Shut Up Iris

Well, now I hate Overstock.com, I bet none of you saw that coming. You didn't see that coming because none of you actually know me, or make any attempt to REALLY get to know me! However let's leave my psychological trauma aside while I spin a little yarn I call 'Overstock.com has issues with comprehension.'

Now, I have used Overstock.com several times and always it went like this: I plan something I want to buy, find it, confirm it is in stock and order it before 9 in the am. Overstock.com charges me, the order ships that afternoon and 2-3 days later I have the item or items. I have only once had to return something, it was pants, made by the chinese that they hilariously switched the waist size with the leg length, comedy ensued. On the return I read the overstock policy on returns, followed it to the letter and received a full refund. No sweat.



So anyhow last Friday at about 7:30 in the am I placed an order for some kitchen stuff in anticipation of Thanksgiving, a rotisserie, roasting pan and griddle. By Friday at 3 in the pm the griddle had shipped, what? The other items you may ask? Processing. Items that were supposedly in stock and ready for immediate delivery were doing something called processing. This meant that the roasting pan and rotisserie had no way in hell of reaching me before thanksgiving. So I pondered, what would one do?

I decided to cancel the order, so I read the Overstock.com cancellation policy and found that processed and shipped items could not be canceled, but that I could cancel items that had neither processed or shipped. 'Wonderful!' I thought 'My order status shows 'processing' so it is neither processed or shipped!', so I logged in but, uh, the 'cancel' check box that Overstock.com's return policy and instructions said to use was not on the two processing items. So what did I do? I made a huge mistake and contacted Overstock.com's customer service.



Fuck, talk about a lesson in retardedness. I carefully explained the issue to the customer service specialist and was told that 'Shipped items and orders sent to the warehouse could not be refunded.', so I copied and pasted the exact Overstock.com policy on cancellations that only mentioned 'processed' and 'shipped' orders. I then had it politely explained that 'processing'(what my order was doing) actually meant 'processed' and I could not cancel it.

Wait, what? Here let me explain how Overstock.com's cancellation policy works: Orders when placed, are immediately listed as 'processing', now you can cancel any order that has not processed or shipped, however please keep in mind that 'processing' in the mind of Overstock.com does not mean 'Processing-in the act of moving along in a process, what I would assume is preparing to ship the order' but ACTUALLY means 'Processed- finished, the process of shipping the order is done.'

So what happened to my order? Overstock.com assured me that they would try to cancel my 'processed' order, you know the order that was shown on their website as 'processing' and therefore according to their policy cancelable. So what happened? Friday Saturday and Sunday - no cancellation, order still 'processing' according to Overstock.com. Monday morning, I contacted them again, and was given the same routine, by Monday night? Still processing. Tuesday morning? Shipped.

So, the Overstock.com order progression goes: processing, shipped. At no time was the order shown as processed. Now you may have noticed that this directly contradicts their stated policy , well, according to Overstock.com it doesn't. Here is how it was explained to me: Overstock.com can cancel any order that has not been processed or shipped, by processed the explicitly mean 'sent to the warehouse for fulfillment' and that on your 'my orders' page 'processing' means 'processed-sent to warehouse for fulfillment' which they then apologized for it being so confusing, and of course they made no apology that they have in fact designed their system so that orders may only be canceled immediately after the order is placed, my order was doomed because I had waited to see if it would ship.

There are several lessons here.

First: In stock items that are ready to ship at Overstock.com, may or may not ship. Which really isn't a problem, except-

Second: Overstock.com has written a purposefully confusing cancellation policy, so much so that their customer service reps actually feel the need to apologize for it.

Third: Overstock.com has set up the 'order status' on the Order Information page to purposefully confuse the order process or in this case the order processing, I believe it is designed to create that few hours of hesitation that makes it impossible to cancel your order.

Fourth: Even when giving them FOUR DAYS for a 'Customer Care' specialist to cancel your order, they still will not do it, but they will e-mail you an apology, apologizing for their 'confusing shipping status' and convoluted cancellation policy.

Fifth: I will never use Overstock.com again.

Maybe I'm overreacting? Should a company be held to it's own stated policies? Should Overstock.com be forgiven for their inability comprehend their policy and order status? I mean they did created the process, oops, I mean they did create the processing so why shouldn't they be able to interpret it any way they like?

