I pit Amazon.com and my own damn stupid self!

The BBQ Pit
1

Rant background:
Back in the ancient past, I was an SDMB member. Then the board went subscription, and I decided not to pay. This rant explains my sudden return…

COMMENCE RANT!

FUCK! Fucking stupid fuck! Who? Me! And Amazon.com, for giving me the opportunity to let my stupidity get the best of me!

It all started innocently enough. Back in October, my bank changed from the arguably evil Fleetbank to the unquestionably evil Bank of America. This sucks, but life goes on. Cut to this week. Going through my stuff and cleaning out my bedroom reveals that, right after the switch, BOA mailed me a “gift card” along with all the other crap that they sent out. This card has a balance of $25. Apparently, you normally need to activate it and create a PIN and all that, but this has been taken care of for me! Yay, ready to use! …except that I don’t know the PIN :rolleyes: . Still, not a big deal. I can still use it to make an online purchase, right? Right! So I check the balance. $15. Those bastards, extracting a fee from a card I can’t even use…

Anyway, I go online to Amazon, thinking about what I can get that comes to less than 15 bucks with shipping. And I think about some of the wonderful games that I never owned but loved to play, back in, oh, the late 90s or so. And I think of Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. So I run a search, click a couple times and up comes a list. OOH! Cheap! There are two buttons next to my potential purchase: “Add to cart” and “Buy with 1 click.” Foolishly thinking that I can simply bypass going through the extra step of clicking on the required link to get to my cart, and simply move on with shipping and payment info, I clicked on the latter option. I am transported immediately to a screen that says “Thank you grolby! Your order is being processed, and you will receive a summary email shortly!” WTF!? :eek: I click “back,” and there are the words sitting next to the button, taunting me: “Not cancelable.”

Not such a big deal, since the whole deal only costs a bit over ten bucks, but I am now realizing with dawning horror that I have not changed my shipping address since last October, and my shipping address is… my school! And NOT my home! So, not only have I just lost ten bucks (from my checking account, dammit, not the gift card), I have lost ten bucks for a package I will never receive! :smack: WHY ME!?

Anyway, I sent out an email to the seller explaining the situation, and I am hoping that the situation can be addressed. And then I took my $15 gift card on over to the SDMB and signed up at long last so I could express my fury:

Fuck you, Amazon.com! And fuck you, Cyber Deals! And most of all, fuck ME for being stupid enough to click that fucking button! I should have known better, ah yes, but impulse got the better of me. Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuckfuckfuck!

At least I got one good thing about of this fiasco: I am once more an SDMB member. But why, why did it have to be this way? WHY!? Life is just painful right now.

2

Contact your old school, register a forwarding address.

I believe that the school must cooperate by law.

3

I’m not amazed that there’s been a snafu with Amazon. I did the same thing about six months ago with a few books being sent to the dorm at my old base (fortunately, one of the guys I knew back then was still there.)

I’m amazed that you subscribed back to the SDMB just to pit yourself…gah! You could have bought a burger with that money!

4

Only a True Doper would rejoin to Pit themselves. Welcome back!

5

Well, my school has a forwarding service for students (I am still a student, just home for the summer), so it appears that my panic was unwarranted. The sentiment of the rant still applies, though! Stupid, stupid me…

6

I actually couldn’t have bought a burger with that money - it was on the Bank of America giftcard, thoughtfully provided to me without a PIN. So it was to be used online, or not at all. I’ve been wanting to re-subscribe for a while anyway, so it’s going to a good cause ;).

7

Why do you hate America?

8

I’ve been able to go in and change a shipping address with Amazon.com after an order has been placed but before it ships – as long as you go in during the same day, I believe, you can change all kinds of things on the order. You might try it to see if it works – you may not be able to cancel it, but you can still make a surprising number of changes.

9

You can also apply a gift certificate/card balance, too. Go to My Account, then click on open orders (at the top in a yellowish box). If your order has not yet shipped, you can change the address, and at the bottom, there’s a box for entering a gift certificate code. (Or change your payment method.)

10

Hey now, hating Bank of America is an entirely different ballgame from hating America.

11

Not only that, it is an entirely separate rant. It has a little bit to do with the $75 overdraft fee that they charged me without informing me…

Anyway, the plot is thickening - I can’t change anything on my order, since Amazon isn’t the actualy seller - they are only acting as kind of a middleman. So the only hope for canceling the order is the email I sent to the seller. And yet, it appears that my school will forward the game to me if I don’t cancel. And if I do cancel, Amazon charged my bank card, but credited the funds to the seller, meaning the seller gets paid, but Amazon has control over any financial transactions…

Ooooh, my head is spinning…

12

Quite right. According to this, Bank of America used to be called Bank of Italy.

So, Grelby, why did you used to hate Italy?