First Order from Amazon
Amazon remembers every order you ever placed. My first order was on March 3, 2000. Here’s what it contained:
- Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson
- The Hedgehog and the Fox : An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History, by Isaiah Berlin
- Cocktail : The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century, by Paul Harrington, Laura Moorhead
I liked Red Mars, but never got around to reading the rest of the books in the series. The Hedgehog and the Fox was good too. I was reminded of this book recently in an excellent SALT podcast by Philip Tetlock called "Why Foxes Are Better Forecasters Than Hedgehogs". The real winner in this batch is Cocktail, which I still reference regularly. This is no surprise though. I was already familiar with this same material from HotWired’s Cocktail, which introduced me in 96-97 to what are still my three favorite drinks, the Gibson, the Rusty Nail, and the Sidecar.
Viewing the payment info and it said I used a gift certificate for that order. I searched my e-mail and found the original gift certificate. It was a gift from Diana, the same Diana I would start dating later that year.
Embarrassingly, the search also turned up the fact that this gift certificate originally expired before I cashed it in. Amazon was nice enough to send me this e-mail a month later:
We've discovered that you received a $<INSERT_AMOUNT_HERE> Amazon.com gift certificate, and that it expired without ever being redeemed. That's no fun. So, as our gift to you, we're reactivating it.
In spite of the honkey-tonk mail merge that left in INSERT_AMOUNT_HERE, I was able to reactivate it and make my first purchase.
(via Matthew Oliphant)
k posted on 2007-07-21 (source):
You saved yourself a lot of pain by avoiding Green and Blue Mars. Better to stick with cocktails than Robinson's increasingly tedious fiction.Peter posted on 2007-07-21 (source):
Once again, I'm amazed at your skill, Matt. Not only do you find the "Neat Thing Of The Day", NTOTD, but also you used the phrase honkey-tonk! Well played. Of course, I had to check my Amazon history right quick and came across my first order, October 23, 1998. (kicking your double-major ass, btw) I bought the children's book "Old Turtle" on behalf of my parents for my nephew. Not sure why October was significant. Again, well played.Kevin Ahern posted on 2007-07-23 (source):
I'm almost positive that I made orders in 1996 or 1997, but this was the earliest that I could find through Amazon: Order Date: August 16, 1998 Order #: 002-0998027-9248662 Recipient: Kevin Ahern View order Items: * The Unbearable Lightness of Being * The God of Small Things * Three Novels of Old New York : The House of Mirth, the Custom of the Country, the Age of Innocence * Last Exit to Brooklyn * Photoshop 5 for Macs for Dummies (For Dummies) I was pretty surprised that I had kept the same account all the way through. I've gone through at least 5-10 email addresses in that time. Although, I should give the caveat that many of these books were not for me. I lived with two women in Queens at the time. My books were God of Small Things and the Photoshop book. (OK, I guess that's not any less nerdy. Oh well.)