Credit Card Services
Post Office Box 7092
Bridgeport, CT 06601
Account Number XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX
I am writing to dispute the following charge:
01/29 02/01 85456110031701887007089 MAD HAT INTERNATIONAL COLUMBIA SC 18.45
Before making this purchase, I contacted the merchant and asked specific questions about the product I was considering purchasing, to determine if it would meet my needs. The answers to my questions provided by the merchant were objectively, factually incorrect. If the merchant had answered correctly, I would have known that the product was not suitable for my needs, and I would not have purchased it.
On the day the product arrived, February 2, 2010, I immediately ascertained upon opening it that the merchant had provided me with incorrect information and the product was useless to me. I put it back in its packaging without using it and sent the merchant email complaining about the problem. He did not respond to my email.
I sent another email February 22, and once again, the merchant did not respond.
Recently, the JanSport backpack I’ve been using for many years broke — the pull tab broke off of one of the zippers.
JanSport packs have a lifetime warranty. Following the instructions on the JanSport Web site, I sent the pack in for repair or replacement. The Web site promised a turnaround time of about two weeks.
About a week and a half later, I got this amusing postcard in the mail:
I received in the mail today responses to my complaint about St. Elizabeth’s from Tufts Health Plan and the Division of Health Care Quality of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
It’s not terribly surprising that St. Elizabeth’s lied to Tufts and the DPH just like they lied to us. After all, once they made the decision to evade and lie rather than admitting to having made mistakes, they had to be consistent about it. What’s surprising is that they weren’t consistent about it — the story they told to Tufts, the DPH and me have different elements and are in some cases contradictory. Some interesting tidbits: (more…)
Janet Davis
Patient Relations Coordinator
St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center
736 Cambridge Street
Brighton, MA 02135-2907
Dear Ms. Davis,
My wife received your response, dated February 12, to my January 26 letter to John Holiver. When coupled with the problems which prompted our letter, your appalling response is enough to convince us to never again entrust our family’s care to St. Elizabeth’s.
I will respond point-by-point to the claims made in your letter.
American Honda Motor Company, Incorporated
Honda Automobile Customer Service
Fax: (310) 783-3023
To whom it may concern:
I sent you the attached letter via fax on November 17. You did not give me the courtesy of a reply, but at least the spam directed at my wife’s email address seems to have stopped.
Unfortunately, now Honda Village is spamming MY email address, jik@kamens.brookline.ma.us, instead of my wife’s.
It is worth noting that E. Peter Mullane’s chief claim to fame is that he is one of the lawyers who defended John J. Connolly Jr., the former FBI agent who was convicted in federal court of racketeering, obstruction of justice, murder and conspiracy to commit murder and will be spending the rest of his life in prison. Nice!
I am not going to publish Mullane’s letter here, because there are all kinds of legal issues with that, and… well… Mullane is a lawyer, y’know? I will, however, publish the response I just sent him, from which you can get a pretty good idea of the claims he made in his letter. Enjoy!
Legal Department
Jordan’s Furniture
450 Revolutionary Drive
East Taunton, MA 02718-1369
To whom it may concern:
I am writing to you about a design defect in a piece of furniture sold to me by Jordan’s Furniture. This defect is sufficiently serious and egregious as to violate both the implied warranty of merchantability and warranty of fitness for a particular purpose. After explaining the problem below, I will explain how I expect you to compensate my wife and me for it.
In November 2007, we purchased an American Leather sleeper sofa at your store in Natick, MA. Several months after the sofa arrived, the end of the zipper holding one of the cushions began to separate from the back of the sofa, so we called and scheduled a technician to come look at it.
He said it could not be repaired and the sofa would have to be replaced. The model was no longer available, and rather than replacing our defective sofa with the closest equivalent, you instead gave us a credit for the original purchase price and told us we could use it toward the purchase of a replacement. The problem was that the new model cost $420 more. In other words, you sold us a defective sofa and then expected us to pay over $400 to replace it within their warranty period.
