Shopping On the Internet

Michael An old computer geek like me naturally has to keep his hardware constantly up to date, so I recently bought a CD burner. Yawn, yawn, the computer whizzes among you will say, I've had one of those for five years! Sure, sure, but only recently did the devices drop below the $300 mark, and I just had to jump on it. A CD burner is a device that allows you to make your own music CDs--just like back in your student days when you compiled your favorite songs and recorded them onto a cassette using a recorder. Today, you insert a blank CD (cost: about a dollar) into a CD burner, use a computer program to read tracks from your favorite discs, and then let the computer burn the CD. It uses a laser beam to "burn" the data onto the blank CD. Afterwards, you have a CD that's just as good as one from the store--only with songs you've compiled yourself.

The purchase, however, was associated with some obstacles, because I naturally ordered with a credit card from an online store -- since it's cheaper and you don't have to pay sales tax -- which sent the package by mail. After unpacking and installing the burner from Yamaha, it turned out that the CDs produced with the burner had errors. What to do? A call to Yamaha, and the guys there told me to exchange the item. But how do you exchange something that you didn't buy in a store, but from an online retailer? A call there, and I got an ROM number (Return-of-Merchandise), which I wrote on the cardboard box I had kept, and sent the whole thing back to the virtual store, which promptly credited the amount back to my credit card. Then the process started all over again: This time I decided on a burner from another company (HP), ordered again online, and when the UPS man brought the package to the front door, the joy was great, because the CDs produced were of excellent quality, and now I burn day and night!