rant!
i'm living in a hostel right now, which is grand, except for this one incident! i gave my camera's battery with charger to reception to charge, because they have lots of converter things (i'm from canada). i went to retrieve it the next day and lo and behold they had given my charger to someone else! there was another cannon battery and charger there, very similar to mine but not the same! this, however, was not the most annoying part.
i went to curry's to see if they could replace it for me. they could order one, they said, and it would cost one hundred pounds. that was a bit steep so i thought i'd check online to see if i could find something cheaper.
despite many searches with different wordings etc, i couldn't find a canon powershot sd750 to be had in the entire uk. for a few days i thought i would have to get someone to order and ship the damn charger all the way from canada (the online retailers that sold the item didn't ship outside of canada). over four days i looked online, went into currys three times (i also called them once) and was generally very frustrated! the first day i asked the salesgirl if there was anywhere else i could check in town, and she said that currys is the biggest and that there was no way that any shop would have what i wanted in stock. i asked if there were any generic batteries available and she said that each camera had its own battery, that no generics were to be had (i found some online). she obviously found the battery i needed, but didn't tell me that the camera had a different name in the uk, or what the battery was called. i have worked in retail quite a bit, and if i was in her position i would have relayed that information to the customer because that's what good customer service is. thankfully one of my roommates told me to go to jessops, and i did.
the salesguy there was *super* helpful. he found the battery hidden behind some others on the rack, and he charged it for me. he was pretty sure they didn't have any chargers left but he checked the storeroom anyway -- they had one left. it cost me sixty quid but oh! my search was over. if the people at currys had been more communicative in general it would have saved me a lot of time and frustration.
curry's could have told me three things to make my search so much easier:
1. my camera, a canon powershot sd750, is known in the uk as a canon ixus75.
2. the battery that my camera takes is a lithium nb-l4.
3. there's an excellent camera shop called jessops *just* down the road (i was at the currys on princess st).
all in all, shoddy service from four or five people at currys, and really excellent service from the first person i talked to in jessops. sheesh!