Harry Potter and the Amazon Cock-up

This is a cautionary tale, about the problems you can cause yourself if you don't correctly follow the fundamental principles of laziness, as I recently didn't. I, like 11 million other people in the UK, wanted to get the new Harry Potter book the day it came out. I was generally feeling a bit sorry for the poor post men and women of Great Britain so I thought I'd just pop to a shop on Saturday morning to pick a copy up. Then I got lazy and thought, we'll be in the new house, I'll just order it from Amazon and have them deliver it then I don't need to go out. So I did that. On Saturday, it didn't come. Grr. Annoying. On Monday I went to the website and they had a big notice on the website about Harry Potter saying "almost all copies should have been delivered now, if not click here" so I did what they said and filled out a "where's my stuff?" form. Yes, I mistook a standard "do nothing" situation for a "a little bit of work will be better in the long run" situation. The latter really is the exception not the rule. Stupid me!

It turns out a 'we tried to deliver this but you weren't in' notice was pushed through my door on Monday afternoon, after I'd submitted the Where's my stuff? form. Ok no problem... I hadn't heard back from Amazon anyway. Just forget the whole thing.

Then today I go to Amazon and order something else only to find out that I've got an £8.99 gift certificate applied to my account. Huh? OK how do I contact them to tell them it arrived... er... hunt through their 'help' menus trying to find something useful. Eventually find a "refund information" auto e-mail thing and send off a message saying that they'd incorrectly applied the refund as it arrived in the end. I almost immediately got a reply saying they were very sorry and the refund had been applied incorrectly and they'd fixed it, but it had been redeemed against my new order.

So now, I have to jump through hoops to give them their money back... or I could do what I should have done in the first place and 'do nothing' until they sort it out. Hmm.

And the real sting in the tail? My girlfriend popped to our local Co-Op on Saturday to get some shopping and said "They had Harry Potter in there, I could just have got you one but seems a waste if you have one ordered." NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!