Peter vs. Delrina, 1993

Just to prove that this whole “Pete the ornery” thing isn’t something new, I provide as evidence this Usenet of mine post from twelve years ago:

Users of WinFax Pro 3.0 who want to receive the recently-released “major patch” for the program but who don’t want to bear the cost of downloading the entire thing from the Delrina Tech Support BBS (phone 416-441-2752) at long distance rates can have the patch mailed to them by Delrina.

You have to call the Delrina Customer Service Line at 1-800-268-6082. When the line answers you’ll inevitably get a cryptic voice-mail message telling you to leave a message. If you leave a message you may never hear from them again, so just press ‘0’ to reach an operator and ask for Suzette in Customer Service; she’ll take your address and mail you the disks.

Disclaimer: I have no relationship to Delrina other than as a [disgruntled] customer.

I followed up with this post where I wrote, in part:

Well, today someone from Delrina called me at work; he said that their Sales Line had been inundated with calls for the patch and implied that they were none too happy about this. Their staff had been monitoring this newsgroup and he was contacting me, as ‘instigator’ of the problem, to see what was up.

…and later…

So, I don’t have my problems fixed yet, but at least I’ve talked to someone about them. Cudos to Delrina staff for monitoring this newsgroup and responding to me directly (I hope they follow up on all such problems, not just ones that cause them phone-grief); perhaps now is the time for some input directly to this newsgroup from Delrina? There still remains the fact that contacting Delrina by phone seems next to impossible and/or very expensive; I hope they’re taking steps to deal with this too.

Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with Delrina other than being a [formerly disgruntled, now somewhat placated] owner of their WinFax Pro software.

Three years later Delrina was purchased by Symantec.