Hello Amazon? Are You There?

Hello. My name is Sharon and I’m addicted to books. It has been 14 days since I’ve read a new one.

You see my Kindle - my second one – died.  To add insult to injury, I was two-thirds the way through a really good book.  At this point, it’s been so long I barely remember its name.  Which means, I’ll have the annoying experience of rereading the book before I’m ready.  I’ll half remember it, but the details will be fuzzy.  First world problems.

The Kindle itself is a dilemma for me.  I really don’t like e-readers. I like actual books with pages that you can mark up and open and close.  And, unlike e-readers, physical books don’t break.  They last until you dump a cup of coffee on them. Even then, they’re usually still readable, just rippled.

Not so with e-readers.  When both my Kindles went belly up, I turned them on, and there were no words, just  wavy lines through the screen. My books had disappeared.  Apparently they are in the cloud somewhere cavorting with a lot of hacked photos.

I naively called Amazon thinking that maybe they’d provide a solution, a fix perhaps

? Ha! I made a joke.

Because I’m a Prime Member, Amazon's answer was to give me $10 off purchasing a new Kindle.  What a deal!  But considering the amount of money I spend buying books, I was grateful for any crumb. So I took it. 

Being a Prime Member, I was promised, no, guaranteed, to have my new e-reader in two days. Awesome! Labor Day weekend was coming, and I planned to spend most of it reading. I know, you’re jealous of my wild and crazy lifestyle.

Imagine my dismay when after four days it still hadn’t arrived. The countdown to Labor Day was on, and with still no Kindle on my doorstop. I was beginning to go through book withdrawal.

Strangely, however, a shiny new Kindle showed up – two days after I’d ordered it – at my mother’s farm.  

Yup, even though I went through the billing and shipping information with Amazon two separate times, they sent my Kindle to my mother’s address. Oopsy.

That meant mom had to mail it back to me. If that doesn’t sound complicated, you don’t know my mother. Suffice it to say, that by the time she remembers to send someone to the post office and ship it to me, the Kindle might be out of warranty.

Since this whole muck up was Amazon’s fault, I  contacted them and see if I could at least get the $10 postage refunded to me.  I know, I made another joke. I’m a regular Jimmy Fallon. But I figured it was worth a shot.

I don’t know if you’ve tried to reach Amazon customer service lately, but it doesn’t exist.  At least not in the traditional sense. If you look deep in the Amazon website you can find a number to call. It will put you in touch with a lovely person from India who cannot help you at all. But they will be extremely charming about it.

If instead, you choose to email them, they promise to respond within 12 hours. Which they will. They will not resolve the problem. But they will not do it  in a very polite way.

None of this is exactly a huge issue in the great scheme of things, but I really do like to read. When my friend hit me up with the Facebook book challenge, (post the 10 books that have stayed with you and tag some friends), it was really hard to whittle the list down to 10. 40 would have been easier.

(For those that care, here is my list: “84 Charing Cross Rd,” “On the Road,” Anything by P.G. Wodehouse, “The Beautiful and the Damned,” “Naked Lunch,” “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests,” “A Book of Common Prayer,” “Vanity Fair,” and “A School for Young Riders.” )

The thing is, I’ve read all of the books on my shelves enough times that I can repeat most line by line. While waiting for the Kindle to arrive, I was desperate for something new. I devoured copies of “The New Yorker,” “The Blood-Horse” and even “Entertainment Weekly.” I was starving for new material.

My mom, ever the practical lady suggested I get off my ass and frequent an actual bookstore.  Like I hadn’t thought of that already.

The problem is, there aren’t any. At least not nearby.  There are many, many malls and no bookstores. The empty shells of Barnes and Nobles litter the Valley, but closest bookstores – used or new – are in Studio City.  Which is a hike. And I’m lazy.

I suppose that I could have ordered some new books from Amazon. With my Prime Membership they’d have been delivered in two days. Probably to my mother’s house.