Little Green Fucker

I can't believe I got sucked into this crap. The Gorilla Biscuits toy (made by Super 7) seemed cool at first. They made up a toy of the gorilla from the cover of the GB 7" for the Australia & Japan tour of 2008. As soon as I saw a picture of one, I wanted it. I emailed a friend in Australia, and it turned out he was going to the show and had no problem in buying one of these things for me. Cool. Then, a few months later, the sneaky buggers made a "second press" yellow gorilla (just like the second press record), and I couldn't resist picking that one up too. And then, wouldn't you know it, they then went and made a third version, on green. By this point, I had reached a weird place. I mean, I wanted the thing, but all of a sudden I was starting to resent paying for something that I saw as useless plastic junk. I mean, these things were not cheap. I began to worry about my own sense of control. I started to wonder how many they could make before I would call it a day and not buy them. But like a fool, I still went ahead and paid for the third version, because I couldn't quite resist, even though I wanted to.

What happened next seriously pissed me off. The thing got delivered... but instead of getting a box with a toy inside, all I got was a note from the post office telling me that the package was waiting to be collected at the depot... but in order to collect it, I would first need to pay the import tax and clearance fee. Yup - after already paying some stupid amount like $65 for this thing, and then being forced to shell out another $30 or so for priority mail shipping (which was the only option, even though I didn't really want to pay for a priority service), I was then going to have to pay out more of my hard earned cash for the postman to be able to hand it over. I was gutted. I didn't want to pay. I started to resent myself for buying the thing in the first place. But then I realised I was in a no win situation - if I paid, then that would be $30 gone. But if I didn't pay, the thing would be sent back to the States, and then I would have to pay another $30 to have it sent back over again. The third and final option would be to have it sent back and then ask for a refund, but then they would only give me a refund on the cost of the item, not the postage. So whichever of the 3 options I went for was going to cost me $30... which seemed unfair. There seemed no way round paying out yet more than I had already paid, which I wasn't entirely happy about paying in the first place. Ugh! Not good!

Well, fate then intervened. That same evening, I fell over and dislocated my elbow, and then didn't go back to work (where my mail is delivered) for a month. After seriously injuring myself, I didn't give a second thought to the stupid toy until a month later, when I returned to work. But by this time, because nobody had been to collect it, the package had been returned to the sender. By this point I didn't actually give a shit. There seemed more important things in life to worry about. So I then ignored the issue for a couple of months, simply because every time I thought about the thing I got annoyed. Finally i decided that this was something that I should resolve, since I had already forked out $90, so I emailed Super 7 and asked about having the thing sent back over. They agreed to send it again (which I would have to pay for) but they agreed to not declare the value so that hopefully I would not get hit for the import tax again. I didn't reply straight back, because I wasn't in a hurry to spend another $30, so I just kinda thought about it for a bit, and mulled over just asking for a refund. SO then another two months or so went by. Again, I was not in a hurry and didn't really care too much about it. But I reached the point where I figured that the time had come to finally sort it out. I was so fed up of thinking about the money that these pieces of junk had cost me that I had pretty much decided that I was going to get the third one & then just sell all three on eBay. It was more about taking a stand and deciding not to get sucked in anymore. I realised that, in total, I would have spent something like $250 on these three toys, and I hated both the toys and myself for this. I felt like a sucker, I wanted my money back, and I never wanted to buy any toys again. So I emailed Super 7 and said I would pay the shipping to have the thing sent, so could they tell me what to do.

A few weeks passed & I got no reply. So I emailed again. And I got no reply to this email either. And every couple of days I would remember the whole saga and get further annoyed by it and wish that I hadn't bought the damn thing in the first place. And then I got so sick of waiting that I just decided to phone the place up. So I called up and spoke to a nice dude called Josh who confirmed that my box was still there. And then something good happened for once - he offered to send it out at no charge, to make up for the fact that they had ignored my last couple of emails. And that's exactly what they did. And a week or so later, it turned up. And, wouldn't you know it, as soon as it arrived I thought it was the best thing ever. Way better than the previous two, because it comes in a little wooden box, in homage to the GI Joe figures that Rev used to trade records for back in the day.

So there you go - without doubt the best piece of useless plastic junk I ever bought :o)