Amazon

Yes, Amazon. Don't you just love it?
All those tempting offers in the books section that
pop up, along the lines of, "If you like this, then
you'll like these". And what bargains in the newly
new sections ... other shops or people giving away
paperbacks for next to nothing. Brilliant.

Mrs C and I love the reviews that customers write
about the books and other stuff they've bought, and
another clever idea - the "Wish List", where you can
put up a list of books you'd like for a birthday or
Xmas (and also search for other members of the family
to see what they'd like).
We're "amazoned" about the speed of their delivery
service - we never ask for next day delivery, but
often the goods arrive the next day or a day later.
Wonderful. We're very impressed.

I was chatting yesterday with a friend who is an
opera buff, and a self-cofessed shopaholic as regards
buying CDs -- much to his wife's despair, as he's got
loads of CDs in the house already. He too is a fan
of Amazon, and he described a curious condition where
he tends to go into automatic pilot when looking the
pages of CDs available. It's as if his finger develops
a mind of its own .. "Oh yes," it says, "I'll have
that one, oh, and that one"... tap, tap tap, goes
his finger.

I've named this condition "repetitive online finger",
though it must have been described elsewhere before
by now. I do get this from time to time myself, but in
a less severe form. Often when I'm sitting at the
computer half asleep (as I often am towards bedtime),
I just go into momentary automatic pilot and type in
something daft, or delete something I wanted to keep.
"Oh my God!"
Sounds familiar?