Online Cupcakes

My wife has a birthday coming up. You may have already heard, as she likes to tell anyone within earshot. Here at home, she began dropping hints about six months ago, advising the kids to expect a new mommy soon, because Daddy is getting tired of the outdated version they have now.

The drama is due to it being the ‘Big Four-Oh’ this year. The date looms on the calendar, like she expects to wake up that day, wondering who she is, where she is, and why the mattress squishes when she moves. I remind her that we age gradually and gracefully - not overnight. It is a slow, inevitable approach that she is making toward that stage in her life when she will be a burden on her children. She doesn’t need to pack her rest-home footie pajamas yet, although it couldn’t hurt to break out the Sharpie and start labeling them …

In an attempt to alleviate the sense of impending doom, and in response to numerous subtle hints, I decided to order cupcakes online. I’m not going to tell you where I went, as my misadventures, although completely self-inflicted, may in some way reflect badly on the solicitors/bakers. All I knew was, for her fortieth birthday my wife wanted cupcakes from a specific source, and I was gonna make it happen. That’s just basic marital common-sense. A woman scorned is bad news, but a woman deprived of baked goods is liable to mount a passive aggressive assault in her own home, on her entire family.

I googled the cupcakes she asked for and was immediately overwhelmed with choices. I had no idea a single, tiny cupcake could contain such complex coloration. Do they pile batter in layers, one teaspoon at a time, or do they spray paint them after baking? And the job of applying swirling hues of icing and itty-bitty cookie shards must be painstaking and tedious, like painting commemorative postage stamps with the summit of Mt. Everest. I never even picked out the flavors I wanted. I just hit the smallest bundle of preselected varieties - no, I didn’t want 100 cupcakes - and hoped there would be some chocolate thrown in for the kids.

This was assuming anything came at all. Because for me to receive their products, forms had to be filled out, and this was where the problems started. I love that the internet has allowed us to avoid going anywhere or meeting anyone (no exaggeration here - I prefer shopping in sweatpants stained with last night’s Ben and Jerry’s), but in my mind, a sale is not complete until I give somebody some paper currency and they hand me back a few coins. When the exchange of money for goods became a virtual process rather than a physical act, I never made the transition. Somehow I got left behind, lost in translation.

This glitch in my personal evolution is no big deal, because my wife usually handles family commerce, thus enabling my technological handicap. But now I was forced to communicate with a website, sharing sensitive personal information via my laptop. That’s about two layers of technology above my paygrade.

When I have a problem with my computer, Julie can usually fix it. But when I’m on my own, I’m at the mercy of a device I’m convinced enjoys watching me struggle. Computers never go “Oh, I see what you’re trying to do. First you gotta press this button over here, and then click on that … ” They just take the information as I feed it to them, passively watching me crash and burn while they laugh. They think it’s soooo funny.

I might have successfully placed my order, if not for the discount offers that kept popping up during the process. When they appeared, they dominated the screen, and I would click on them, just to make them go away. Like electronic Whack-a-mole. I got so many offers - first-time-order discount, text-alert discount, and so on. What groundbreaking advancement in the confectionery industry would make me pause and say, “The saffron-infused, vanilla/tangerine swirl is available! Quick, put down the baby so we can order! Thank god we’re on text-alert!”

The next step was to provide a delivery address and payment information. This always makes me feel like I’m casting sensitive, personal information into a digital abyss, like I’m throwing a written journal of my darkest secrets into a crowded street and hoping only one specific person stops to pick it up. I told myself somebody has to review these vital statistics in order to complete the sale, and this was a secure site that would safeguard the information with their lives. The number of people exposed to this information has grown over the years, of course, to include representatives of all the companies with whom I have conducted business in the past … and anyone with a computer and internet access.

