Re: Xy & Ansi

[nsivin@xxxxxxxx (Nathan Sivin)]

Kindly allow me to correct the misconception that Nota Bene is honest about
rerefunds. I changed over to XyWrite a couple of years ago because too much of
NB didn't work, and there was at that point no effective technical support. By
last October, although still a registered user, I had not yet received the
"final" (i.e. the first real) manuals. I therefore called TG and asked for a
refund. They told me that was up to Dragonfly, whatever it was called by that
point, in New York. They were not answering their phone. I wrote 2 letters,
and got no reply. Finally last April (!) I got a letter telling me that they
were not going to give me a refund because they had provided me with a driver
for a HP Deskjet cartridge. Can you believe it?

It was a standard cartridge for one of the largest-selling printers in the
country. What had happened, ca. 1991, was that when I called to ask for one
they told me it might or might not be supported. When I pointed out that every
other word processor had long since supported it (the shareware PC-Write had a
driver ready in 3 weeks from the time the printer came on the market), they
said they would try. I waited a year, getting all sorts of excuses and
prevarications in the mean time. When they said that couldn't get the spacing
tables from HP, I called HP, got them immediately and free, and actually
provided NB with them. In another few months I had the driver, and so,
presumably did the other thousands of NB users who had the cartridge.

Last April I was told that NB would not consider giving me the refund that they
had promised without qualification to anyone who asked for it up to
90 days after he received the "final" manuals. Their reason was that they had
done "custom" programming for me that outweighed the cost of the program! They
were not interested in the fact that they had wasted more of my time than it
took to produce (automatically) the NB driver spacing tables from those they
provided me because they were too lazy to call HP themselves. My ordinary
consulting rate is $750 per day or part of a day. If I lived in New York, I
would have gone with relish to litigation.

The kicker is that people at my university could have given NB a lot of
business if they merited it. The number of potential sales they have lost here
on account of this bit of mendacity makes the few bucks they saved on one
refund an exceptionally stupid move. And I refuse to believe that my case was
in any way an anomaly, since I have heard from friends who used to use NB of
others like it.

-- Nathan Sivin
History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia PA 19104-3325