Am I not meant to own a camera?

You may recall my run of bad luck with cameras a year ago: Lost my old camera, so bought a new one, lost the new one a week later, then miraculously found the old one, so returned to status quo with the old camera, but only $500 poorer.

But what with a year having passed since that series of unfortunate events, the urge to have a new camera tugged once again at my heartstrings. And rationalism, usually the check and balance to my impulsiveness, offered little resistance. So new camera it was.

Having only recently made my first tentative forays into the world of online shopping, I was especially determined to buy my new digital camera online. The assessment and decision-making process in choosing the exact camera was elaborate, if not empirically substantive.

I asked friends and colleagues for recommendations, and the majority opinion seemed to incline towards Canon. Then I walked all the way over to BestBuy, torpedoed straight over to the Canons, and was relieved to see they were also the prettiest and smallest ones on the shelf. Then walked all the way back to the office, and indulged in a spot of internet research and informative googling. I dappled in a smidgeon of online brand comparison, just enough to sufficiently reassure myself that the Canons which were the prettiest were also reasonably competitive in function and cost.

Then I took a deep breath, crossed my fingers, logged into the BestBuy site, and paid for the camera online. That's all I had to do, the trusty site informed me, and poof! the camera would appear at my doorstep in two days. So I pressed the 'confirm purchase' button and held my breath.

Five days later, I was still holding my breath.

I knew this internet shopping thing just doesn't work! I thought to myself irritably. So I logged back into my BestBuy account to track my order. And what did I find?

Razorsharp Ficali had input the 'delivery to' address as a mix of the office address (West Village) and home address (mid-town East), in an interesting melange which would lead nowhere. Yep, street number of one and postcode of the other, to create an imaginary place that existed only in the fantasy of my own mind. And in the mean time, the camera's been shuttling around conscientiously, but fruitlessly, defying geography, reality and the precision of GoogleMaps, in the black hole of the UPS.

Oh dear. I look forward to an interesting conversation with UPS tomorrow.