Traveling Down the Amazon

Published February 5th, 2007

Had one of “those” experiences with amazon.com this week. On Jan 25 I placed an order. I was able to choose the Super Saver shipping. Now, I can be impatient, but it is sometimes worth it to suffer the catastrophic isolation of not having books to save a buck. The next day, I realized my hunger would not be sated with the first order and so I placed another. Again with the Super Saver shipping. Trying to save Amazon some trouble, I tried to merge my orders. The Jan 25 order had not even been prepared to ship. Yet, the Jan 26 order immediately went into “preparing to ship” mode and could not be merged. Oh well.

Then I looked at the est. delivery dates. Jan 25 order (hereafter Order A) was scheduled to arrive between Feb 5 and Feb 7! And then the Jan 26 order (hereafter Order C) was scheduled to arrive during the exact same window!

And that’s when things got weird.

Order C spent days “preparing to ship” - and order A just sat. Suddenly, Order A gets delayed, and split into Order A and Order B! Allegedly this was done to allow part of my order to arrive sooner, but…both were now scheduled to arrive between Feb 7 and Feb 12! At this point, I was beginning to twitch from lack of book. So then Order C arrives on Feb 2. And then both Order A and Order B arrive today, Feb 5. So what have we learned?

1) Merging orders is arbitrary, regardless of the posted “rules”.
2) Estimated delivery dates are about as accurate as weather reports.
3) Amazon does what amazon does. Apparently with great oddity.
4) Quit whining and enjoy your books, jerk.

Anyway. Two notes here:

1) I have updated (well, created) the “About” page.
2) I will begin reviewing things soon, maybe tonight. I have long wished for a spot to review things. I just can never seem to find the right place. I’d like a couple of better wordpress plugins, but the good review modules seem to have broken in v2.1. So, I’ll make do with what I got, I suppose. Primarily I’m going to review books. I love LibraryThing, by the way. I would just post the reviews there, but that’s no fun. I may mirror them. If you like to read though and want to keep track of your personal library, LibraryThing is the way to go!

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