The one where the replacement Fire Tablet arrived
When I got home from work yesterday evening, I asked our eldest daughter (who had been in the house all day) if a delivery from Amazon had arrived. She shook her head. Only it had. They had tried to deliver it, she hadn't answered the door, and it had bounced to the local post office depot.
So this morning I stopped en-route to work at the post office, brandishing the hand-written collection ticket, and a credit card to identify myself. A woman in a badly fitting uniform fetched a huge box from the rack behind her, and scanned this barcode and that barcode for some time before finally sliding the box across the counter at me.
After getting to work half an hour later, I discovered that the box was a pretty good cardboard re-creation of a Russian doll. The box contained another box, which contained another box. Inside that box, I found a black slab of plastic and glass – the replacement for the Amazon Fire tablet I reported as faulty a couple of evenings ago.
After finding a power cable from the depths of my desk, I switched it on. Two hours later, and perhaps fifteen reboots later, it had updated itself to the tippest, toppest, newest, shiniest version of whatever the hell version of whatever it is that Amazon install on their tablets, and started hassling me with offers to give my children “Amazon Unlimited for Kids”. Of course I found a bug in their “No Thankyou” button that made the entire damn thing go round in circles three times, repeatedly asking me if I wanted to sign my kids up for a “Free for 12 months but then we empty your bank account special one time offer”.
Anyway. Got there in the end.
The Fire Tablet has been my consistent travelling companion for the last year. When holed up in far flung hotels I use it to watch downloaded TV shows and movies. When stuck on trains hurtling to the other end of the country, I listen to podcasts on it, or sometimesread. I have a stack of books waiting to be read. I've tried to go to bed early for the last several evenings in a row, and ended up dicking around with Twitter, KIK, WhatsApp, or Snapchat rather than reading anything. I did kind of make some progress last night, but then found myself reading to the end of a chapter at 2am. We won't talk about the time I stayed up in a hotel all night watching Mr Robot.