Amazon agh

Right, so a few... ok, scratch that, a lot of months ago, a fellow blogger at whose blog I'm a regular was rather upset, to say the least, with Amazon. While I understood her grievance at the time, I, being quite happy with Amazon myself, didn't think much of it.

Then just this week, I committed an act of extreme intelligence (alas, I keep forgetting that < sarcasm > and < /sarcasm > aren't valid tags): I went on to place an order through Amazon. All was fine until I remembered I had moved since last time I had used Amazon, and my order was being dispatched to my old address.

Now, unfortunately, my keyboard, among its 105 keys, has no button labeled "PANIC". It really should, though. So I clicked my way to finding out what to do in this sort of emergency. The best Amazon could do was send an e-mail with the text of my liking to the seller. So I explained that I had made a blunder and please deliver to my correct address which is as follows and so. Unbeknownst to me (at the time, that is), Amazon encased my e-mail in between two segments of text of their own, the first one being as follows:

Important Notice: Only dispatch to the address shown in your seller account. Do not honour buyer requests to dispatch orders to any address other than the one provided by Amazon.co.uk. Do not accept any payment method other than Amazon Payments. Payment for the sale may be withheld if these guidelines are not followed.

So what was poor Paul (let's assume that's the seller's name) to do? Well, alledgedly, at the time of his reply (two days after my original e-mail, yet well within the expected time of dispatch) he had not seen my message until he had sent my item. Might be true, but a nagging feeling at the back of my head tells me Paul had, indeed, read my e-mail, but prefered to tell a little white lie and respect Amazon's terms. I can't blame him for that, and, had I known of Amazon's guidelines, I wouldn't have asked him to ship my stuff to my actual, current address, but you'd think Amazon could have put a bit more effort into dealing with these situations? I mean, sure I made a blunder and I have only myself to blame, but I expect others might have erred in even worse ways. Think of the Americans...

Pax vobiscum atque vale.

ArabianShark has ways of retrieving his ill-posted objects, rest assured. Your concern is appreciated.