If there’s one technical support job that even the dimmest of bulbs can flick the rope of drool off of their pendulous lower lip to get, it has to be watch battery replacement. Any fool can do it; ask all of my stoner friends in high school, who all worked at the same mall watch repair pagoda.

Still, even though watch battery replacement is the career choice endorsed by the National Down Syndrome Congress, mistakes can happen. Things can break. When that happens, we’re usually understanding, but we expect resolution. Unless we’re at Dakota Watch Pagoda in the Springfield Mall, in which case, we expect our expensive watch to promptly be squirreled away and never seen again.

Mike B. writes about a fubared watch battery replacement and his MIA watch after the jump:

On the 4th of June I noticed my watch battery in my Diesel watch was dead. I was in close proximity to a Dakota Watch pagoda in the Springfield Mall, so I asked the girl behind the counter if they replaced batteries on all kinds of watches. She said that they did and that it would be about 10 minutes, so I handed mine to her and browsed the cases.

About 15 minutes later she turns around and with the most sheepish look on her face says: “I’ve never,like, replaced a battery in this kind of watch before, and I noticed the pin was like, placed in there funny, and when I went to pull it out it
like, broke… I’m sooooo sorry, and we’ll send it off to get repaired and stuff.”

I was angry that she broke my watch, but at least she owned up to her mistake and was willing to fix it, even if it did involve sending it away for 4 weeks. I may not have even been that upset but it was a $150 watch and it was a birthday gift, so it holds a great deal of sentimental value to me. She wrote me a claim ticket, which had a “promise date” of July 4 on it as the date it was due back.

July 4 comes and goes with no call. I called back and spoke to a woman who I later would know as Vanessa Twiman, the store manager. She informed me of the
store’s policy to only send out shipments on Mondays, and that since the girl broke my watch on a Tuesday, it had to sit and wait for 6 days before it would even
leave their store. The “promise date” on my order had moved to the 10th, without any sort of notification.

Fast forward to today, the 10th. I call back because I’ve not heard my phone ring, and UPS and FexEx both have pretty much made the rounds today. Once again
Vanessa is there with the same story, only this time the store just did inventory yesterday and didn’t get a shipment today. (I’m not sure how any of this is my
problem, but ok.)

So, now I’m left without my watch, 5 weeks later, and I’m dealing with this woman who hasn’t once apologized for her employee breaking it in the first place, hasn’t tried to accomodate me at all, and hasn’t made any effort outside of the exact letter of her DOR to see that my watch comes back in a timely fashion. I’m forwarding this email to the customer service email at Dakota as well.

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