On the Amazon

For reasons too boring to go into I recently wanted to buy some 'Pen Drives' / 'Memory sticks' / 'whatever silly name they haves'.

Co-incidentally, I got an advert from Amazon. I followed the link. They had some 2 Gigabyte ones at £6.34. I decided to buy three of them. This comes to £19.02 with free postage (I thought).

I was wrong. The postage they wanted was £17.86. Really! I weighed the 'Flash Drive' I already have. It weighed 15 grams. So three would weigh 45 grams. I thought it was a mistake and queried it. I was told that it was OK because they were selling them on behalf of another company (like they make their own books in the cellar?) though they did admit that they set the postal rate. So, instead of charging me the postage at 84p (which would get me double the weight posted) they wanted to steal another £17 from me.

Anyway, I try not to do business with shysters and crooks so I'm not using our Amazonian friends any more. I feel strangely 'empowered', though I'm getting sick of being wound up by these kind of people. I'm quite relaxed when not being wankered by badgers (or is it badgered by wankers? whatever).

I sent them the message below (no swearing now, that makes them slime onto high horses where they clearly have no right to be. In fact they hardly have a right to be mucking out the high horses. They should in fact be helping the advertising guys eat the high horses pooh - or poo if you prefer, never been sure about the spelling here).

anyway, here's my heroic message for which I'd like some credit please...

Hello. I just made a query about your postal prices. I got an answer quickly so that was quite good. It didn't however explain why you were charging £17.86 for a weight that Royal Mail would send for 84p (3 flash drives that weigh approximately 15g each - small packet rate) This is comically outrageous and I will tell everyone I can about it as quickly as I can, principally via my blog but also in person. Sorry but I don't have 'mug punter' tatoo-ed on my forehead just yet! Yours a quite angry but also amused John Parkes