The shoes of life have done kicked me in the ass again

December 5, 2019

Ah... no wonder some say we have a sole.... <cough>

Had me some fun (NOT) attempting to make an Amazon purchase with a couple prepaid cards I thought covered the entire purchase... but first I learned I couldn't use multiple prepaid cards for the same order.. (the hard way.. by mistakenly submitting an order whilst imagining the payment system would do something sensible like check initial card value, then ask for additional payment options... NOPERS!!! It simply charged full not-what-I-hoped-to-accomplish ahead with the order, and failed when noting the single payment method couldn't cover it..) then I learned I could send myself Amazon gift cards purchased with said prepaid cards.. then I learned BOTH cards had somehow lost value ($9 lost on one, $10 lost on the other) to the point of no longer being able to cover the purchase.. (the hard way yet again by typing in what I thought a prepaid card was worth (in exchange for a gift card), placing the order, seeing that fail, then checking card balances due to a sneaking suspicion that maybe I somehow mistyped the card balances after their last use (I never make those kinds of mistakes).. and that's when I'd learned they weren't worth as much as I thought they were (the equivalent of being kicked while down)..).. after which point I learned I could input more than one gift card number against the purchase while using my usual credit card for the balance....

And yet people are somehow still impressed with modern online so-called technology? I could have friggin' boiled a blogging ocean in that time, for godssakes....

But am I surprised developers and their white-washing marketing bre/sis-thren accomplices would be less than completely honest about the likes of “one click shopping”?

No. It was probably thousands of clicks and/or keystrokes... including canceling botched orders, deleting email confirmations and notifications of failures, needing to provide a code sent to my phone once during the process, providing the Amazon password and solving whatever captchas several times, the calling of the prepaid card lines and grinding in the card and “secret code” numbers (and wouldn't you know it? only one card per call instead of cycling back through a menu with a different card number.. so hang up, do it all again...).

I also imagine having exercised Amazon 666 ways to Sunday like that will be leading to lots more junk/spam/useless-informational email.

So... what have we accomplished, here? And how much CO2 did it produce? Is it really that much better than a trip to brick and mortar – where at least one might chance upon above-average members of the (for me) opposite gender?

Ay yi yi....

Then again, maybe I'm just an idiot.