Don’t got mail.

I buy a lot of stuff through mail-order, as the Bethany University post office well knows. It seems I am always there to pick up one package or another. It’s because I hate shopping; if I want something, I poke around the internet, find the cheapest price possible (including tax and shipping; you always have to include extra expenses) and buy the thing. Why go to K-mart or Borders when you have eBay and Amazon?

I also use Blockbuster’s online service—again, why go to Blockbuster when you don’t have to?

The catch of mail-order is that Bethany’s post office takes an extra day to get me the mail. They get the stuff from the Postal Service, and then they gotta sort it and stick it in everyone’s mailbox, and that takes an extra day. Sometimes two. They don’t have a very big staff, but they have an awfully big job.

This is not a huge hassle, but it’s a little annoying when I want to watch my Blockbuster movies over the weekend (and Blockbuster emailed me to tell me they were coming on time), yet I can’t watch ’em because they arrived Friday and the post office won’t get it sorted until Monday or Tuesday.

Thus I’m in the habit of checking with the post office for packages. If I don’t, it’ll take ’em two days to put a notification in my mailbox, and in the meanwhile my packages are just taking up space in their office. (Plus, I want my stuff.)

The slowness, unfortunately, also means that I’m mentally blaming the post office for delaying my packages when it might actually be the person who’s supposed to send them.

Case in point: I bought the Star Wars Trilogy on DVD. (I’d been waiting a few months for the price to come down, and when it hit $25 I bought.) The person I bought it from had 1.5 stars out of 5, but I saw stars and a low price and bought the DVDs.

It’s now a month later, and I was wondering what happened to my DVDs, so I went onto Amazon’s site and checked out the status of the shipment. And while I was at it, I looked at the seller’s feedback page. And was horrified.

The guy had pissed off 98 percent of his customers. Either the stuff arrived late, or—in more than half the comments—not at all. Some of the comments were unrepeatable. The guy has also apparently ruined a wedding anniversary because the gift never arrived. Here, obviously, was a disreputable bastard, and I had stupidly sent him $25.

What was he doing with 1.5 stars? Well… Amazon doesn’t let you leave zero stars. You have to at least leave one. I never considered this because I am usually quite happy with my purchases and rate them 4 or 5. So I figured one star would mean you're not great, but at least you send the customers their stuff within a month. Guess not.

On the up side, Amazon will refund the $25, and the Star Wars DVDs are now available for $18. Score.