I sent them a reel to reel tape that contained recordings of myself and my young siblings recorded at the end of the 60's, start of the 70's. Keep in mind, there were no smartphones in those days, and the only way you could have captured sound would have been with a tape recorder or 8/16 mm super 8 film. And so I had that irreplaceable recording of us.

I decided to take a big chance and send it to Southtree - they being the more highly rated of them and LegacyBox (essentially the same company, but set up as a flanker brand).

I had read that it would take weeks, and was totally fine with that. But at the month and a half mark with no response, I shot them an email. What I got back was about as bad as it gets. I was informed that when they opened my box, they found "nothing" in it. Actually, what they would have found was an Amazon bubble wrap envelope, folded in half with the 5" reel inside, and put into the box at a diagonal angle. I did that so it wouldn't shift around. When I purchased the service, I was given the additional option of having other memories be digitized, so I chose Kodak slides. At the last minute, I was too nervous that sending all of these memories would be risky. Good thing.

Because I only had that one envelope in the box, the person who opened it must have seen all that empty space and assumed that I had put nothing in it but the Amazon envelope that was meant to be padding. So they just moronically tossed it.

The email response told me that SouthTree didn't want to leave "any stone unturned", so, they encouraged me to "look around your house to make sure you didn't forget to send it." My looking around equals their "leaving no stone unturned". Well, I did look around my house and distinctly remember putting it in the box. What an asinine, patronizing way to "leave no stone unturned".

Numerous emails were exchanged with them saying they continue investigating, the top management would be alerted, etc. Weeks went by with me clinging onto hope, but it wasn't to be. I sent a final email asking for at least a refund, which they gave (big deal, they had done 0 work anyway), and seeing if they could at least reimburse me for my loss. In the legal community, it would be called "Gross negligence" and "Breach of Contract". I wasn't thinking of a huge payday. A thousand or 2 would have been a drop in the bucket for my loss, but instead, not even a return email from the owners.

GTH SouthTree. You truly suck and you clearly hire only the most incompetent people because it's cheaper. You will never know the loss, to me, of that irreplaceable tape, but somewhere in the trash dump in Chattanooga, TN, sits my tape, lost forever. What a terrible loss that I can never ever replace.