The devil is in the details

Annoying things

(because the annoying things are kind of related, in a rambling sort of way)

Pennies are useless. Pennies also take up a lot of room in the small change pocket of my wallet, so I have stopped carrying them. Instead, I put them in a jar. The jar got full, so I started filling another jar. Etc. Recently I decided that I was sick of having jars of pennies as desk decorations and that jars of pennies=real money. After much careful consideration (in the form of Hey! Here's an idea!), I decided to take the jars of pennies to one of those Coinstar things at the grocery store and turn them into real money. I had done this before and had found it to be a monumental waste of effort, but I decided it might be better this time because I had what looked like a million dollars' worth of pennies and also because I had heard that the Coinstar machines would pay out in Amazon. com gift certificates without the coin-counting fee that was assessed if you got cash. This sounded like the perfect plan! I love amazon.com! More appropriately, I love buying books. I have an unfortunate habit of going to Barnes and Noble while bored. I have had to curb that spending my making endless amazon.com wishlists so that I can remember all the books that I desperately need...not that my "books to read" shelf needs more books. As of Wednesday, when the Coinstar adventure happened, my "books I absolutely must have" list (as opposed to the other list) had a combined cost of $291. So an amazon gift certificate sounded like a lovely idea. Off I went, with a backpack full of jars of pennies.

I will spare you the details of the adventure, but the machine was annoying. I had about 2500 pennies (I could have sworn that I had way more than that) and I am not entirely sure that the experience was worth the $25. For those of you who might be interested in repeating this sort of waste of time, the Coinstar machine will also give you Starbucks cards and a couple of other types of gift certificates for no fee as well. Just hope that you don't have so many pennies that you jam the machine 4 times. And then...off I went again, back home with my backpack full of empty jars and few grocery items that I needed...off to buy things from amazon.com.

I ended up buying three things from amazon. (All non-fiction, history type books.) While checking out, I was faced with a dilemma. What type of shipping should I choose? For those of you who live under a rock, you are offered many different shipping speeds, all with an associated cost (ie. faster=more expensive). I realized that I didn't need the books right away, so I opted for a relatively slow delivery method which ended up costing $5. I think it said it would take 5-ish days. Now, a few weeks ago I made another purchase from amazon.com. I bought my sister a birthday present. It was a little later than I usually shop and I was quite worried about having it get to her on time, so I paid quite a bit extra for shipping. It was 2 days late (taking 3 days total). The cheap-o shipping for this new order? Well, I ordered Wednesday night, it shipped yesterday and will be delivered today. Grrrrrrr.

Please note, no penises were involved in this story. (:P to Jen and momma)

posted by Immunegirl @ 1:23 PM