don't bring it up first.)
In summary: EBX at Redmond Town Center? Made of epic fail. Avoid.
Oh, wow, the failboat has arrived at the dock, and its pilot today is Christie Ridgway.
Christie Ridgway is the author of three books I thought were chock-full of potential: the "Malibu & Ewe" series, How To Knit A Wild Bikini, Unravel Me, and some upcoming book whose title I have already forgotten and don't care to look up again.
I got as far as page 11 of HTKAWB before I ran into this:
His last chef had worked out great. Sandy was businesslike, quiet, and a lesbian to boot. When she'd recommended her friend Nikki, Jay had assumed--which reminded him of one of his grandfather's favorite old saws, "Assume makes an ass out of u and me"--that she'd be of the same sexual persuasion.
But after studying the woman on his doorstep... well, to put it bluntly, this leggy darling was no dyke.
OH HELL NO. I'm not interested in continuing with this. I'm not interested in reading any story in which the leading man -- the so-called "romantic hero" -- would think this shit. I'm not interested in any author who thinks it's cool for her romantic heros to think this shit. Give me a '70s romance with a "no! don't! stop!... no, don't stop!" rape scene any day over this, because I do not read books to get in-your-face homophobia.
And what the hell does that mean, "this leggy darling was no dyke"? I'm sorry, I didn't realize that attractive, freckled women who wear their hair in pigtails and look younger than they are can't possibly be gay! (Has anyone told Willow Rosenberg?)
Near as I can tell, friend Sandy never shows up in the actual book. Gee, what a surprise! The author, who thinks homophobia is a cool trait for her hero, didn't want to actually include a "dyke" as a supporting character? Wow, color me shocked.
Amazon.com also has a review which points out that there is no knitting content in this book -- a passing mention of a knitting shop and that's it. The rest, the reviewer says, is explicit sex.
Hey, I'm totally up for explicit sex. I have no problem with explicit sex. But let me share a NSFW tidbit I found while thumbing through looking to see if Sandy ever showed up:
It takes a lot for me to stop reading a book mid-read, effectively declaring that I've wasted my time reading the first part of a book and am damned if I'm going to waste any more. This is the first one I've run into along those lines this year, and holy damn, it's bad.
The book in question is Slayer Slang: A Buffy The Vampire Slayer Lexicon by Michael Adams. Looking at the back cover flap, I am dismayed to discover that Mr. Adams is, or was at the time, a professor of English, the chair of the English department at his college, and a published author of other books on the English language.
What, were they really hard-up for professors over at Albright College? Do English professors who enter Reading, PA spontaneously combust 87% of the time? If the quality of his teaching is anything like the quality of his writing, and the quality of his syllabi approaches the organizational quality of his chapters, I can't imagine anybody matriculating from the English department at Albright College with better than a high-school reading equivalency.
I myself matriculated from Indiana University with a bachelor's degree in English, and apart from the occasional substitute professor, I have no complaints about any of the many fine faculty who oversaw my education there. I came away with extremely high standards for essay-grade writing (and let me be quick to point out that these reviews do not qualify as essay-grade or above), a tendency to outline my exam answers (the back pages of my college blue books are full of game plans for my writing), and a desire to see nonfiction writing actually advance a theory or narrative rather than simply vomiting up whatever random factoids occur to the author in whatever random order they may occur.
This book? Fails miserably on that last point, and perhaps even more importantly, rather than presenting an in-context view of Buffy's language and syntax based both on Joss Whedon's unique writing and speaking style and on the pop-culture references that surround and shape Buffy the Vampire Slayer, only points out pop-culture references that are too obvious to miss, or which the author clearly has some knowledge of. There's no hint that the author did even a half-second's research into other popular science fiction and fantasy literature, for instance, and apparently he somehow lived under a rock, completely missing out on such formative girl groups as the Marvelettes or the Ronettes (only able to come up with "majorette" as a reference Willow might have been drawing on when she attempted, unsuccessfully, to coin the term "Slayerette"). Adams is happy to point at Rush references or quote Lisa Loeb, but if the man's ever so much as heard of Motown, there's no evidence in this book.
I was willing to deal with the tunnel vision Adams brings to the pop culture of Buffy--it was a bit of a surprise to hear that J.K. Rowling had co-revived the term "bezoar" along with Buffy when a bezoar and its illustration featured prominently in an issue of the immensely popular comic/graphic novel collection Sandman, by Neil Gaiman, just a few years previous, for instance--but the crappy organization really started to wear then by page 30 or so. There's no sense that Adams is building to any kind of point, no suggestion that all his observations on Buffyspeak are in any kind of order. Quite frankly, most of the first 30 pages read like filler (there's even a page that's taken up almost entirely by a footnote comprised of, I am not kidding, the table of contents for not just one but two other books about Buffy), as if he'd written a Buffy dictionary but could only sell it if he included 120 pages of so-called linguistic analysis of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Personally, I think he should have stuck with the dictionary. The 125 pages that precede the Buffy lexicon are meandering, random pieces of meaningless noise, with no insight toward what makes Buffyspeak interesting or important, and frequent failures, misses, and mistakes when it comes to pop culture references.
Don't waste your time on this. You're not going to learn anything from it. My only regret is that stabbing a stake into this book wouldn't dust it (and let's face it: if it did, I'd owe the library some change, which the book certainly isn't worth). I hope that if this book turned up in early-seasons Giles's library, he'd recognize it for the piece of crap it is and toss it in with the recycling.
Tags: buffyverse, reading, rejected