Being Led By Perception

The reason for this post is a long story which I won't go into other than to say one of our gas burner heads doesn't work correctly anymore. So I went online to see if I could purchase a replacement part and indeed I could. If I went through the "genuine" GE parts site, the part would cost me close to $80. But in the search results was another site which I'll just call AppliancePartsWarehouse which had the very same part for $25 less. I closely compared the picture on their site with the one in my hand and they were identical in every way. So I ordered enough of them to replace all of the ones on our gas cook top which have gotten quite soiled over the years along with the corresponding cap that sits on top to protect it from spills. 

I received the normal email saying my order had been received and soon another one saying it had been shipped. I tracked the shipping over the next few days as it wound its way toward rural Iowa and yesterday it arrived on my door step. It was quite a small package for 12 parts that I had ordered (6 heads and 6 caps) so I opened it up right away and inspected. Inside were the 6 caps that I had ordered but there was no shipping receipt or other indication that the 6 heads were supposed to be in the box or shipped separately.

So I looked at the emails and found a phone number that I called after lunch and there I sat on hold for the next 2.5 hours while I was doing other things. Eventually closing time came and it disconnected. That started to get me worried. So I googled up the company website and immediately found page after page of dissatisfied customers airing  their beefs, mostly about the bad customer service and being shipped incorrect parts. I was starting to wonder if I had been scammed even if I did receive half the order.

What had I gotten myself into?

Unfortunately, as I tend to do more these days, it caused me to stew about it all night long and I never got a very restful sleep as a result. I decided to call them first thing in the morning to see if that made a difference but I wasn't all that optimistic. Already I was thinking about having to request a charge back through PayPal which I used to pay for the parts and all that would entail.

I placed the call and immediately it was picked up by a pleasant sounding man. I was a bit taken off guard since I was expecting a sour sounding unhelpful person reading a canned script off a computer screen. I told the man my dilemma about half my parts not being included in the box and I had only received an email saying one order had been shipped with no mention of two boxes. After a few seconds of typing into his computer, he said that there had been a second box with the burner heads and it had shipped the next day. He gave me the order number in case it didn't arrive so I could follow up if necessary. It was a very acceptable and pleasant experience.

But the entire incident made me realize how often I am led by my perceptions from the start. Had I ignored the beefs being aired online and realized they are a form of "survivor's bias", I might have obtained a good night's sleep last night instead of tossing and turning. Lesson hopefully learned.