The Kindle Diaries - Part 5, Complete With Snacks

It’s been a week of disappointments, and some of them I am duty-bound to share with you.

For those of you who were interested in The Kindle Diaries, I have an update.

One of our Kindles died. Emergency Contact got one as a present and it needs to be replaced after only making it through five months of, not particularly strenuous, use. The mode of its demise I find interesting and will be handing on to Amazon.

She was sitting on the apron of Bangkok airport, waiting to take off, when the reader went into an uninterruptable software update. Mine did one at much the same time in Australia, and it was most annoying. I was reading and it just flicked over to a ‘busy’ screen and there was nothing I could do about it for some minutes. Hers flicked over to the busy screen and then she got thrown into the sky and out of range of the update by a couple of healthy jet-engines. The Kindle never recovered. It just got stuck and she had no book for the entire leg between Thailand and Australia. Now, if Amazon warn you that it might happen and give you the option to delay the update until you’re safe in your home territory, that’d be alright, but we didn’t get a say. It just went and did it. (The wireless connections weren't even on.) And there can be no excuse in the fact that she was out of her home Whispernet territory for the update (Whispernet is what they call the 3G connection). The thing is designed to be ideal for travellers. That’s the whole point of being able to get a ton of books on one small contraption. No good if it’s completely baffled by changing locations.

Anyway, this all happens as my boss strikes up an arrangement with me to sign for his replacement Kindle. I need to open it, re-register it from Australia and post it on to Singapore, where he can go back to downloading his books onto his computer and then onto the device. His stopped working as well, but Amazon don’t ship, or have Whispernet, in Singapore. In my book, that’s not a good week for the eReaders.

In fairness, the customer support and interactions with Amazon have been very positive. I will wait with interest to see how this all pans out.

But that leaves me with the real bummer of the week. I bought a packet of Burger Rings with no flavour on them. It was really weird. They were the templates of Burger Rings. Just the shapes; no colour, no flavour, no nothing. I saved them. I was going to complain and keep them as proof, but now they sort of interest me. It’s like wanting to keep the runt of the litter, or something. Maybe a kindly spider will come and write advertising on my roof eaves and people will come from miles around to see the amazing albino burger rings.

Come to think of it, I think eight legged creatures are the ticket, here. What I need, before I make any rash consumer decisions, is an octopus. They never get it wrong.