CAT | Rants
It seems someone with a slightly closer involvement with the company has finally stepped into the limelight. Here’s a copy of what “Manny” had to say on HideYourArms:
“Although I was never officially affiliated with or worked at Dirty Microbe, I’m a personal friend of the founders.
After receiving a MySpace message from someone trying to track down Christian about an order, I did a Google search and found lists of complaints on blogs and forums, including this one.
Dirty Microbe has been going though severe financial trouble for a few months and has recently gone out of business and filed for bankruptcy. The founders are scrambling to liquidate the company’s assets to repay creditors, including outstanding orders. I’d advise anyone who is missing an order to do a chargeback as soon as possible.
Dirty Microbe was a very small company and unique in that they printed all shirts in house, by hand. I mean, so small that it was rare that more than two people were working at any given time in there. You can imagine the workload. Lack of manpower was one major reason they went under and I suspect the main reason for the silence now. It’s hard to imagine how much time it takes to go through the legalese for bankruptcy plus all the other stuff that has arisen from the situation. The owners have pretty much been slammed doing that, and they were already way backed up on orders and support requests.
Tens of thousands of dollars were invested in printing equipment, web store design, signing artists, affiliates, advertising, etc… and subsequently lost. There was no scam — believe it or not, order volume was relatively low and the value of all unshipped orders tiny compared to the investment. Many recall that Dirty Microbe shipped a lot of shirts before they went down.
I feel for anyone been burned by this, I’ve been shafted by buying stuff online before and I know it sucks. I’ve tried to advise the owners to make some sort of announcement so those looking for answers have some idea what happened, but they’ve been tough to get a hold of. I’m sure they’re just trying to get past what has been the most difficult time of their lives.
I’m going to cross-post this on a few of the other blogs in hopes of getting some word out to do a chargeback ASAP, as there is a time limit on those.”
So there you have it, probably the closest we’re going to get to an official repsonse to this.
There are now posts on tcritic, HideYourArms and T-Shirts Around the Internet.
Spread the word to the blogs people! And digg the article!
UPDATE (1st August):
One affected customer has posted a digg article regarding Dirty Microbe, please go forth and Digg it up so more people are made aware of the scam that are Dirty Microbe:
http://digg.com/offbeat_news/Scam_warning_Dirty_Microbe…
UPDATE 2 (2nd August):
It seems people are having a slight amount of success contacting the owner, Christian von Kleist, on Facebook. I have sent him a message and I will update you with what he says.
Well, you know how they say good news travels fast but bad news travels faster? In that case, this should travel at about warp 9.
This Gordon Ramsay esque sentence should sum up the rest of my post:
Order T-shirt. Wait a month. Enquire. Hear nothing. Wait another month. Enquire again. STILL nothing. Pissed off.
Now, to go over that in more detail, back in May of this year (the 19th to be exact), I ordered a t-shirt from Dirty Microbe, as I found the shirt quite amusing (which I still do).
Now, their site said they were receiving an unusually large amount of orders, so would take a bit longer to ship (I was given a date of 9th June). Fair enough I thought.
What I didn’t expect was the fact it’s now 2 months tomorrow that I ordered the shirt and I STILL have nothing from them except from an order confirmation and automated repsonses from their “support ninjas” that they will reply to my query within 2 business days.
Put quite simply, this is NOT acceptable conduct for a business, and it seems I am not the only one experiencing this problem.
So until I hear otherwise, I offer you my advice:
Do not buy from Dirty Microbe. Do not buy from Dirty Microbe. Do not buy from Dirty Microbe.
Done.
…Suck the big one!!!!
Sorry but I just thought i’d post about my anger at how Layzells decide who’s allowed in. They refused entry to me and Ollie tonight saying its “been over 25s for a long time now” but I have it on good authority that they let in a 17 year old in about 30 mins after we were refused. It’s so harsh.
Tip for the future: arrive before 11pm, It’s only over 25s after 11, according to their advert in the Sheerness Times Guardian anyway.
James.
Changed my mind now from that last post, after recent events…
I’ll leave it to [[wikipedia:Hard Fi]] to remedy the situation with Better Do Better:
I’ll tell ya how its gonna be,
don’t you never ever come near me.
…
You think you’ll come round here,
start singing in my ear,
girl you damaged me,
I don’t forgive so easily.
You better do better than that!
I feel better now. Well I don’t, I still feel like crap tbh but hey, you can’t have everything.
James.
As some of you may know, I’m awaiting a callback from Orange regarding upgrading.
Well I got the call, and missed it, so I called them up, they said the M3100 was back in stock so I said yes I’d like to upgrade, they went to take card details (Which I didn’t have with me) so I said can I call them back. They said this was fine.
I popped to the car, grabbed my card, called Orange back, to be greeted with the message… “Actually that phone is still out of stock”!
I said “I literally called your team up 5 minutes ago and they were ready to take my card details to have the phone!!”. “Well I don’t know what to say sir.”
So I asked if there was a note by my account saying to notify me when it was available, and they said no, so that means they took it off my account thinking I’d upgraded!! GRRRRR. I’m seriously tempted by T-Mobile’s Flext package, and I can get that same phone with them!
Damn you Orange, damn you to hell.
James.
