When you are as excited about Christmas as your kids, and your best laid plans turn to custard, it is a tough pill to swallow. Heart-breaking even.
Our little three year old girl is a real outdoorsy lass, following me everywhere on our lifestyle block as I go about my weekend jobs and projects. She has replica outdoor equipment so she can be like dad when he is mowing the lawns etc. She loves coming on the ride on mower with her pink ear muffs, and so we decided that for Christmas we would whip around the family and chip in to get her an electric ride-on tractor and trailer.
We ordered the tractor in plenty of time and stashed the big box in the back of the shed until Christmas eve. Like a kid in a candy store I headed to the workshop with a beer in hand to assemble the John Deere look-a-like tractor. I was so excited.
Firstly, the instructions were horrendous to follow and inaccurate, but that is not uncommon so I sucked that up and worked it all out. But then, no power. Nothing, zilch, zero. Deep breath Jamie, it is possible that it comes out of the box dead flat. I charged it over night then shot out first thing in the morning (Christmas morning!) to check. Nothing. I was devasted. To make matters worse, this was really the only present Laney was getting as everyone put in for it as it was quite expensive.
Never the less, Laney wasn’t to know that it was meant to be electric and was suitably excited about her new ‘push-along’ tractor like dad’s. Knowing that there was no way I was going to get any customer service out of the supplier over Christmas, that night I took a punt on voiding the warranty and opened it all up. I managed to find a rouge wire connector that was not attached and eureka, we were in business.
My Christmas day heartbreak turned to joy again.
This is a lesson we learnt at Jenkins a number of years back. We once shipped most machinery direct to customer sites and un-crated etc at the time of install. After too many ‘surprises’ we now ship most things direct to our Tauranga service base and pre-commission everything prior to going to site. This has been an awesome step made by the team, eliminating delays and the equivalent of Christmas day heart break for our team and customers. I should have taken my own advice in this example!