Vox Lucens

Ranting & Raving, that is.

I hate it when someone goofs me over. I hate being taken advantage of. And what might be worse, I hate falling for scams or even psuedo-scams.

After a good deal of price-shopping today, I decided to make a rather significant purchase. I found a good deal, one that the seller (”Best Price Cameras“) indicated came with a number of accessories, and one that had highly reasonable two-day shipping. I gave them my order, my credit card info–amazed at the amount of weird technical requirements they put on it all (like validating my shipping address with my credit card–has anyone else heard of that?)–and gleefully went my way.

I got a call a few hours later from an upbeat-sounding gentleman who wanted to confirm my order. Confirm we did. I gave him my credit card security information, listened patiently as he told me I had to call my credit card company so that they could ship to my office address, told him that I had purchased batteries from another source. When I told him there was nothing more that I needed from him, he began the “goodbye” procedure, telling me that I would have my camera in two weeks.

“Two weeks?” I said. “No, no, I paid you $24 for two-day shipping. I should have it Wednesday, right?”

“Oh, no,” he told me. “This item is on backorder. You can get it in two weeks.”

After confirming he was serious, I began to wonder just why he hadn’t mentioned this before. He had all the other information about my order, and must have seen my expedited shipping request (which is important to me), but just *failed* to mention the backorder. It made me suspicious, so I asked, “What about all of the other stuff that was listed on the website as coming with the order? Is that still coming with?”

“No…..” he said. “You didn’t purchase a package. Just the camera and the lens.” At that point I had enough–this deal wasn’t that good, and I was feeling seriously scammed by false promises of free stuff and two-day shipping. So I said, “Alright, let’s just cancel the order.”

It is no exaggeration to say that it took him less than one second to say “yourorderhasbeencancelledgoodbye” and hang up the phone. I’m still not sure if I’m happy he gave up that fast or annoyed that must be really used to people cancelling when they hear the whole story.

And now I’m back to UCC. UCC, that is, accompanied by Hitchhiker–it helps to ease the pain. It helps a lot, actually–the only thing that would help more is a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster.

(And it must be admitted, studying Article 9 and secured transactions is infinitely more interesting when watching the scene in which Humma Kavula removes Zaphod’s second head as collateral.)

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 7:31 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.