Panini really comes through

Less than ten days ago I was showing you the box of 2014 Panini Golden Age that I had gotten during the Black Friday sales, and as some of you may recall, that box just happened to be missing it's promised autograph... and now here I am, to show you Panini's response to said missing autograph.

In that original post, I mentioned my lack of success in trying to contact Panini via the telephone, in fact, after weeks of trying... and failing, I had pretty much given up on any further attempts to do so. After reading that, Matt (Bob Walk the Plank), was kind enough to leave a comment in which he suggested trying to contact Panini through @PaniniCSM on Twitter, which was something that I hadn't even thought about trying.

Honestly, I didn't expect anything positive to come out of this newly suggested Twitter route, but I went ahead and tried anyway... and much to my surprise, a response came less than 24 hours later.

This is where Joe White (hopefully he doesn't mind his name being used, especially since he is the hero of this story) enters the narrative. I don't know if he's the only person manning Panini's Twitter account or not, but he's the only company representative that I dealt with, so every time I mention Panini in the rest of this post (and the title for that matter), I'm actually referring to Joe.

Right off the bat, Joe offered to send a couple of 2014 Golden Age autos to replace my missing one, and while I certainly appreciated the offer, "a couple" wasn't necessary as I was only shorted one. Instead, I asked if it was possible to just get one that I didn't already have, and provided a list of the ten or so that I already had from the set. Joe said that not only was that possible, but that he would send a couple that I didn't have. There was that "a couple" again, sometimes you just can't fight generosity without coming across as being difficult, so I didn't try to push my "just one is enough" any further.

So just three days after the initial contact was made on Twitter, replacement cards were overnighted (I really don't like to think how much that ended up costing the company) to me, and I couldn't have been happier with the cards that Joe picked out:

Other than knowing of his World Series outings in 1964, and his involvement with the creation of Big League Chew, I wasn't overly familiar with Jim Bouton. I had no idea that he had authored numerous books, and that one in particular, "Ball Four", was considered such a classic as far as baseball related books go. Since finding out about it just a couple of days ago, I have already found and bought a cheap copy, that is now in transit. Hopefully it lives up to the hype!

The Brady Bunch was a show that I watched quite a bit of when I was growing up, especially after Nickelodeon started running it in syndication, so to get a card that was signed by Peter Brady himself was pretty cool. The only thing that would have been better, is if Mr. Knight had inscribed a few of these, I mean how great would it have been to get his signature with Pork chops and applesauce written somewhere below it :)

Lost in Space was another show that I watched a great deal of in my younger years, so getting an autograph of Will Robinson is pretty cool too. I have been a fan of The Twilight Zone for as long as I can remember, and anybody who's even slightly familiar with the show, has probably seen at least one of the three episodes that he was on, especially since "It's a Good Life" is one of the most famous episodes from the series.

Many thanks go out to Joe, not only for the great selection of cards he chose, but also for being so easy to deal with. Many thanks to Panini as well, mostly for having the good sense to hire someone like Joe, as I don't think that I have ever dealt with someone in customer service who was as efficient and pleasant as he is/was.


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.