So I have some complaints about the lack of support from Albatron. Here’s a fun little e-mail from them:

From: RMA Support <tan@albatronusa.com>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 17:30:52 -0700
To: John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>
Subject: RE: Status?

Dear Customer,

Thank you for contacting AlbatronUSA/Monivision Support.

At the moment, we do not have any record of the invoice. Please resubmit
with your name.
[snip]

Reaaaallly…. Let me just check my /var/log/exim4 directory…

2005-06-20 22:31:17 1DkZTh-0006Nv-JB => rma@albatronusa.com R=dnslookup 
T=remote_smtp S=21076 H=mail.albatronusa.com [66.15.159.40] C="250 2.6.0 
<20050621033048.GA8520@fritz.complete.org> Queued mail for delivery" 
QT=8s DT=1s

Ahh yes, thought so. Sent to you 4 days ago, even. 21K. Gee, perhaps it INCLUDES A PDF OF MY INVOICE, COMPLETE WITH MY FULL NAME ON IT AND IN THE HEADERS?

So here’s my dilemma. My system has one free slot. I popped a spare Ethernet card in it to restore network connectivity to my MythTV box (the problem that started all of this is that the on-board Ethernet on this Albatron motherboard went dead.) To do that, though, I had to remove the little plate that provides the S/PDIF optical audio output. I’m not using it yet, but had hoped to.

So…. do I risk sending my motherboard to a company who, in all likelihood, will lose it once it arrives (or take months to return it to me), or just deal with not being able to get audio output? (The new Stargate season starts in a few weeks, and I don’t want to miss it!)

Right now, I’m leaning towards giving up on the digital audio output and just telling anybody that reads this blog about how ALBATRON SUCKS.

There were a lot of helpful suggestions regarding their slogan “Spirit of the albatross” I mentioned in my last post. I suggested they should be “spirit of the weasel.” Some others pointed out how “Spirit of the albatross” was strangely appropriate. Here, Albatron, are some more suggestions for you:

• “Spirit of Richard Nixon”
• “Spirit of Digestive Biproducts”
• “Spirit of Windows ME”
• “Spirit of That Guy Selling Fake Rolexes In The Alley”
• “Spirit of Blog Spammers”
• “Spirit of Outlook”
• “Spirit of Online Poker Sites”
• “Spirit of Spyware”
• “Spirit of That Crappy Paperclip In MS Office”
• “Spirit of Microsoft Exchange”

(Yeah, that last one was really hitting below the belt, but they deserve it…)