I meant to write this up yesterday, but this will have to do. Yesterday, I did an Amazon search for the book Sex with Kings, which is an historical account of the mistresses of various kings. (I once did a paper in college about Louis the XVI's [either him or Louis XVII's] mistress, a very powerful woman in her time, and I maintain a fascination with Napoleon and Josephine and Marie Antoinette to this day. Anyway, the book seems right up my alley.)
But instead of getting the generic results screen, or the exact page I was looking for, that search pulled up a book about Martin Luther King Jr. Not kidding. I just tried to replicate the results now, and it didn't work. One of those little bugs that happen every once in a while (like the publicized result for searching "abortion": did you mean adoption?), but a funny one. It's also in considerably poor taste, but what can you do? It wasn't any human error that produced that result. As long as it's not still happening....
More on Amazon: Today, I did a big order for the library from Amazon, for our popular rental video collection. Three (so far) of the videos are listed as Region: Unknown. Which means that we can't purchase them, just in case they don't play on Region 1 DVD players. I wanted an answer as to why certain titles would list that way, especially considering those very same DVDs are available online from Facets--with nary a warning about region. So I went to the DVD region help page, which wasn't helpful in the least, and was about to email customer service when I noticed a "by phone" button. If you press this, you are given the option of having Amazon customer service call you on a number you provide, in a time frame you provide. What the hell, I thought.
The call was prompt, the help was prompt, but the help was also useless. The girl on the line just read me the information from the website, which unfortunately for her, I had already read. I wanted bigger answers. For instance, why? Why are some DVDs regions unknown? She said the only info. she had at her disposal was the information on the web page. Whaaaaaa? What's the damn point of customer service if they have no additional information? I know it's not that poor girl's fault, and I tried to be ultra-polite as I pumped her for information, but really. How useless.
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