Well, today has been rather frustrating

And it started out so promisingly, too.

I'd rather not get into what made it take a turn for the worse, not right now, but I am going to mention one particular thing that just added to the disappointment.

Some time last year, I ordered Raymond Queneau's Exercices de Style, the deluxe artbook edition that's divided in two, top and bottom, so that one can leaf through the illustrations and the text separately.

I'd seen it in the library and much admired it and finally decided to splurge on my own copy since I had some gift certificate money left over.

Like most of their French books, it was “Not In Stock, order now and we'll ship it to you” at Amazon.

Accordingly, I ordered, and waited, and waited, and waited…

I honestly wasn't expecting to ever receive it at all, because they twice sent me notices that there was a delay, that they were having difficulty laying hands on it.

So when it finally did arrive about a week or two ago, I was absolutely delighted.

I had glitches applying my gift certificate balance to the stuff I ordered late last winter, so it ended up charging my card, but I was happy enough I didn't care about that.

In any case, I thought I'd destress a little by leafing through the storylets and illustrations at random, as I often do, and got an unpleasant surprise.

One of the illos (they're spread across two pages each), had very noticeable damage to a portion of it, due to some sort of printing/binding defect which made the ink of one page kind of scrape off onto the other.

It seems to be just one picture out of 75, but this really upsets me.

If it had happened on one of the text pages, I would have been annoyed but more-or-less accepting, since it wouldn't have interefered with my reading.

But the damage is on one of the artworks, in an art book, and if I'd just wanted the text version I could have bought the decidedly non-deluxe pocket paperback instead.

Anyway, this worries me in more than one, not least because I'm not sure that Amazon will consider this flaw enough to be a defect and thus eligible for replacement.

Because in comparison to the rest of the book, which seems perfectly okay, it's about a half-centimetre at most strip down the center of just one picture.

And they did have such difficulty getting it in the first place, and they might not be able to get another to replace it, and maybe it's better to have a slightly damaged deluxe artbook edition than no artbook edition at all.

And for all I know, the entire print run might be like this and sending it back and waiting for another to be shipped would just be a waste of everyone's time and money, and not just mine.

Well, obviously I'll have to sleep on this and I'll see about comparing the library's copy if it's also got that same problem.

But yeah, this has kind of been the capper to a not-so-good day.

ETA: Finally checked out the library's copy and took pictures.

It either doesn't have this problem, or it doesn't have it enough to show.

My copy:




The library's copy:



And it looks like this may have been my last day to return it, and they raised the price of getting another copy, too.

Let's hope they go by the day the return authorization is requested and not by when they actually receive it back.

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.