Reassured, I began typing, and I was immediately confronted with a dilemma : what do I do at the two-line section for my street address? If I filled in only the top line, would the computer assume there was no apartment or suite number and skip over the second one? Or was it better to skip the first one myself, making it obvious the second one was unnecessary? I was hoping that by helping the computer early on in the process, it would return the favor later when I started to have problems. Ultimately, the computer was in charge of this whole situation, and I would have done anything to lessen my inevitable confusion and frustration. I would hold the door for it - maybe buy it lunch - if something like that was possible. I just can’t think digitally.

But I pressed on, imagining my family’s joy and delight when that sweet rainbow in a box arrived on my doorstep. The price for adoration was steep, however, at $70.00 for two dozen mini cupcakes. I thought maybe the high cost was due to critical shortages of flour and sugar wreaking havoc in a volatile commodities market … or perhaps the union that represented itty-bitty pastry decorators and icing specialists went on strike. Regardless of whether the reason was related to supply or personnel, I looked for where I could apply one of those promo codes they offered me earlier; I was happy to support struggling pastry vendors everywhere, but I would get my $5.00 discount!

By this point, I was ready to be done with the whole process. The laptop had dipped below twenty percent, and when I saw ‘Place order,’ I clicked on it. In my excitement, I had forgotten all about the discount! There was a brief hesitation before the screen advanced, and that was when I saw ‘Add promo code’ further down below. I had just enough time to think “Why is that down so far at the end??” before it disappeared along with the rest of the page.

And with the ring of the cash register, the sale was complete. Too late to turn back, I scrambled to protect my assets from … myself. The digitally-generated engine of commerce was moving ahead without me, but I hoped I could alter its course, while still being dragged along behind. I thought that if I could submit the discount code after the transaction was over - but before the banks had gotten involved - the vendor might credit my account. It literally did not occur to me until now - as I write this - that I could have simply canceled the order and started over.

I wish that was a joke.

I had clicked on all the offers that popped up during my order, so the vendor had sent me a whole bunch of new emails. I began searching these for a discount code, but all I could find was sales pitches for more cupcakes. Because I was in the process of screwing up one order, I decided I was in too deep to start another.

I thought a real live human might help me avert total financial disaster, so I called the (I’m not making this up) “Happy helper” line. With visions of elves reciting flavor profiles from their cubicles in some North Pole call center, I made the call. And I waited while the tepid ‘hold’ music seeped into my ears and oozed across my frontal lobes until I was helplessly humming along. These folks already have so much of my personal information, why don’t they tap into my Pandora playlist and play that back to me? They didn’t even have the courtesy to have the obligatory message of ‘Your call is important to us’ playing on auto-repeat. I first lost patience, then heart. I hung up.

Back to the computer. I clicked on ‘Contact us’ and composed what I hoped was a clear, concise email. Afterwards, I went back to be sure all the information I sent was correct, and I saw that I put the correct date of the order, but the wrong day of the week. I missed it by three days, which is about as far off the mark as you can get in a seven day cycle. Additionally, I realized I included the order number in the heading of the email heading but not the body. No big deal, that’s why I was checking over the email, to fix any errors. Except that I had already sent the email. My attempt to straighten out my initial error was filled with errors.

I told myself I wasn’t the first person to screw up either an order or a follow up email … although possibly not both at once. But that’s what customer service is for, right? They’re more tech-savvy than me, although perhaps that’s not saying much. The pool of inaccuracies I had created was still shallow, and I was confident they could wade successfully through. I thought if I tried to fix or explain things now, sending yet another email, it would only make things more confusing. When I received an automated response a minute later, I felt reassured that I had at least sent them the correct email address. The computer provided that automatically, of course, although I was unaware of that fact. In my ignorance, I felt optimistic about the situation’s eventual outcome. They would be able to figure this out. Despite my helpful input.

When the customer service representative got back to me the next day, their first question was - predictably - “What’s the order number?” I found it, huge and underlined, in the confirmation of my initial order, and I carefully cut and pasted it to my responding email. But once it was pasted to the email, everything else I typed mimicked the large, underlined font. This meant that after customer service kindly asked about the order number, my response appeared to start off in a conversational tone, and then escalate suddenly to a meandering scream, like the order number triggered some weird number-related PTSD.

