Two weeks ago, I ordered an instrument from Mars Music. The store local to me didn't have it in stock, so they were going to transfer one from another store which did have it. The salesman — excuse me, the musician told me it would take about a week to come in, and they'd give me a call when it arrived.

After a week, I hadn't heard anything, so I gave a call. It hadn't come in yet, so I was told to call back on Friday. On Friday, the guy I was dealing with wasn't in, so another guy told me he'd research it for me. He couldn't find anything out about it, so he promised he'd have the first guy give me a call on Saturday.

Well, Saturday rolled around and no call came. Nothing on Sunday. So I called the store on Monday. The guy "in the know" wasn't in again, so they told me he'd be back in on Wednesday.

So I called today, and finally reached him. "Oh yeah," he said, "I was supposed to look into that." He took my name and phone number (which I'd already given them three times over the past two weeks), and eventually called me back.

Apparently, when the stockroom people at the other store pulled the instrument and looked in the box, they discovered that it was damaged. They had a second, undamaged one in stock, but they weren't sure whether or not to send it. Perhaps they imagined that I had my heart set on an instrument with a particular serial number, and would reject an identical, undamaged one with a different number. Or perhaps they were simply smoking crack. Anyway, they purportedly sent an email to the general manager at the store I was dealing with, who, I am told, neglected to pass the question on to the guy who was handling my order. To top things off, they don't have a box for the undamaged instrument (and apparently they can't just ship it in the box the damaged one was in).

It'll probably be another week before it arrives. This is really starting to piss me off.