Geek Habitat

I’ve had $120 in Amazon gift certificates squirrelled away for a couple months. Every time I make a concerted effort to spend it, nothing seems compelling enough to purchase. This evening, I finally found something I wanted to aim the money at (2 matching bookcases for our home office/computer room), but after getting 3/4 through Amazon’s checkout process I’m told, “*** We’re sorry. The quantity you requested is no longer available. ***” Bah! They don’t even have 1 item in stock…

To add insult to injury, what I want is actually available at my local Target store. However, I have $120 in Amazon funds available, so Amazon’s where I want to buy it, thankyouverymuch! We’ll see what Amazon support has to say. I’m half hoping this is just the result of a technical glitch; usually Amazon’s out of stock items indicate as much on the product page, not well into someone’s checkout experience. {shrug}

I do most of my shopping online (excluding groceries, pet supplies, and plants for my garden), but sometimes it’s still harder than it needs to be to consummate sales online!

That said, I am so doing the “Just give me a gift certificate for Christmas/my birthday” this year. I’ll be a happy camper with any of the following: REI, Amazon.com, L.L. Bean, Territory Ahead, and of course, ThinkGeek.com. I’d even be willing to make an exception, and do some of my garden purchases online — WildSeedFarms in Fredericksburg, TX, offers online gift certificates, now!

Postscript, one day later: Never heard from Amazon (it is still the weekend), but their system did manage to get over its glitch and let me order my bookshelves. I don’t know what’s sadder — that I thought trying to buy bookshelves was blog-worthy to begin with, or that I thought it was worthy of a P.S.

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Random Snicker of the Day: Frodo Failed… Bush has the ring (see photo 7 of 8 in the series)

Oh, hell, I’ll make it a two-fer: British Army gets anti-microbial ‘combat underpants’. Funny, they look like bike shorts to me!