Calamity James

I finally bit the bullet and gave in to temptation. I bought a couple more T shirts, this time from a reputable seller.

Nothing but praise for BustedTees, they replied to my enquiries very quickly and were very polite (even said to have a good weekend!)

I went and bought “SHIFT Happens!!!1” and “Blow me“.

Very impressed with the T-shirts, and ‘shift happens’ particulary caused a stir at work with clients saying it was very apt.

I’d recommend them to a friend, so go forth and purchase! I think there’s some kind of sale on too!

James.

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!

This is a brief one from me, and for once isn’t a rant (although I’m still awaiting anything from Dirty Microbe!)

Over the weekend, my friends’ band, The Mondays, did their first “gig” at a street party on the Isle of Sheppey. To say they were nervous and their drummer was on holiday they sounded AWESOME.

Definitely a band  to keep an eye on in the future.

I have assumed the role of techie dude for them, so it’s down to me to make the website and deal with all the videos and styling side!

I’ve already started so check out….

• www.themondays.co.uk (Just a MySpace link at the moment)
• www.youtube.com/TheMondays07

Enjoy!
James.

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.

Yes, I’ve neglected this blog.

Yes, no-one cares.

Yes, I’m going to start blogging again. Starting when something interesting happens. I’ll post tomorrow about my experiences with Forza Motorsport 2, as it’s an awesome game!

James.