Why I'm not allowed to work at a photo studio

Sunday, May 18, 2008

In keeping with the theme of customer service mishaps, I bring you one that belongs to somebody else, for a change.

Lifetouch is in the news for shipping a load of jacked-up yearbooks to a school in Texas. When the yearbooks arrived, the students found that about 40% of their photos had been altered. Girls' heads and been stuck to boys' bodies, limbs had been removed, clothing changed or removed. Yuk yuk yuk. That's exactly the sort of stuff I did when I first used how to use Photoshop. There is no denying the fun aspect, though I would have probably added pro-Bush t-shirts and stuff.

Anyway, here is what the PR Director at Lifetouch had to say. You can see that the job comes with a manual, and the manual has a section on Responses to Complaints, though the responses are not specific to the details of such complaints. Here's her quote, from StarTribune.com :

"Our people misinterpreted guidelines for the yearbook''

I love when a company tries to blame the customer for the issue, in this case, implying that there was some sort of communication breakdown between the school and Lifetouch, like the school maybe wasn't clear in specifying that it was important for everybody to keep their same head on their bodies, oh, and please don't clone out any limbs.

Now THAT is the kind of customer service I have encountered this week. Welcome to my world, Dallas High School!