Life with Churry.

Friday, July 20, 2007

Twice in One Month

This must be the summer of new experiences. I'm selling stuff on Amazon.com, I painted my apartment (ok, touched up,) I bought (and used) a jigsaw, and I've now stood in line on release day twice in one month to buy a hotly anticipated product (for two different products of course.)

Ah, the power of marketing. Here's the line in front of our local Borders store at 9:30 am. If you don't know what we lined up for, it's not even worth telling you now.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Did You Not Read My Last e-mail?

I recently started selling things through Amazon.com's marketplace and have been totally happy with the results. No one's been interested in my eraser refills (big surprise,) but I've successfully sold a memory stick and two books.

Yesterday, I got a nice e-mail message about the camera I have listed for sale. The lady wanted me to send the camera to a friend in Africa. Now that made me a little suspicious, but it's not like I don't know anyone from Africa and have friends and family in Africa. So I considered the sale and even looked into customs forms for making such a shipment. Another flag started waving in the back of my head when I noticed that she wanted me to respond directly to her e-mail address. That wasn't how the other sales went, but this was only an inquiry. So I thought maybe it was different. I went ahead and responded directly to her, saying that I would prefer not to ship outside of the US.

This morning, I awoke to a message from this Sandra De Jeken telling me she can't receive then re-send the package because she's in the hospital and thanking me for shipping to Africa. Another e-mail told me not only "Sold Ship Now," but also that the buyer has thousands of dollars deposited with Amazon, all of which is frozen until the sale is completed. Hmmm, none of the other buyers had that. Is this special for a "high" value item?

The problem is that I don't care if she's in the hospital or if she has $10 billion deposited with Amazon. I'm not shipping to Africa. I frantically went through a couple of Amazon help pages to find out if I could nullify the sale before noticing the sale is not even acknowledged in the Amazon system. *whew* It's a scam. I reported it to Amazon, and now? Back to my daily procrastination.

p.s.
If there are any spammers out there who want to spam her account, her address is sandra.dejeken@yahoo.com. Cheers!

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Self Improvement

"Hey, what's up?"

"My IQ! I just bought a Mac."

Sunday, July 01, 2007

Certified Geek

After 11 hours on the sidewalk in Palo Alto, I was giddily walking to the car with my new iPhone in hand. blogger14 was feeling bad that instead of shaking my hand, Steve Jobs put his hand on my arm and said, "I'm not doing that today." A bit disappointing, but I cared much more about the $600 gadget in my bag than I did about shaking a man's hand, regardless of who he is. Plus, he was nice and smiley about denying me a handshake. So that's that.

Tony had said he decided against standing in line for the iPhone because he decided that he would be ashamed of having committed such an act 10 years from now. I, on the other hand, would've been sitting around at home thinking about the iPhone anyway, so sitting in line felt like taking action towards achieving my goal. Plus, I met some cool people, learned about the cute little "slow food" wine bar called Vino Locale, and got to play with a functioning Newton, courtesy of the Stanford Newton User Group. Good times.

In the end, Tony was there anyway. Standing with bystanders watching us get our iPhones and trying not to look left out.

All that aside, the iPhone is sooooooooo cool. I love the perfect synchronization of address books! The other perks are cool, too. Now I can tote around just one gadget to show off pictures of my niece, listen to music, get traffic updates and directions, check my e-mail, surf the web, and of course, make phone calls. All with the ease that Apple products are known to deliver. And now that I've stood in line for an Apple product launch, I feel like a true, certified geek. Go me!