So…. I finally got a new guitar, an Ibanez RG Prestige. It is very nice. But I will talk more about it once I’ve played it more.

I bought this guitar today, but I played it on Friday and realised it was an awesome axe. Why didn’t I buy it then?

Poor customer service.

On Friday I was at Allans Music in the city, and I was there for at least 45 minutes before any staff member offered to help. At which point I did get to play the guitar I was looking at (thru a very nice Marshall Vintage Modern combo).

Of course, the staff member who I talked to, and had wandered off to find tools to retune the guitar and the whammy bar, never came back. Eventually after I had been noodling at quite decent volume another staff member approached and asked how I was, at which point I mentioned the tuning and whammy issues.

He actually went and got some allan keys and tuned the guitar…. well, actually just the bottom E string so I could see how it handled some metal riffage, since I’d spent a good amount of time showing off my 1337 shred and slow blues sk!77z (which had left quite a few bystanders with jaws on floor)

The whammy bar never materialised.

Eventually I’d been playing for what seemed like an hour, and was quite ready to buy the guitar, but no staff member was around.

I even managed to walk out, right past the second staff member who I’d dealt with, without a word being mentioned. This is what we call a retail EPIC FAIL…. And not unlike my experience a week earlier at Billy Hyde in Parramatta – who also may have had guitars I liked, but also just annoyed me with their lack of service.

At this point I went “home”* without spending a bag of cash on a new guitar.

So, today, I visited Turramurra Music and actually got served.

Sure turramurra music was a little weird…. one of the guys kept randomly singing “the cats of australia have made their choice…. snappy tom” at the top of his voice, the staff was having a chat about gum and comparing different quality levels to epiphones and gibsons, one of my ISYS123 students came in to get his acoustic restrung, they have way too much christian/religious music stuff – tab books, straps with religious themes and the like, and the guy who I dealt with used a reference to Andy Summers instead of the Hey Hey Guy when I mentioned my name….

But they actually had the same guitar I’d liked at allans, as well as some others I’d wanted to try – like the ESP LTD M-400, which is a great guitar for just metal…. but I wanted something with a single coil pickup to be able to indulge my slow blues side.

So at the end of the day, bad service lost someone a sale….

And in sad news, George Carlin passed…. and this is just a little tribute…. The classic MADtv sketch – Touched by an Atheist.