Haze Guitars and COVID-19

22nd March, 2020

I wanted to add an update regarding the COVID-19/Coronavirus restrictions and what they mean for your interactions with Haze Guitars.

As I write, Ireland is one week into an initial two-week period of restrictions to try delay the virus spread.

I’ve already been in contact with anyone that has an appointment scheduled during those two weeks and I’ve just begun to contact those with appointments immediately following.

It’s fair to say that a lot of uncertainty remains about how things will play out over the next few days, weeks, and months, so I’ll publish here as well as updating customers directly.

If you have an appointment scheduled

As things stand, I’ll be continuing to honour appointments.

That said, I completely understand if you’d would feel more comfortable cancelling or postponing. That’s absolutely fine.

As of now, there are no restrictions on smaller-scale contacts. However, while announcing the current Delay Phase measures, the advice given by the National Public Health Emergency Team stated that:

Individuals should reduce discretionary social contacts as much as possible

My opinion has always been that there are very few emergencies in guitar repair but (for now) I'm not sure I should be the one to make that decision for you. You are better placed to make that call for you and yours. If you’re happy to make your appointment, that’s fine. If you’d rather wait or cancel, that’s fine too.

I realise that my schedule already means long waiting times and a further delay might be annoying. I’m sorry about that.

What I’m doing

I have a number of interactions with customers every day. These tend to be one-to-one and they’re not great in number.

I’ll be insisting that anyone coming in sanitise their hands and I’ll do the same each time.

Between appointments, I’ll do my best to disinfect surfaces and items that might be touched. I feel the risk is as controlled as I can make it but obviously it can’t be zero.

For a number of reasons, turnaround may be a little slower than usual. I hope you’ll bear with me.

What do you need to do?

If you want to play it safe and reschedule your appointment, your original booking email has a big orange button labelled, ‘change or cancel appointment’. If you decide to reschedule, I sincerely thank you for your patience. I really appreciate it.

If you want to continue with your original appointment, just do so. Should you change your mind, you can click that big orange ‘change appointment’ button any time up to the day before (although more notice is always nicer than less).

If you can, leave your guitar in its case without touching it for a couple of days before your appointment. While the effectiveness of this may be questionable, it can’t hurt. I won’t be offended if you don’t want to try out your guitar on collection and would rather wait too.

The future

Please be aware that this could all change. If I, or anyone I’ve been in contact with, show symptoms I’ll immediately ask everybody to postpone or cancel.

If the government or the NPHET advice changes, I’ll follow that.

And, to be honest, if I get nervous enough, I might ask everybody to reschedule anyway. I work from home and have my own family around so I need to monitor things and make my own calls as to what’s best. I don’t see this happening but, as you’ll appreciate, these are uncertain times.

Thanks for bearing with me.

I’ll update here as necessary.