So nice to be able to be positive about something (for myriads of reasons I've had a couple of very negative days, culminating in a dream last night about selling up the Orkney home and moving back to Yorkshire which in the dream pleased me very much. I don't want to think about the ramification of that too much to be honest...)
Meanwhile I have been putting together a gift parcel for someone and I needed a small tube of seed beads and a tiny crochet hook. I'd had an on-line seller of beads recommended to me so I had a look at their website. I wasn't sure if their tiniest crochet hook was quite tiny enough so I e-mailed to ask. I know nothing about adding beads to knitting, which is what this was for, except that I have never done it. I got a very nice and helpful e-mail back so the next day I went to place an order.
Only I couldn't. You know those forms you fill in when you're ordering over the net and there are mandatory fields? Because our address is fairly non-standard compared to a lot of addresses in other parts of the UK we often have trouble filling them in because we don't have enough lines to ours. The problem I had with the bead people was slightly worse than that because county was a mandatory field and it was also mandatory to select from a drop down list. Which was fine except that Orkney wasn't on it. [Neither was Shetland which was just as well. otherwise I could have got quite cross] The nearest was Highland and Grampian but that was a) incorrect and b) certainly not what appears on my card records so there was no way the order would be accepted by the card company.
I felt really bad because I had had this nice e-mail replying to my query and I had fully intended placing the order and I know they must have dozens of people every month who send them queries and then don't follow up with an order but I don't like to think of myself as that sort of a person So I sent another e-mail explaining what had happened [and not complaining that their county list didn't include large swathes of the population of Scotland because they'll have bought an 'on-line' ordering package and really how many people in Orkney and Shetland are going to be wanting to order beads in any volume for goodness sake? I know I like to keep firms on their toes as to the existence of a large customer base in the Northern and Western Isles but you have to be sensible about these things. M & S not delivering to those areas is an insult, these people not having us on an e-mail order form - not so much.
Anyway to cut a long story short, the extremely nice girl at the frim who had answered my e-mail sent me another one with a phone number and she took my, very small, order over the phone. She couldn't have been nicer or more helpful and really I'm just sorry that I didn't want more beads because she deserved that I should spend lots and lots of money with her rather than the paltry amount that my order came to.
So a huge shout out to Sophy at G J Beads and if any of you out there are in need of beads I can highly recommend them.
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