I have a very good friend who has everything. His birthday approacheth. What does one get a man who has everything?
Well, he’s a beer drinker, and years ago I introduced him to an incredible, powerful malt beverage from Denmark: Elephant Malt Liquor. I have seen grown men (and women) stun themselves drinking any more than 2 in a single sitting. One acquaintance downed a sixpack at dinner time, then drove his Buick literally screaming up and down icey US-130 through a south Jersey snowstorm, starting fights with gangs of punks in convenience store parking lots and creating a police event from which he miraculously escaped with most of his ass. Good stuff. Man did HE look like shit at work the next day.
The perfect gift, yes? But I haven’t seen Elephant in these parts for years, dammit. I make some calls to local liquor stores. Nobody carries it, and nobody wants to order it for me. Not even the place where I drop thousands of dollars a year in tequila taxes. (South Florida sucks. Nobody ever wants to extend himself for a little extra money. Up North they’d clamor for the business and encourage even more. I’d be a chesty hero. Sigh.).
I go on-line. I find two places that carry it, one in Jersey, one in Connecticut. There’s an on-line form (uh-oh). I manage to get through the crap with the
name and address and pull-down menu because nobody knows what their state abbreviation is, the goddam credit card number which might or might not want you to leave spaces between the numbers — you never know until you’re done and find out you did it wrong and need to do it again AAAAGGGGGHHHHH why don’t they TELL YOU UPFRONT THE RAT BASTARD FUCKTARDS and then there’s nowhere to actually make a purchase. Nowhere.
I send them an email explaining my problem (”I only wanted to buy a case of beer. Why won’t you let me buy a case of beer? Why did you make me register and concoct a password and then not let me buy a case of beer? I’m a big boy and I eat my vegetables as well as my wife and all I wanted was a little case of beer….”) and try the second place.
The second place wants $2/bottle ($48 total) and $27 to ship it. And, I discover, so do several other on-line services, like beerrgeek. If I wanna gag, I’ll chug it warm, not pay half the price of it in shipping.
I go to Carlsberg.com, “probably the best website in the world.” This echoes their pathetic tagline, “probably the best beer in the world.” Which is probably, make that “almost certainly,” the worst hook I’ve ever read, up there with “Eat More Chicken.” Talk about a self-esteem problem. “Probably.” Fucking “probably!”
And besides, it isn’t. Smacked in the ass if I can figure out how to contact anybody, let alone order a goddam case of beer. Music, colors, visual effects……but nothing practical. What’s the point of a website if you can’t SELL somebody something? European savages.
I get an email from the first place I tried, telling me that the reason I couldn’t find a button to press to make a purchase is because the item needs to be picked up, not shipped. NOW he tells me. I fire off a response to that effect, and tell him if I can’t find any store closer than 1,800 miles away, I might convert to Schlitz. He tells me to get in touch with Carlsberg USA. Which I do.
My first two emails requesting a local contact are returned as undeliverable. WTBF. So I call. I get an automated answering service, and I press the numbers for Sales and Marketing, which turns out to be VM advising that he’s out of the office for a week, bother somebody else at another extension. Then, amazingly, it cuts off. I call back, press the other extension, and get a VM advising that this putz won’t be back in the office until the end of the month.
This is almost enough to get me to drink water for the rest of my life. Tap water. Sewer water. Don’t they want to sell me anything?
A day passes, and I try email again, this time using a different email service. It goes through! But the return-automatically-generated email advises that the person I tried to contact n longer works there (ironic: the “person” was “customerservice@CarlsbergUSA.com” — and it seems true that “customer service is no longer available” there) — but if this is an an emergency, I should contact so-and-so. Whom I call. And who answers!
I lay it all out. He’s sympathetic. Even helpful. He asks me where I live. He says he has a distributor here! he gives me his cell phone number! I thank him profusely and promise not to mock his ass in my blog. I call the distributor’s cell phone number! I leave a message! I call again 8 hours later because I haven’t heard from him! This is exciting!
I’ll let you know what happens when if he ever calls. OMG. What the bleeding fuck is going on in this country when nobody will fucking sell you and you can’t fucking buy a fucking case of fucking beer?