For the sake of healthy commerce, the rep ignored my rant in their next email to me, saying they would credit my account, if I could provide them with a promotional code. I had thought they might skip that part (“To hell with the red tape! This guy wants cupcakes, and he needs my help!”) and just give me a discount. But who am I to interfere in the bureaucracy of baked goods? I was just happy they were still speaking to me. In the interest of keeping my account from landing in the ‘random internet nut-job’ file, I told them I would look for one.

Unfortunately, by this point, the impending birthday was rapidly approaching. About three months prior, my wife had told me where to order the cupcakes, with a stern reminder to leave extra time for processing and shipping, and I dutifully had gotten right to the business of procrastinating until the last possible day. But I had not made allowances for the obstacles I was likely to create with my good intentions. This had become a lumbering fiasco of my own making, and it was taking up too much time.

An aside : we’ve been married awhile, so much of this post will come as no shock to her.

So there I was, scrambling to find a valid discount code, scanning through the jumble of unopened emails that began arriving ever since I first placed the order and clicked all those pop-ups. They were taking over my inbox, each offer having spawned its own thread. No matter how many times I hit delete, they came back, like weeds, threatening to bury anything I actually wanted to see. One said “In case you forgot it, use this promo code.” Among the frenzy of uncontrolled growth, a lifeline had appeared, in the form of a gesture that suggested their company was already getting to know me.

The customer services rep then messaged me an offer to add the code herself, rendering the ‘valid’ code I had just found unnecessary. But I feared that if she added the code herself, she would need to void the first sale, essentially starting all over. The big day was drawing near, and I didn’t want to add extra steps that would slow progress. And if I sent her an email asking which procedure would be quicker - voiding the first sale or using the code I just found - it would probably just serve to confuse the issue further. I resolved to keep things simple by ignoring her offer, once again returning her kindness with insolence.

In lieu of a response to her offer, my next email contained the ‘legitimate’ code with the terse note, “Your company sent me this code. Use it,” My thinking was, now that we had gotten to know each other, any warmth or friendliness on my part would seem out of character. Hoping to ensure that this email would finally put the issue to bed, I tried to include the original order number. But I couldn’t find it. If I had gone back to when this whole thing started and looked for it in the original sale’s confirmation email, I probably could have found it. But I didn’t look there. Why didn’t I? Haven’t you been listening? If you’d been paying attention, you would have realized that, in situations where a simple problem may be quickly solved using basic technological applications, my strongest inclination is to make things worse.

Instead, I found the order number in my email at the top of the thread to the customer services rep - remember I put it in the heading? - and I cut and pasted it and sent it to them. Unfortunately, in the heading to that old email, the last two digits of the order number had been cut off. I discovered this helpful little tidbit when I went back to check - once again, after I had already sent it - so it contained the ‘legitimate’ discount code but was now listed under the wrong order number.

But really, how important are a couple digits anyway? To clarify; this latest email was in response to her question about the request I made that - in an effort to streamline the process - had ignored her original solution to my problem, and I wanted to include the order number here to ensure we were all on the same page, before the customer services rep decided they had had enough and just deleted me completely from the database.

Although I doubted the fate of this meandering nightmare hung on the inclusion or deletion of two little old digits, I sent a final email with the entire order number. I signed off by saying, “Please excuse my ineptitude,” hoping a little levity would help get this thing to the finish line, and with the days to the birthday growing short, I imagined them laughing when they read that, saying “I’ve seen worse.“ But I wonder about that.

In the aftermath, with the credit card agent scratching their head, and the customer service rep requesting more overtime, I sat back, thinking, “For me, technology-wise, that really wasn’t so bad.” It was then that I remembered that the estimated delivery date - before all the confusion - was one day prior to her birthday.

Next year I’m just gonna bake a cake.