A Lesson on Waiting

It's not a major deal, or even one to make the world shudder to a stop. It was more a little hiccup or perhaps a burp along the highway of life. Yeah, more of an inconvenience.

Yesterday, I decided I wanted to buy a new workout DVD collection. It's one I'd been eying for a while and pricing, salivating over, so with all our tax checks arrived and in the bank, I thought, all right time to do something nice for me. It's not that expensive and it's kind of an intermediate step to the DVD's my hubby and I tried last summer (the ones that kicked our asses royal). I thought it might be a good thing to try them and work back up to the ones from last summer. It was a plan anyhow. So, when I went to the company's website to order, I did everything it asked of me, all the pages loaded properly and then I hit the very last button - you know -the one right before the screen pops up to say, "congratulations you have successfully purchased...." Well, the I got an error message saying my cart was empty and that the URL had switched to another site. It gave me hyperlinks to press, which all took me back to the same page. All right. I'll play along. I went to press the order form....nadda. Same error message. I tried the company's other products. Nope. Nothin' doin'. Their entire shopping cart had crashed.

All right, I'm a big girl. I realize glitches happen, so I'm not too upset. I go to my email to make sure there isn't a purchase confirmation email. Nope. Not even the first one. I check back in 20 minutes. Still none. So, I'm thinking the order didn't go through. I'm good with that. I'll just go elsewhere to order the product.

Enter ebay.

I find the product I wanted for about a third of the price. Still in box. Brand new. I show my hubby the listing. It's a Buy It Now so I don't even have to wait for the auction to end to get this fabulous price. (Really, if you're shopping on ebay and don't want to mess with the auction and find something you want at a reasonable price, this is really the way to go.) - So, hubster tells me to go ahead and buy it. I do. Get the confirmation from paypal and all is well with the world. I also find another series of dance workout DVD's to get for 20 bucks, which will come in handy while I'm recouperating from surgery. (Yes, I have to have surgery in July. Carpel Tunnel in my left arm. ugh.) - I buy the dance workouts and all is right with the world.

Until I'm at work.

I check my email to see if my ebay purchases have confirmation of reciept of payment from the sellers. What do you think I find instead? If you guessed a confirmation of order from the site that crashed, you'd be correct.

Ughhhhhhh.....

Now, to fix this problem requires either my husband or I to call their customer service line precisely at 11am EST, (they open at 8am Pac) to cancel this order. Again, not a big deal, just annoying. Because now I have two of the same product coming to me, and one is about 3 times more expensive. If I had just waited 24 hours, I wouldn't have been calling my hubby to see what he could do before our credit card got charged.

But on the other hand, if the cart hadn't crashed I might not have found the product so much cheaper. Or the cheap dance workout DVDs. Silver linings for all!

And I learned a lesson: Don't be so hot to buy something without shopping around really well first.

(You'd think I'd have known that after last week's netbook buying fiasco -but that's another story.)

Rock on,

-Kate