Just Brilliant!

It's been fun to see the answers to the HMHSB coming in! Don't forget, you have until noon today (Eastern time) to send them to me at horsiemama8@gmail.com!

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Look what finally arrived! A month after ordering and after two emails and a phone call to find out where my order was. 

My concern was caused because the order was marked "fulfilled" and then just sat in my account. There was no email that it was on the way, no tracking number, nothing. Total silence from Breyer's shipping department.

I knew that that department was problematic, but after ten days of the fulfillment notice, I emailed Breyer and asked them to check. I never received an answer but a few days later I did receive Breyer's usual shipping notice email saying the set had shipped and to check tracking.

Except, there was no tracking, either in the email notice or when I checked my order on Breyer's web site. 

After another ten days of daily checking for a tracking number somewhere, ANYWHERE, I emailed Breyer again and asked them to check my order and to please send me tracking.

No response again. And no Brilliance order received.

Soon my Vintage Club Inferno joined the wait (ten days post ordering) as did Prague. I wasn't quite as concerned about them, but when I finally decided to call Breyer about the Brilliance set, I asked that their statuses be checked, too. No one answered the phone so I left a message, resigning myself to a continued wait.

A few hours later, I got a shipping notice for Inferno. That was good news, but I heard nothing on the Stablemates. (Or Prague.)

Late last night we heard a knock at our door. A box from Reeves was sitting on my porch. Surprise! My Brilliance set had finally arrived.

Color and Clarity (the names are the 4 C's of diamond grading)

in electric blue and holographic sparkle,

and Carat and Cut

in silver pinto and gold charm.

To acknowledge that these Stablemates celebrate Breyer's 75th anniversary, the number 75 is formed by the pinto markings on Cut.

I'm glad they are here at last. And sadly (but honestly) I wasn't surprised that I had had trouble with the shipping. It's happened to me before and it has been happening a lot to other folks who have ordered directly from Breyer. 

I am sure Breyer is aware that the shipping department has some major issues and my guess is that 1) they are trying to resolve them, and 2) they have a contract in place with the company that ships and can't just cut ties and move to a more reliable company. Let's hope they get things straightened out soon.

Now, let me see... At last count I had 109 Stablemates. This brings me to 113. I do collect Stablemates!

(But still not unicorns. And that is not going to change.)

Customer Service & Shipping Woes

I love Breyer. I love their products, their events, their clubs... just about everything. But I don't care for their customer service. Why? Because never, ever have I received a return phone call or email. EVER. 

Until yesterday.

A week ago I had called to ask about two missing items from my BreyerFest purchases. When I checked online, my account details had listed everything as fulfilled, complete with tracking numbers. Knowing Breyer was in the middle of a mammoth job of shipping things, I waited a few days for a return call, hoping that in the meantime my missing items would show up.

Crickets. 

And no new boxes.

Three days later, with the order's status still showing as fulfilled, I emailed Breyer, explaining the problem, and including the order number and what I had not gotten.

More crickets. And still no boxes.

I waited four more days, growing more and more frustrated, especially as I saw posts on social media where people reported that they'd called Breyer, spoken to someone, and gotten results. That bothered me. Why did I never get return calls or emails? 

Wondering if the problem might be on my end, I went back to Breyer's web site and checked their contact info, then compared it to my phone log and sent emails. Everything was correct - the problem was not me.

Finally, I decided to call Breyer again and, as in the past, got the answering machine. I explained the situation, although this time I added that I had already phoned and emailed them with no response, and asked if someone would please get back to me. For whatever reason, that did the trick and I got a call from Breyer's Customer Service an hour later.

She apologized for the delay and checked my order. I was told that it was on the way and given a tracking number. I hung up happy to have finally gotten through to Breyer's Customer Service and to know that my tee and Stablemates were on the way.

Until I clicked on that tracking number and got this message.

As I looked at it trying to figure out what was wrong, I suddenly realized that she had given me the same tracking number as the one on the original box, not a new one. Now what should I do?

I tried again, hand typing the number into the search box instead of clicking on Breyer's link.

This time I got some better information. As I compared the two messages, I also noticed that the first box came UPS, while this shipment (with that identical tracking number) is coming USPS.

Call me confused about that for sure, but at least I know that my missing merchandise is on its way . And, at last I can say that, for the first time ever, I got through to Breyer's Customer Service.

That's a win on both fronts!

Tracking a Year's Worth of Blogging

On November 8, 2015, I started tracking how many reads three of my blogs were getting. I had MapLoco which tracked where readers were from, and that was fun, but I also wanted to know how many people were reading. I love to write and will write regardless of readership (I have other private blogs that exemplify that), but I was curious at the same time as to just how big my readership was on my three main blogs.

The results were surprising.

 This is a screen shot of the beginning of the tracking. (I discontinued tracking Flying High with Mrs. I  because it was for my students' families, and I switched them over to Facebook - a much easier format for my students' parents to use.)

And here's today's. (Since I accidentally deleted two numbers on 11/6/16 for Horsiemama, I am actually tracking from the second week, but it is still a full year.)

Teachinmama went from 30,236 to 33,280 reads in the year's time. That's 3,044 reads this year or 59 reads per week.

The stats for Horsiemama are similar. The numbers begin at 7,330 and end at 10,745. That means I had 3,415 reads total or 66 per week.

What's more interesting to me personally is that, although the readership is close in numbers, the people reading the blogs are very different. Teachinmama is my "grandaddy" blog - I started it in 2008 as my personal blog and it is read solely by family members. It is private and can only be read by invitation.

Horsiemama targets a different audience. I started it in 2012 when I got Abby and began filling the pages of Teachinmama with Abby tales. (Abby Tails would have been a fun name for her blog!) I wrote about her so much that I decided to give her her own blog, but I did not take hers private as I have many horsey friends, both real and model, who I thought might enjoy it. And, most of my family members are non-horse lovers, and are happy just reading Teachinmama. Only occasionally does someone cross over and read both.

Looking at MapLoco, I see that Teachinmama has been read on 1 continent, North America, while Horsiemama has readers in 5 continents. (Only missing is Africa and Antarctica!) The dots are clustered around places where family members live in the USA on the map for Teachinmama, whereas they are all over the country for Horseimama plus a large cluster in Europe and smaller clusters in Asia and Australia.

It was a fun experience for me to track this past year and then look at the results. I think I will continue filling in stats each week and, next year at this time, compare the two years and see if things have changed.

Stay tuned!