Hey, you guys.

Hoje eu conto a confusão que aconteceu numa loja aqui na hora de buscar os pedidos que fiz pela Internet. Enjoy…

Hey, you guys. You’re listening to the new episode of the Inglês Online podcast, and today I’ll tell you about a mix-up at the store where I was supposed to collect my online orders.

So this is obviously our last episode of 2016 (two thousand sixteen) and I wanted you to hear about something that happened to me in the past couple of weeks. It’s nothing really out of the ordinary – not that it should happen all the time, hopefully it won’t. But it can happen to anyone, though, and it’s a bit of a departure from our usual content about shopping, which is usually, you know “How much is it?”, “Here’s your change” and so on.

Here’s what happened: there’s a store chain here in the UK called Wilko. I guess in Brazil the closest thing to Wilko would be Lojas Americanas. So, it was the second week of December and I realised I needed some cleaning wipes for my cell phone. Simple as that, my cell phone was getting dirty and I needed to clean it, so I went to Wilko and looked for wipes. No luck: they were out of cleaning wipes. That same day I went online and ordered the wipes to be delivered at my local store. Total of the order: £1.50.

The next day I decided to buy a nice box of chocolates I’d seen at Wilko a few weeks before. However, I already knew my local Wilko store was out of that because I checked last time I was there. So I went online again and placed a second order for the box of chocolates. That one cost me £8.

Every online store in the UK accepts PayPal as a payment method, right? So I paid for both orders using my PayPal account. It’s just easier than typing my card info every time. So right away my bank statement showed two charges by PayPal: one for £1.50 (one pound, fifty p) and another for £8.

So a week or so went by and I got a call from Wilko saying my stuff had arrived. They didn’t really say which order so I just assumed both of them were there. So I headed over to Wilko and then to the Customer Service counter, and gave them my name. The lady behind the counter went to the back of the store and only came back, like, ten minutes later, empty-handed. My stuff wasn’t there! Neither the cleaning wipes nor the chocolate box.

She asked me to wait a few more minutes so she could search for the products in the store. Then, she came back with the wipes, which were fortunately in stock now, but they were still out of the chocolates. So she just apologised for how long it was taking, and then I told her that I had actually changed my mind. Instead of waiting for the chocolate to arrive, I would cancel the order and take a refund. So right then and there, she asked me for my card and proceeded to credit my account with £8.

It should all have been done and finished right then – but it wasn’t. So just last week I got another call from Wilko saying my order had arrived! What? Anyway, I ended up forgetting about it until yesterday, when I looked at my bank statement and saw that Wilko had charged me for £8, again. Some kind of mix-up, for sure.

So today I swung by my local Wilko shop again in the hopes I’d be able to sort this all out and get a second refund. This time a guy spoke to me and I explained what happened. He said my refund should have come from PayPal, since it was my chosen method of payment for the order. So he rang some PayPal person and asked them to process my refund. And PayPal has now sent me an email saying the refund is being processed. So I guess that lady was maybe a bit hasty in giving me a refund through the store system rather than having PayPal do it.

So there you go everyone, rather than doing a whole episode reminiscing about our year together and talking about the highlights of 2017 – you got my refund story. This is useful stuff – I promise :) so enjoy.

Happy holidays and talk to you next year!

Vocabulary

a mix-up = uma confusão onde alguém achou que uma coisa era outra, o que era dessa pessoa era de outra, etc.

fifty p = fifty pence (pence é o plural de “penny”, o centavo inglês)

swung by = passado de ‘swing by’, ou ‘dar um pulo em (algum lugar)’

reminisce = lembrar e falar sobre algo que algo que já passou

she was a bit hasty in = ela foi um pouco apressada em

so there you go = então aí está / então é isso