I got a call from what appears to be Pakistan this afternoon. I'm honestly not sure how they got my phone number, but I'm glad they did. I've been attending to family business in Fargo for nearly a week and have been trying to get things worked out over the now nearly ubiquitous WiFi connections in the hotel, hospital and coffee shops.

Goggles4U has been a solid choice, and one of the first places I've tried since I was thrust into all of this. I've been concerned over the past few weeks at what seemed to be a dramatic drop of the ball when it came to dealing with customer problems.

One thing I've seen from G4U is that they always seem to either solve the problem or refund the customer's money when there is a problem, and that hadn't necessarily changed. It was just taking much, much longer to get a response (if one could be gotten at all).

I had a couple of people ask for my assistance and I was finally able to punch an email through to them. The customers seem now to have been contacted and hopefully this "clog" has been cleared for good. The person I spoke with talked of spam filters acting up and replacing the system they were using (it was supposedly even blocking some of the email from their own "contact us" form).

Regardless, things appear to be getting back to normal.

They assure me that all attempts at contact using the form on their site will be answered within a day or two. Please let me know if that is not the case in the coming weeks.

I've been following the saga of "Sue_4_eyes" the past week or so. She ordered from Eyeglass-Direct and has had huge issues with them. Up until today it looked like there was a chance for the company to make good.

Read these posts to see what has transpired.

If you're thinking about going that route, you may want to reconsider ordering from a "non-2-star shop" (our first!).

I've updated the review for the site also with a (very large) note. Buyer beware!

Specs On The Net, a site I really appreciated not more than a month ago is having a number of rather serious difficulties, including:

• Bouncing email (thanks "Binky"!).
• Server errors on Log In.
• An expired SSL Certificate (I notified them of this on 12/30/2006).
• Extreme slowness.