April is the cruelest month

I haven't really felt like posting much, well I rarely feel like posting much anyway, but this month was just kind of even more so.

But a few updates on stuff.

The tape deck is well and truly disassembled. We tried putting it back together, but it wouldn't work properly after that, so it's junk.

I never heard back from Cambridge University Press regarding the cassette.

Fortunately, Amazon came through and I now have a replacement and will, hopefully, soon be Speaking Greek, or some version thereof.

I went and bid on something on eBay and remembered just how much I hate bidding on stuff on eBay. There's always some bastard who does the last day sniping.

I'd been toying with increasing my bid in increments, and the last one I tried put me at the highest bidder, which is a little annoying, but not undeserved, as I was pretty much pushing up the selling price out of sheer irritation.

Fortunately it's less than 25 cents over what my max bid was intended to be, and I feel a little better googling and finding out that someone seems to have recently paid roughly twice what I'll be paying for this item, not to mention it costing me less than it did for the last person who bought this same thing from the same seller, during the auction I'd bid on last month (in which I am happy to report that the first sniper in that auction got sniped by another).

Not to mention, the Canadian shipping is the same price as for the US, which is always a bonus.

So, even though it's a little more than I hoped to pay, at least I'm getting something I like for not as much money as it could have cost me, and it saves me hours of footwork trying to find one used in the area which I live.

Although with my luck, once I've bought it, I'll find one for half the price in the first place I look.

Ah, well.

Dear Academia: Everyone else switched from tape years ago, why can't you?!

Well, my tape deck is well and truly broken.

After taking it apart so I could get the damned tape out, I kind of wonder how they ever managed to put it together, since the design was not exactly conducive to assembly, much less re-assembly.

God only knows how much a new one will cost, now that everyone except for the Cambridge University Press is using CD.

The tape itself is now also unplayable, assuming I had something left with which to play it.

I've written the CUP, and hopefully I get positive word back from Amazon. I did discover and report the problem within 30 days of delivery, allowing for holidays, and their return centre did show it automatically as being part of an order I could return, and the thing is very definitely defective in a damaging way.

If I'd had it playing on and off for the entire month, I could understand, but this was its first time ever! And it committed murder/suicide on my tape deck!!

So yeah, I really hope I can get a replacement at no extra charge, since this thing has cost me far more than it's worth and I rather doubt Cambridge is going to put their courses on CD until they've sold off all their remaining stock, or whatever it takes to get them into the digital age.

I'm so not buying the remaining books in the series now.

And likely not anything else under their imprint for the forseeable future.

Well, at least this wasn't from a library set

So I finally get a chance to listen to my “Speaking Greek” cassette, which I got from Amazon last month, along with the companion books in the “Reading Greek” series, since I now have a little leisure time in which to try learning Greek.

I was really looking forward to finally hearing how Ancient Greek's supposed to be pronounced, since the library has only modern and New Testament Greek in its language kits.

The very first time I try to play it, the damn thing unspools and tangles up into my tape deck. No problem, right, I can gently ease it out?

Wrong. Apparently it's gotten so tangled, and in such a way that even breaking open my cassette deck to try and extract it doesn't help. I've tried with chopsticks and tweezers, and I don't know if I can get it out in one piece, or at all.

Right now I'm taking a break from about two hours of frustration. I'll probably vent some of it at the Cambridge University Press for making such a shoddy item which should have been transferred to CD a long time ago.

It's noticeably lighter than the other cassette I have which has the same play duration, and the tape reel seems much thinner and flimsier, though that could just be because it's brown instead of black.

The irony is that I'd just finished using my tape deck to play a different language tape without any problems right beforehand, and had no problems with it last week when I got that old Inuktitut kit out of the library, or the time before with those Icelandic ones.

So, in addition to replacing this cassette, I'll also have to find another tape deck. Damnit.

Anyway, I'm going to contact Amazon to see what can be done. It's defective and very definitely not compatible with my equipment, so at the very least, I'm hoping to get a refund, if not a replacement.

From the looks of it, I'm just barely within the "30 days from delivery return window", since I received this March 9th according to Canada Post records and today is April 9th, so hopefully I'll be able to replace it without having to pay for another, which would mprobably make me quit buying stuff from them, which would on the bright side save me several hundred dollars per year.

The automated return centre thing shows that particular order as being still returnable as I type this, so that ought to count for something.

Ideally, I'd prefer a replacement (hopefully non-defective) since this was part paid for with a gift certificate I earned by buying a bunch of stuff during their last promotion. And it did ruin my tape deck, of which I took some pictures, and the following are the least fuzzy.

I wish I could get a really good close-up of the damage (damn tape seems to have stuck to itself or melted), but I can't get the hang of the zoom function.




I'm just glad I didn't wait until after the holidays to finally check things out.