Well, they can, but fuck them I have the right to call them on their bullshit and not shop there ever again, and I hope someone reading this will learn something.

I may have mentioned before some of the things I hate (American cars,BMW's, scientists,Christians, conservatives, liberals, computers, Dell computers, laptops, racists, Americans, Iranians, Afghanistan, let's face it, I just don't like that many things...........) and I think I should add to that list:Major News Outlets. I just don't see why reporting has to be as hard as they make it. The thing that set me off today is the coverage of the Fort Hood shooting. I left work last night having read articles and seen coverage of the shooting in which one shooter was killed, one had escaped, a police officer was killed and eight people were dead and twelve were wounded. These reports came from Fox News, MSNBC, Rawstory.com. I come to work today to find that every single fact that was released about the Fort Hood shootings before I went to bed last night was absolutely wrong.



The only 'fact' from last night that has remained 'accurate' is the shooter has a muslim sounding name and that he is (not was) an army psychiatrist.



The worst part in all of this is that it's very easy to see why mistakes were made and it boggles the mind to see that they are the exact same mistakes that 'journalists' made in covering Michael Jackson's death, the balloon boy and the shooter at the holocaust museum stories and those mistakes are stem from news outlets wanting to be the first with a news story.



I can see the allure of getting to the scoop first, the problem is that in American news outlets 'first' has completely replaced 'accurate' in journalism. Let's take a look at the Fort Hood shooting story, erroneous headline by erroneous headline.

First: Last night it was reported by Fox and MSNBC that one shooter had been killed and that one was still being sought and then went on to cover how the base and all surrounding schools had been put on lock down. Because everyone knows that in a murder spree the obvious place to hide is a school. What? The fact is that there was one shooter, he was shot and detained and is in stable condition.The worst part is that no single news site cites a source for the erroneous information. Which means they assumed, or they made it up. Both of those things are what a 'reporter' does when he wants a headline but can't be bothered to wait for the facts.



Second part of the anatomy of this news clusterfuck fail: Police officer shot and killed. Wrong. Had any single journalist checked they would have found last night that the hospital was reporting that the officer had been shot, was in stable condition after undergoing surgery. Who cares, LIVE police officers don't make headlines, DEAD police officers do, let's call her dead, there is your headline, next story!?

Lastly we now know that twelve people were killed, not eight and that thirty one were wounded. Now I know you are thinking 'well I'm sure that eight people were probably killed at the scene, and others died later, that's not lazy journalism' ah-ha! But only ONE person died in the hospital, eleven were killed at the scene, and if the reporters didn't know how many were dead WHY DID THEY PUT IT IN THE STORY.

Fuck. It's hard enough to make sense of the world with the facts but when major news outlets are so purposefully stupid putting news being first before news being accurate it makes it impossible to trust any news source, well, you CAN trust one new source.



That's right, some boring asshole in Englandland decided to use caution in reporting last night. When I looked last night after checking Fox, MSNBC and Rawstory, I went to bbc.co.uk and saw the headline and it was about the Fort Hood massacre, just like the other news sources. The main difference? The BBC listed no body count , listed no speculation and simply listed the facts, shooting at Fort Hood, several wounded, several possibly dead more information as the story develops.

Now this morning Fox, MSNBC and Rawstory have scrubbed their sites to try and hide their wild and inaccurate speculation while the BBC simply updated last nights story with the facts to fill in the blanks , the BBC even waited all night to post the shooters picture to make sure they had confirmation that the picture was in fact the shooter.

Some day Americans will wake up and stop buying news from inaccurate, overblown sources. There ought to be some law against sensationalist, inaccurate reporting. It also turns out that one of the facts today in the US media is STILL wrong, the gunman isn't an Arab, he is a Palestinian raised in Virginia. It says so right on the BBC news page and the in depth well researched 'shooters profile' another thing our major media missed. Instead of trying to get a 'scoop' and and running all over the lives and bodies of the victims why can't we just wait and get the story right? The American public deserves it and more importantly the victims of the shooting deserve it.

The Fort Hood shooting is indeed a tragedy, unfortunately a tragedy now compounded by the slanderous and tabloid reporting by our major 'trusted' news outlets.