DECaffeinated Ramblings of a (knocked up) Coffee Achiever

Dear Cletus -

GET OUT!

Love,
Mom

... where every post becomes about pregnancy or babies.

I'm sorry. I hate to be so single-minded, but really, it's all I think about. And since I'm on bedrest, it's not like I have some active social life to update you people on.

So, if the idea of reading crap about kicking babies and weird food cravings and ultrasounds and what will very likely ultimately prove to be far more information about my inner workings than you ever cared to know, then go ahead and take me off your reading list.

I won't mind, I promise.

Just check back in August or so.

Today's our 5 year anniversary. And am I in the Bahamas, on a romantic vacation with Cappy to revisit the location of our honeymoon? No.

Instead, I'm on bedrest. Until Tuesday. Maybe longer. The kid doesn't seem to mind much - Cleets is as hyper as ever - but it's driving me crazy, and it's barely been 24 hours. I'm moody, I'm stressed out, I'm 16 weeks from my due date, and I'm wondering how the hell I'm going to get any of my work done on a laptop in bed when I'm so spoiled by the super-fast dual-monitor setup I have at work. You can't design websites on a slow-ass tiny laptop with a stupid thumb-mouse.

But I want to keep working as long as I possibly can. Magnum PI reruns on Sleuth are only going to alleviate so much boredom.

Hormones make for strange dreams. Last night I dreamed I was in prison with circa 1999 Brad Pitt and we shaved our heads.

Of course, when I wasn't pregnant, I dreamed I took Johnny Rotten to my 10 year high school reunion, and that I was at a slumber party painting Stephen Colbert's toenails, so maybe it ISN'T the hormones.

The cup of DECAFFEINATED coffee I'm drinking, or the blinding rage that complete strangers cause me when they ask whether or not I'm "supposed to be drinking that"?

I signed up for a MySpace account a while back (this is the moment that Internet historians will mark as the moment that MySpace "jumped the shark.") and wanted to change my email address.

I tried to use their online address change feature on my profile page, but when I submitted my new email address to the system, it returned this error:

Sorry! an unexpected error has occurred.
This error has been forwarded to MySpace's technical group.

So, I reported the problem to MySpace with a request for help. Below is the email exchange between myself and the MySpace help team.

Despite the year that has passed, for many victims of Hurricane Katrina, not much has changed. Even though it's faded from the collective memory, the suffering, the loss, and the pain are still very real, and very immediate for many survivors.

I spent a lot of time with Cappy in Katrina-ravaged areas of the southeast, and documented (and photographed) some of our adventures.

But even though we were there, we were still outsiders - our immediate families, our personal effects were untouched by the storm. I can't imagine what it must have been like for those who lived through it. Who are still living through it, and heroically trying to rebuild their lives, whether in New Orleans, in Waveland, or in a new city full of strangers.

As the days and years continue to pass, Katrina will fade more and more from our collective memory, unless we make an effort not to forget.

And I really hope we all make that effort.

Well, I finally got the Amazon situation resolved. After their outage of 4+ hours on Monday, I went back to the site to check on the status of my order to see if it had changed (it had not) and the option to cancel "Lolita" had returned. I used it to cancel the remainder of my order, and the situation is resolved.

But I never did get a response from their customer service. At all. Not even an acknowledgement that someone had seen my message. I'm not going to file a complaint with anyone, since I WAS able to cancel my stuff (eventually).

But I'm never ordering from Amazon.com again.

At 8:09 this morning, I sent the following email to Amazon via their online "email us" form. To be sure, I also sent it to orders@amazon.com, help@amazon.com, customerservice@amazon.com, and jeff@amazon.com - addresses that have all successfully reached people in the past.



I don't expect this to produce results, any more than my previous two attempts have, especially given the fact that they promise to respond to online email help requests "usually within 24 hours." They can't even commit to responding in a reasonable time when you jump through all the hoops they put in front of you to reach a real live human. I've been waiting over 72 hours at this point, and the only contact I've had from them are the 4 autoresponse delivery failure notifications fI received for daring to attempt to email them directly.

Bastards.

On July 10, I ordered a bunch of books from Amazon to take with me on vacation, including "Lolita." I'd never read it, and figured it's one of those books everyone has to read sometime.

But apparently for me, sometime never comes. Because SIX WEEKS LATER, Amazon STILL hasn't shipped that damn book.

And of course, Amazon's website is utterly devoid of contact information. No email addresses. No phone numbers. Just useless libraries of help files that I should spend my time weeding through in the hopes that it MIGHT hold a CLUE about the whereabouts of my book and why the hell it hasn't damn shipped yet.

And on all the help pages - links to forms to tell Amazon how well their help files worked for you.

Let me get this straight. You don't want me to contact you about my problems with my order, but you want me to critique the quality of help files for you? You have GOT to be kidding me.

I finally found a link to an online form which allegedly sends an email to an actual human that may or may not respond in 24 hours.

They also courteously provide a place where I can submit my phone number so that AMAZON can call ME at their convenience. Maybe.

This is customer service? Why not just build a moat around the company's office too?

I've been pissed off at Amazon before - they tried to screw us over with some busted t-mobile phones a few years ago, but I was able to get in touch with a real person and get it resolved.

Right now all I want is Amazon to cancel this order and give me my money back, so that I NEVER HAVE TO DO BUSINESS WITH THEM AGAIN.