wherein Liz thinks aloud about tea, computers, and presents
There is a mail-order tea company from which I have bought variety samplers for my sister's birthday a couple times, so they send me occasional emails with discount offers and stuff. A few days ago I received one and thought to myself, "You know, I deserve nice things. I will buy myself two or three fancy teas as a gift for making it three quarter of the way through a rather challenging year."
I picked four blends that sounded appealing, narrowed them down to two, and went to place my order.
And the site glitched. Any time I tried to use the 20% discount code, it suddenly refused to recognize my address and insisted I had no available shipping options -- which was obviously ridiculous since the shipping options existed just fine as long as I wasn't using the code.
So I sent a message explaining the problem and asking if it could please be fixed so I could make use of my discount. Within a day I got a response saying that their programmer had identified the general shape of the problem, but it was bigger than just me and would likely take several days to hunt down and fix. So instead I should just place my order without the discount and they'd give me a 25% refund.
Well, I'm not going to turn down an extra 5% off, am I? So I have ordered my fancy teas and they should be shipped later this week. :)
...I wonder if I should give teas as the other half of my winter solstice holiday gifts this year? I have one item each already purchased for my parents, Vicky, Cat, and Susan, but A) it's more of a useful thing than a nice thing and B) it's not enough to count as a full gift on its own so I need something else to make up the difference. Fancy tea could be that thing! It would definitely work for Vicky and Cat. Susan I'm not sure of; I'll have to sound her out in a deliberately casual conversational tangent sometime.
And Mom and Dad are not tea-drinkers at all, so for them... well, I'll just bug Mom for a wish list, which is how my family usually does these things anyway. We're not great at choosing unexpected yet apt gifts, so we've made it all very nice and clear and explicit -- you know you'll get things from your wish list and the only mystery is which items you'll receive, and who exactly they'll be from. *wry*
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I picked four blends that sounded appealing, narrowed them down to two, and went to place my order.
And the site glitched. Any time I tried to use the 20% discount code, it suddenly refused to recognize my address and insisted I had no available shipping options -- which was obviously ridiculous since the shipping options existed just fine as long as I wasn't using the code.
So I sent a message explaining the problem and asking if it could please be fixed so I could make use of my discount. Within a day I got a response saying that their programmer had identified the general shape of the problem, but it was bigger than just me and would likely take several days to hunt down and fix. So instead I should just place my order without the discount and they'd give me a 25% refund.
Well, I'm not going to turn down an extra 5% off, am I? So I have ordered my fancy teas and they should be shipped later this week. :)
...I wonder if I should give teas as the other half of my winter solstice holiday gifts this year? I have one item each already purchased for my parents, Vicky, Cat, and Susan, but A) it's more of a useful thing than a nice thing and B) it's not enough to count as a full gift on its own so I need something else to make up the difference. Fancy tea could be that thing! It would definitely work for Vicky and Cat. Susan I'm not sure of; I'll have to sound her out in a deliberately casual conversational tangent sometime.
And Mom and Dad are not tea-drinkers at all, so for them... well, I'll just bug Mom for a wish list, which is how my family usually does these things anyway. We're not great at choosing unexpected yet apt gifts, so we've made it all very nice and clear and explicit -- you know you'll get things from your wish list and the only mystery is which items you'll receive, and who exactly they'll be from. *wry*
If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)