One of the things about working for a company that puts such a huge value on great support is that you really notice when other companies do poorly at it. Well, maybe that’s the wrong way to word it. Everyone notices when they get shitty support. But now I pity the people who work for those companies.

This saga started right after we got back from the cruise, and I used the family photos we took to create a Christmas card at Minted. I must’ve looked at a zillion designs before I settled on one.

Minted has gorgeous designs, it can’t be denied, but their user interface is a pain in my ass. I couldn’t decide which card to get, so I would pick one, personalize it, and then put it in the shopping cart. And then change my mind.

You have to put in all of your info every time you do this. So every time I decided on a card, I had to put in our address on the back (I was looking at the postcards) and our last name in this little block under the photo.

(Other companies save that info and populate the personalized spaces automatically so you don’t have to type it in every time.)

When I got the cards, I was dismayed to discover that our cards were ostensibly from The Chandlers. I immediately contacted Minted via live chat.

Yes, technically it was my fault when I finally settled on a design and neglected to change our name from The Chandlers. I freely admit this and I said as much to the agent.

The operator I got was obviously not empowered to engineer my happiness because he offered to reprint them for $37. Which was more than half of what I paid initially. I said no thanks and took to Twitter.

Twitter got me better results, though it took some time. Eventually, someone else (a supervisor?) was able to get the cards corrected and reprinted. It took a week, but I finally got the reprints yesterday.

Except the cards I got were for the R family in Midlothian, Virginia. They are a lovely family. Two cherubic blond children and their attractive parents. I wondered if their photos were also taken on a cruise (they were posed on the kind of glam staircase that you see on a cruise ship) but that would just be too much of a coincidence.

I couldn’t believe I waited this long for someone else’s cards. I hit up Twitter again, and ended up with a refund because at this point, I just wanted my money back.

That would be the end of the story, but the best part is that when I went to Facebook to look up the R family to see if I could maybe send them their cards, they had already messaged me! Indeed, they have my cards, and we’re going to mail them to each other. So there is a happy ending to this story after all.

You know, it’s not about the cards. It’s not about the fact that Minted has a crappy UI. It’s that I’m now even happier to work for a company that trusts us to do whatever we can to make a user happy. If that had been a Happiness Engineer on that very first live chat, a reprint would have been ordered immediately and that would have been that.

I’m so glad I work for a company where every Happiness Engineer has the same power to make our users happy. There are no supervisors, no escalating of tickets.

So the moral of this story is, double check your last name and work for Automattic.