Ordinary Gweilo

As promised, I did subscribe to Spike magazine. What has happened since has hardly inspired confidence.

I used their website to subscribe. This re-directs you to Quamnet which has a secure site that will accept credit cards, and it appeared to work but I didn’t receive any confirmation, and neither did I get the ‘instant’ access to their website that was promised.

The following Friday I found a copy of Spike at a newstand and purchased it to read over lunch. The same afternoon, I received an email from Spike telling me that they had received my payment and that my subscription would start with the issue published that day!! A copy duly arrived through the post on Saturday morning.

This is obviously nonsense. What do they expect? That I would hold off buying Spike on the off-chance that my subscription had already started, presumably waiting till Tuesday morning (after I had checked the post on Monday)? All the other magazines to which I have subscribed give you a few days notice that the first copy is going to arrive, which is usually a few weeks after you have paid. Spike, on the other hand, sends you an email after the first copy has been posted.

Then they send you an idiotic free gift. Not a tool set, a pen. a cheap personal organizer, luggage or anything marginally useful, but a “real metal spike”. Good grief.

Well, ‘send’ might be putting it a bit strongly. The label containing my name and address obviously wasn’t aligned properly, and printed only the estate name. Someone had thoughtfully added my name, but nothing else. Neither did it have a return address.

Now it so happens that Hong Kong Post know me quite well, as a result of my complaint about my Amazon parcel being left in a public place with a sign saying “please steal me”. Which was how my real metal spike came to be delivered to my front door by a man from Hong Kong Post, who apologized for it being ‘broken’. Which it wasn’t.

My next problem is going to come when my wife notices an 8″ metal spike sitting next to my computer, and suggests that possibly it isn’t a good idea to leave it around for small children to play with. So, grateful as I am for the excellent service from Hong Kong Post, I actually don’t want a real metal spike.