OK, so it wasn't a car or a house or a 60 inch flat screen TV but it's been a long time since I shelled out $200 on a pair of shoes - boots, to be exact, and ankle boots, to be exacter - absolutely plain flat white leather lace-ups, brought to my attention nine days after Mercury went retrograde courtesy of a presumably targeted fab ad (the name of the company, not my description of the ad) appearing on the front page of the New York Times (look it up yourself), although how fab know I once had a similar pair made by ecco that I wore for ten years until they dropped off my feet and have been searching for ever since I have no idea. (Well, I know how they know about the searching part. I haven't posted this yet and I'm already getting ads for ecco showing up all over the place. Thank you Larry and Sergey.)
Anyway, there were these white leather high-tops on my computer screen and I immediately emailed fab to find out if they had my size. I got a very chatty email back all about those are really cool boots, aren't they, and I'd like to have a pair myself etc. etc. but sorry, they didn't, which of course led to me ten seconds later groping my way through Shoe the Bear's all-over-the-place front page to get to the bit where they sell shoes and outlining my right foot on a piece of paper with a magic marker.
Correct shoe size determined and initial frenzy of boot discovery over, I was a little taken aback when I realized that because I was now in Denmark the 110.00 price I'd been quite prepared to pay was in euros and not dollars, but with my birthday coming up next month it took about as long as it took my favorite currency converter to tell me the boots were $148 for me to remember I've just refinanced so have more disposable income (hah!) and anyway it's only money.
The page where you plugged in the credit card number and shipping address did look a little simple compared to U.S.A sites like Amazon and PayPal, but when you're a cosmopolitan person like me you expect to come across these little differences when you travel, it's all part of the experience for goodness sake, and so what if the shipping method - described as simply "shipment" on the acknowledgment - cost $58.39? It's my birthday next month and I'm loaded.
And so what if I got a call from Citibank's Early Warning Fraud Alert the next day asking me if I'd paid some riding stables somewhere in the midwest $49? As it's about the fourth time in two years that I've been hacked, the CEWFA lady was trying so hard to persuade me to get yet another new card rather than risk more fraudulent charges she offered to call all the companies whose bills I have on auto-pay for me and give them my new card number to save me the trouble! Boy, I thought, this order for my new boots is working out really well.
A couple of days go by and in my email I get what I can only think is a shipping notice. I already know Shoe the Bear is a new (and optimistic) company - my order number is 10000434 - and now I realize they're also very sensible and don't want to waste too much money on documentation and silly old forms. Apart from the date - March 6 instead of March 4 - the new missive is exactly the same as the original cheery acknowledgment (the wording of which had seemed a little strange at the time but I was excited) -
Hello, Pamela Reeves
The waiting has come to an end! Today your shoes will be packed and shipped. You'll be ready to rock them within a few days. If you're satisfied with our product, and want to track down the whereabouts of the Bear, drop in on our Facebook page!
- and the shipping method is exactly the same - "shipment." How amusing! Those funny Danish people don't want me to be able to track my shipment, they want me to track down them. It sure is different over there.
And as this cautionary tale is very long, I think it best to post it in two parts, so with apologies for leaving you in suspense, I shall now go and see how much money I've lost today on DDD.
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