I Battled the Website, and Won!

Every now and then we achieve these little victories

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

This is an anecdotal victory tale within the universal story: human v. website. Usually the humanoid surrenders, the algorithm wins, life goes on. But for those of us who usually surrender, and on top of that who generally refuse to deal with the Amazon website on principle — a task that gets harder by the day — here is an Uplift Story:

All I wanted was to send a baby shower gift.

Amazon had thanked me for my business, confirmed the transaction, assured me the gift would be delivered on Tuesday. Whew. The party is scheduled for Thursday.

This party is happening in Catania, Sicily; I am sending a gift from San Francisco. Thus, I am dealing with the evil Amazon, because one can send something via Amazon.IT and otherwise sending a gift package from the U.S. to Sicily is an impossibility. Sometimes we just do what we have to do.

Oops! I am greeted in the morning with a message that my credit card was declined by the bank. Excuse me? This credit card has been on auto-pay from the day I got it a decade or so ago. The credit card algorithm revealed that payment was declined “because the address entered did not match the address on record.” Oh. A return to Amazon revealed, after about 20 or 30 minutes of digging, that the shipping address for the gift had erroneously slipped into a billing address line.

I spend 10 or 15 minutes trying to get the website to let me fix it. Eventually, I give up. I find the place where I’m invited to Add A New Payment Option, and add a new card. (It’s also on auto-pay, so I’m pretty sure it’ll be fine if I can get the right address into the right line.)

Please confirm new card, it says. But it refuses to provide a box for re-typing the number of the new card. No amount of typing and searching and clicking will bring up the box into which I might re-enter the new numbers and confirm the new card. By now it is close to midnight, this having been an on-again/off-again battle. Not a good time to be arguing with a website, but I am committed.

I take my laptop down to the front desk of my building, where the concierge on duty happens to be a tech genius. He understands it all, but not even he can get it to provide the little box. We go for coffee. We return to see the little box has blinked on — only to blink off.

I go back to my apartment in full battle mode. I push my laptop far enough away to finish some other chores, but copy the necessary numbers onto the clipboard and poise the cursor on the exact spot. I go about my business — it’s now closing in on 1 AM but I am beyond determined at this point — keeping one eye on the evil, recalcitrant website.

And sure enough, at about 1:10 AM PST the box blinks back into action. I spot it right away and hit Ctrl V — pasting the numbers in before it can blink off. Take that, evil techno-gremlins.

Mission accomplished. Gift purchased. Delivery made in time for party.

Current score, Technology: 5,794 — Humanoid: 1. But I’ll take it.