Decadence in Books

Alternate Title: Amazon knows where you live.

There are a lot of ways in which I waste all my hard earned money. I eat out far more than I ever should, I buy the expensive kind of sandwich bread, and often times I will buy new socks just so I don't have to wash the old ones in the middle of a week.

But of all these different ways of throwing money out the window, the one that I think is the most frivolous and insanely heady is buying books at or near suggested retail price. I mean, in general, I live at Half-Price Books, a place that is built like the warehouse in my own personal heaven, where you can get a good paperback for under a dollar and a good condition hardback with change back from your five. But there is something inherently delicious and wastefully adult about spending full price for a first run book. It makes the reading that much more potent, when you can actually calculate the market value of each page as it goes by.

More often than not, when I do go the full price route, I do it through Amazon because the abstraction on the price is much greater from the privacy of my own home. Going into a Borders and actually watching the cashier ring up a stack of books in front of my face is more than I can handle, fiscally. My rationalization muscles start kicking in, and I'm hard-pressed not to grab the books out of their hands and run back to the shelves and out the door to the nearest discount shopping center. On Amazon, the numbers are cute and manageable, and when I save 60 cents by buying two Orson Scott Card books on the same order, it satisfies the bargain shopper within, despite the fact that it's 60 goddamn cents.

Seriously, Amazon is the master of direct marketing. To like, the deepest portion of my soul. It truly knows who I am. Since I am a slave to Firefox and its magical search bar, I use the Amazon engine as the most common search, besides Google. So the Amazon master computer has stored a seemingly endless account of things that interest me and uses that opening personalized front page to lure me in to exactly what I've been most recently thinking about. It's a little scary that a website knows my tastes better than the majority of my family members.

And I haven't even gone in to their most deadly weapon in their arsenal - the direct email. It is very sparingly used, at least on me, but it has the pin-point precision of a sniper rifle shot to the head in getting me to buy things. (Not that a shot to the head gets me to buy things. I think that metaphor wound up a strange place.) I have gotten a grand total of four of these emails in my life, and every single time I ended up buying the book that it was announcing. Granted, I would have bought these books anyway, but the emails a.) always came the week immediately before the books were actually released so I would have it on the first day available, and b.) link to the major publication reviews of the book, which I'm gonna have to read anyways, which then feeds into my immediate need to buy the book, and then, why not just order it now, save yourself the trouble of putting on pants and driving to the bookstore and yes Amazon, you love Amazon, Amazon rules all.

Man, this is a little depressing, how easily I become a member of a horde.

So anyways, I go through all of that to say that I ordered a couple of books on Thursday around midnight from The Website That I Will No Longer Refer to by Name Because I've Already Said it 47 Times in This Entry (TWTIWNLRNBIAS47TITE). And I chose the free-shipping option, because that's yet another one of those things that makes me feel completely frugal and smart for choosing TWTIWNLRNBIAS47TITE, expecting the books to show up in about a week or so. No big rush, I'm still trying to get through the last 400 pages of Cryptonomicon again. I put LaSister on alert, though, that the UPS guy might be coming by sometime soon.

Fast forward to Sunday. I'm pretending to clean up the apartment and generally being a layabout when I remember that when Mike was over on Saturday night, he had mentioned that my Gameboy was laying up against the patio door. Since I had lost the Gameboy several months previous, I went to retrieve it. I pulled aside the curtains and sure enough, there it was. But more importantly, out on the patio was a little box. A little box with the distinctive TWTIWNLRNBIAS47TITE logo on it.

I retrieve the package, and it contains both books that I had ordered less than 72 hours beforehand. It was at that point that I decided that not only did TWTIWNLRNBIAS47TITE know exactly where I lived, they had it nailed down to the point that they could air drop books directly into an 8X8 patio at a moment's notice.

This revelation was immediately followed by another: That I was probably overreacting. It's much more likely that in the dead of night an Amazon ninja secretly scaled the walls of my apartment complex to deliver my books as silently and efficiently as possible.

And that? Is some good customer service.