Sirpriz!

It was with mixed feelings that I pressed the button unsubscribing me from Sirpriz.com. In hindsight, perhaps signing up to a website that was all in French when I myself don’t speak, read or know a word of French was a bad idea but the reviews made it so appealing!

When you become a blogger you really do get to find out about some cool things on the Internet; take for example Remember the Milk or Where The Hell Is Matt or Librarything. But it was when I signed up to Postcrossing that I learned about Sirpriz. Sirpriz is basically a gift exchange. You are given a random user to send a gift to and in return you are also sent a gift from a random user. The idea is that you do this once a month, however there are other exchanges you can take part in as well.

The whole website is in French, however I signed up because it had been suggested that most of it was also translated into English. This however was a small lie.

So off I went to create a username and password and was eagerly awaiting my first package. One of the first things you have to do is post a small introduction of yourself on one of the main boards which I did easily enough. Having thought I had successfully completed all the required tasks it was with great surprise (no pun intended) to receive an email telling me off for not having updated my profile. Being told off in French is not fun, especially when the only word you really understand is ‘warning’ and I think they had kindly translated that one into English.

It got even worse when I went to fill out my profile and found a big old Warning label on my profile warning people not to trade with me as I hadn’t completed all the tasks! It took one begging email highlighting my poor French skills to get the warning removed but in the end it was and I happily received my first package.

Now it was with very good intentions that I made a mental note to create a package for my assigned person and I really, really did think it was not due until the end of the month but the next thing I knew I was being faced with another warning all in French telling me off for not having sent my package. Luckily SF was able to translate the warning for me and it was with great speed that I got the package ready and sent RC off to post it.

However in the end I decided that the stress of being yelled at in French was too much for me, not to mention the super high posting costs which is so crazy when it was only being sent a very short distance, and so I resigned from the sirpriz project.

Lesson learned: don’t sign up to an exchange project in a language you don’t understand.

Cloggie In Training

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