Needless to say, we were unhappy about this, and we complained. A customer service representative agreed for Jordan’s to absorb half of the incremental cost of the replacement sofa, thus reducing our out-of-pocket cost to $210. We accepted this offer with reservations.
Fast forward to a few months ago, when the same zipper on the same cushion on our replacement sofa began to separate from the sofa in exactly the same way. Not only that, but because of the separation, the zipper comes undone when people lean back on the cushion. (more…)
My wife received a call from someone at St. Elizabeth’s at 3:15 today: “… I just wanted to let you know that we received your letter and are looking into it….”
My letter obviously didn’t make it through the mail from my house to St. Elizabeth’s in six hours, which means that they saw it on my blog. A review of my blog’s access logs shows someone at the hospital visiting the page at 1:49pm, a little over three hours after I posted it. Either someone who reads my blog knows someone at St. Elizabeth’s and forwarded a link to them, or someone at the hospital is actively monitoring the Web for postings about it.
I suppose this wouldn’t be terribly surprising — any large business that isn’t doing that nowadays is run by fools — but I do think it’s somewhat interesting.
I can’t resist the urge to point out that if St. Elizabeth’s has to choose between having enough people on staff to process test results in a timely fashion, and having someone on staff to monitor the Internet for postings about the hospital, I’d rather they choose the former than the latter.
John Holiver, President
St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center
736 Cambridge Street
Brighton, MA 02135
Dear Mr. Holiver,
My wife, Andrea Kamens, was treated in your emergency room (ER) early in the morning on Sunday, January 17.
The doctor who treated her told her to seek follow-up care with her primary care physician (PCP), Dr. Cathleen London. He said he would call Dr. London that day, but my wife should wait until Tuesday to contact her, because by then all the test results would be available in my wife’s electronic record, where Dr. London would be able to access them.
Not only did the ER doctor not call Dr. London on Sunday as promised, he never called her at all.
Not only were my wife’s test results not available by Tuesday as promised, they were not available until January 26, nine days after my wife’s ER visit.
I am not going to waste my time explaining why this is clearly intended to deceive the recipient about the source, importance, and content of these mailings. I know this is so; you know this is so; the methods of deception and intent to deceive are obvious. I’m quite certain that a judge will agree.
I received a number of these mailings before I finally decided to ask you to stop sending them. On October 15, I sent a message through the contact form on your Web site which read as follows:
(Do not add my email address to any bulk email lists as a result of this submission. I am providing you with my email address only so that you can respond to this request. NO OTHER USE OF MY EMAIL ADDRESS IS AUTHORIZED.)
(Do not add my postal mailing address to any direct-marketing lists as a result of this submission. I am providing you with my postal address only so that you can remove me from your direct-marketing list as described below. NO OTHER USE OF MY POSTAL ADDRESS IS AUTHORIZED.)
For months now, you have been sending me junk mail in envelopes that you have intentionally designed to deceive recipients. You’ve made them look like some sort of official certified or registered mail, and you’ve intentionally left your company name and return address off of the envelopes. These envelopes are clearly designed to get people to open them, when they would just throw them in the trash if it was obvious they were from you.
This kind of deceptive direct-mail advertising is exceedingly slimy. It is distressing to me that I purchased a vehicle from a company that employs such slimy tactics. You have proven to me, unfortunately not for the first time, that my initial impression, that you were different from all the other slimy car dealers out there, was wrong.
Whatever mailing list I am on to be sent these slimy mailings — please get me off of it. Right now. And leave me off of it. Permanently.
Honda Village did not have the courtesy to reply. Furthermore, since I sent the message quoted above, I have received at least two more of these offensive mailings, the most recent one today.
If you had stopped sending these when I asked you to stop, I would have left it at that. But since you didn’t, I have decided to teach you a lesson not only about not sending junk mail to people who have asked you to stop, but also about engaging in deceptive trade practices.
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