Insatiable

Since I’ve been here, people have asked me if I miss home. Almost immediately, I unequivocally say “no,” because, to be honest, I don’t. I thought about it some more. Am I just heartless for not missing home? What is my home? Why don’t I miss it?

I recently thought about one of my favorite films, Zach Braff’s Garden State. There’s one particular scene where the main character talks about home, having been away from it for the past 9 years.

Andrew Largeman: You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore? All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can put your shit, that idea of home is gone.

Sam: I still feel at home in my house.

Andrew Largeman: You’ll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day one day and it’s just gone. And you can never get it back. It’s like you get homesick for a place that doesn’t exist. I mean it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for you kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.

I think my view of home is much like Largeman’s, in that there’s no place evoked when I think of “home.” For the past four years, I’ve missed California. Kind of. That was home for the past 14 years. By the end of the four years, I no longer missed California. After leaving Taiwan, I didn’t miss my “home” there, either. Maybe I just don’t miss things. I kind of wish I did, though. I feel much like Largeman, who is so emotionally numbed that he doesn’t feel anything. However much he wishes to feel emotion, he is simply incapacitated. I’m living in the moment and not looking back. Is it even possible for me to look back? Granted, I have nothing in my room in Taiwan and it’s an empty, characterless room. All my stuff’s in New York, so I suppose New York is my home now. With that said, I’m still making it feel like home. Maybe someday I’ll have a home again.

So I’ve finally come to the end of a long, but rewarding escapade with Timbuk2 customer service — only one of many experiences I’ve had with customer service in general this summer. While it wasn’t the most pleasant one while going through it, in the end Timbuk2 made themselves an exemplary example of customer service done right. Then again, if they were perfect, it wouldn’t have been an escapade.

I suppose the story would start with the Timbuk2 messenger bag that I ordered in late July from a third-party retailer (Rock/Creek in Tennessee, whom I have no problems with whatsoever). The bag came within a few days after ordering it online. The story would have ended here had one zipper not been defective.

Alas, I had the option of coping with a faulty zipper on a pricey bag, or get it off my conscience by just sending it in to Timbuk2 for warranty repairs. Now Timbuk2 has a legendary warranty — basically lifetime, and they’ll cover anything, even if it’s your fault. The only caveat? You pay for return shipping. No problem, $5 to give me peace of mind. However, just to make sure that sending it in would be the right move, I decide to shoot customer service an email to see what I should do.

Days pass by without a response. Annoyed, I tweet @timbuk2 a note about how no one responded to my email. Sure enough, the next day, someone wrote back to me, apologized, and told me to email the head of customer service personally. Alright, sweet, I’m finally getting somewhere. So I send the same email to the head of customer service, and within 5 minutes I get a response. Wow, I’m impressed. He tells me to send it in, which I do. Problems then begin to arise again.

USPS sends me an email confirmation that the bag had been delivered to Timbuk2. The warranty website said that they would send me an email upon their receipt of my bag. Not a word. I send the head of customer service an email again, asking if they had received my bag. Silence. I tweet the same thing, trying to see if they got my bag. Nothing. I suppose patience is a virtue, but it wasn’t until 3 days later that I got an email giving me store credit for the bag I turned in. Perfect, end of story, right? I wish. The store credit they gave me didn’t account for sales tax, which with CA taxes is more than the cost of shipping my bag to them! P.O.’d, I send customer service an email. No response. What the heck is going on?! I order my bag anyway with the assumption that they would get the situation sorted out later. While I waited for my bag order to be processed, I perused several review sites. To my “surprise”, I found that Timbuk2’s customer service was notoriously bad. Orders would go on for weeks without a delivery. Customer service emails would go unanswered. Worried that my order would suffer the same fate, I send the head of customer service another email asking about the status of my order, and whether or not I could get the tax+return shipping cost refunded.

Finally, Timbuk2 did it right. Promptly, the head of customer service sends me an email saying that the order has been expedited. How expedited? Like it’s coming within a few hours of you reading this email. And they reimbursed my shipping fee + tax with $20 worth of store credit. Yay for accessories! With the bag in my hands, working zipper and all, I think I can safely say this case is closed.

A word of advice for Timbuk2’s customer service: Reply to your emails. It helps to make repeat customers, and more importantly, happy customers.