Lame-azon. Dumbazon. Suckazon. This is the direction all of my creative juices have been flowing over the past few days: thinking up insults with which to refer to Amazon, verbally encapsulating my feelings about the screwed-up listing of my book on their website. In other words, I am wasting my time.

I have also been pestering my customer service rep the printing house, to the point where she must certainly be questioning her life choices, those that brought her to the unhappy position being my customer service rep. But I am wasting my time. A bus driver—master and commander of her own ship—might be able to give you a free ride, but a stewardess can not; she is just a helpless cog in a big machine. All she can be is nice.

The one direct action I’ve been able to take is to build a refresh page, a web page that, while open, reloads the broken Amazon listing of my book every thirty seconds. The idea, I tell myself, is ease my way into their awareness, like a distant light flashing on a dark horizon, subliminally attracting your attention. But I am wasting my time. This more like shooting BBs at the gates of Jeff Bezos’s ten-million dollar mansion; the most I’m likely to do is rouse security.

So I write letters to the Amazon customer service department, where some poor fellow, fifteen payscales down from the people who can actually help me (and probably several continents over) politely cuts-and-pastes various sections of the FAQ from their web page, sending me notes like “That book appears to be out of print, I suggest you try our book search program to find a used copy.” I attempt to engage him in discussion, telling him, “Oh, no, that’s not true. I know for a fact that The Deadfall Project is still in print. In fact, it’s life has just begun. Here are a few hundred links that will show you otherwise…” But I am wasting my time. My replies don’t even go back to the same customer service rep; they are randomly forwarded to someone else in what, I imagine, is a stadium-sized room, tightly-packed with men and women earnestly searching the help section on the Amazon website, seeking the most appropriate response to cut and paste.

So for all that I am doing, I am doing nothing. While some of it is frustrating, some of it does make me feel better. And of the latter, none more than just cursing of their name.

Assazon.