I tend to be a big fan of shopping online, especially for dorky things like computers and cell phones and sidekicks and palmOS devices, but everytime I do, I think the anticipation is going to kill me and I promise myself that this time I’ve learned that it’s not worth it and next time I’ll just buy at a store and spend the five bucks more in order to save myself the shakes and hives and teeth gritting that comes from not having what is rightfully mine since I’ve already paid for it, dang it!
So, here’s the backstory:
I bought this computer online at amazon.de on the evening of June 28. On June 30, Amazon.de gave me a shipping confirmation and payment receipt and an estimated delivery date of July 5-6. I bought this computer through amazon.de but actually *from* one of the merchants in their zShops. Then on July 5 I got a payment confirmation from www.soft-tech.de (the zShops merchant). That annoyed me somewhat, because I thought it’d already been in transit for 5 days at that point. Then on July 6 I got a shipping confirmation from them. “Great,” I thought to myself, “it’s already supposed to **be here** by now!” Then later on the afternoon of July 6, I got a note from the soft-tech.de company stating that they were about to mistakenly ship me the wrong model, because that’s what their supplier sent them by mistake. They wanted confirmation from me that it was OK to ship this wrong model to me instead of the one that I ordered. The “wrong model” is actually more expensive and has a nicer display (at least according to the spec sheets I found online), but it’s another delay in the whole getting-Cliff’s-new-computer-to-him chain. But I’m getting a nicer computer for the same price, so I can’t really carp about it.
But I want it **now**, and it was supposed to be here by **now**!
(I know, I know…”somebody call the whaaaaambulance.”)