Leaving it Behind

I had my first book buying experience today. It was hell. Sheer hell. Like Arizona in the summer time.

My quest started at about 11:50. I logged on to my school's bookstore, and found that things were taking a relatively long time to load. Actually, they were taking an obscene amount of time to load. As I progressed some things got faster because I was going back to pages which had already loaded before, but if i went to a new page it would take several minutes. Getting the books for my five classes into the checkout stage took an hour or better. Then, as I proceeded through checkout things got worse and worse. I then discovered I needed to have an account with the bookstore, so in order to do that I needed to go through a sign in page, a new member form page, and another confirmation page. Then I finally got to checkout, where I typed in my credit information. I thought I would be safe from there, but no, five minutes later when the next page loaded there was yet another confirmation page. I clicked continue on that page, but the computer refused to budge. I was ticked. I decided to go put some mail in the mailbox (a good deal up the driveway from my house). I came back, still nothing had happened. Then finally, the page changed. Timed out it said. Of course it timed out! No program is going to accept a credit card number that's been sitting around 15-20 minutes!

Desperately I pressed the back button on the browser several times, going back to where it asked for the credit card information. My hope was to fill out that information again, and hopefully everything else would load fast enough that it wouldn't time out this time. No such luck. In fact, from that point I don't think another page ever loaded.

At this point it was about 1:20 and I was very frustrated. So, I decided to call the campus bookstore. Eight-hundred number: busy. Long distance: score. I told the woman on the phone my situation, that I'd gotten all the way to check out (after an hour and a half) but everything was so slow that I kept timing out. I asked her if there was any other options and a couple seconds later she replied "Well, I could take your order here over the phone." At that moment the heavens opened and I saw many angels rejoicing in heaven. (Really, you can ask my mom.) So, I ordered my books over the phone in about twenty minutes, which seemed years shorter than my ordeal online. Two hours later my mom and I were finally out of the house to run the errands we needed to.

And all I can think is how I can't wait until next semester when I have to do this all over again!