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So. I've been craving some digital camera action for a while. I decide that it's finally time to break down and buy one; if i'm going to do it, we should have it in time for our trip to Napa next week. So i do a little research. I ask my geeky friends for their advice. I go fondle the actual cameras in a coworker's office. I make a choice. (The Canon Digital Elph S200, if you're curious.)
My other coworker Tim finds me a kickin' deal on dell.com with several tasty coupons. Oddly, Dell's website lists the camera as 'in stock', but my email confirmation of purchase tells me that it's not going to ship until July 16, 2002. Weird. (Just to clarify: July 16 isn't really an acceptable ship date, for my needs.)
I send email to the dell customer service people. The service people, amongst a lot of apologies, respond with this very confusing sentence:
"The part was, indeed, in stock, however, due to the volume of
orders received for this item, there may be a delay in the restocking
of this part."
We decide to cancel the Dell order, and order the camera from amazon.com, where they generally do mean "ships in 24 hours" when they say it. Tim is all the while explaining how this happened to him with his Clie, except they continued telling him it was going to ship even when he had the box in his hands. So i ordered the camera from amazon, and Russell planned to call Dell to cancel our order in the afternoon.
Imagine my surprise when i found out that the camera from Dell shipped this morning, and amazon (ever-efficient) also had our camera already in the shipping process.
So we'll get two cameras this week. Double our fun? Or a trip to the post office? I suspect it will be the latter.