What did you do last week?

Last week I finally took advantage of Amazon Prime, which I still pay for but ended up not using as much as YouTube lately. Last week I used two of Amazon Prime’s services, Prime Video and one-day shipping. I found out that the show Picard, even though it is a show that is exclusive to the CBS app in the U.S., is on Amazon Prime as an Amazon Original in Japan. Therefore, I started watching that show. It is a show that follows the exploits of the main character Jean-Luc Picard, who was captain of the ship the Enterprise in the Star Trek series The Next Generation. I used to watch that show when it was on television and really liked it. I watched it regularly and I watched most of the movies that were made. Even though I had liked The Next Generation, I was not exactly interested in seeing Picard, until I found that it was on Amazon Prime in Japan. I have been watching the episodes as they come out and I watched the newest one last week.

The other thing I did last week that was out of the ordinary was to return a product from Amazon for the first time. I have canceled a product after I bought it before, but this is the first time where I actually sent something back. What I bought was a new cell phone case. First, I need to give you some backstory.

I had phone problems last year. The phone I have been using stopped working; it wouldn’t turn on. I got a new phone and case on Amazon, but before the phone could ship my old phone came back to life suddenly. I was able to cancel the phone, but the case arrived too quickly. The thing was that the phone and case were from the same maker of my old phone, but the model was different. The camera and buttons were all in different places. Rather than spend the time or money sending the case back, though, I decided to retrofit it. I used a knife to resize the camera hole in the back of the case and to open the side of the plastic to access the power button. On my phone the power button is on the side of the phone, and it is also a fingerprint sensor, but on the newer phone, which the case was designed for, the fingerprint sensor is on the back of the phone. Therefore, I more or less cut it all to size and because the size of the actual phone case was the same, it worked, and I have been using that case ever since.

However, that case has started to get a bit old and the rubber around the edges to seal them in place has started to come off, so I found a new phone case and bought it on a whim on Amazon. It showed up the next day, but I waited until the day after to actually open the case. I was excited when I finally opened it, and I liked the color and it all seemed great. That is, until I tried to put my phone in the case and discovered that I had bought a case for a phone with a similar model name, from the same maker, but too small. This one would have been impossible to retrofit.
As I was checking out the ‘returns’ guidelines I accidentally started the process to return it. I got sent a mailing address with a bar code, printed it off at 7-11, and sent it the next day from a post office. I got a refund that covered the cost of the phone case as well as the shipping. It was easier than I thought; it just takes a bit of time.

Daniel

Vocabulary

follow (verb) – [in terms of stories, movies, etc.] to be about the experiences of someone or something over a period of time
exploit (noun) - a brave, exciting or interesting act
backstory (noun) - the things that happened before, and helped to bring about, current events
come back to life (idiom) – to become alive after being dead
retrofit (verb) – to put a new piece of equipment into a machine that did not have it when it was built; to provide a machine with a new part, etc.
on a whim (idiom) - a sudden wish to do or have something, especially when it is something unusual or unnecessary