I think I crossed one of these. The Chesapeake Bridge. As I have this thing about falling from heights, some of these bridges were scary enough on video. I'd never cross them.

Or a journey through customer service.

I do some Subscribe and Save items on Amazon and I had a shipment due recently. It was supposed to be here last Friday, but there was a shipping delay. Still, no big deal, it would arrive on Monday. Only on Monday instead of two boxes outside my door, there was only one.

I checked around the front of the house, went online and read what Amazon had to say about it. They suggested 1. waiting an extra day because sometimes a shipper will say delivered a bit prematurely and 2. contact the shipper.

Since I've never had a premature delivery notice, I sent a tweet to UPS. The person who responded was friendly and gave me an email address where I needed to send the information. So I did that and waited.

The response came on Tuesday. It was terse. The gist of it was: if there were two boxes, they'd each have their own tracking number. You only have one tracking number, you'll have to contact Amazon. Okay, then. Fine.

I did the Contact Us form on the bottom of my account page. I had a response from Amazon within an hour even though they give themselves 12 hours to respond. The Customer Service specialist had replacement items on the way already, and she was sorry, but one item was out of stock. Would I like a refund?

Wow. How awesome is that? I rarely, as in almost never, have a problem with Amazon, and when I did, they immediately took care of me, their customer. This was a far different feeling than I had at the end of the UPS exchange.

At the end of this, I'm left with a real meh feeling about UPS, but I'm like, Amazon rocks! Might be a lesson for other companies and their customer service employees.

Late Sunday night, while I was watching the Oscars and thinking about heading to bed, someone tweeting a promo code to Kobo. It was unlimited use and 90% off! OMG!

I immediately hightailed it over to their site. I've had a list of books that's I've wanted to buy forever, but they were all pretty pricey, especially for ebooks. My wish list was reduced substantially as I bought up a storm. Writing books, reference books, romance books, books that simply plain interested me. I bought them all.

I thought I was done, but then yesterday during my lunch hour I saw on Twitter that the coupon code was still good and I picked up a couple more books. With 90% off, it would have been foolish not to!

Of course, not all the books I wanted were included in the sale. The big 5 didn't participate as well as some other publishers like the company that does the For Dummies series. Ah, well, I did enough damage without them.

Grand total? I bought 30 books, but since most of them were a little over a dollar, I think I came out ahead big time.

Alas, I think the coupon code died between lunch time on Monday and when I got home that night or I'd share it here and tell you all to buy my books. The code didn't work on anything I tried to buy yesterday in the evening. Yep, I was still looking to add to the To Be Read pile. Can you blame me? Sales like that don't come often.

Air New Zealand rocks!

Twitter is one of my favorite places to hang out. I love having conversation with people there and checking in to see what others are talking about, but there's one Twitter tradition that needs to be retired. Follow Friday.

Let me be clear, I appreciate each Follow Friday mention I receive, but there are authors and others who only do it to promote themselves. There's even a service that will do all the Follow Friday tweets for them!

That's not what Follow Friday (#FF) was intended to be.

In the early days of Twitter (and I've been on there for six years now!), Follow Friday was a way to help new people find others to friend. Someone would usually tweet the person's user ID and then a short reason about why they'd be fun to tweet with.

Before much longer, this morphed into tweets with just a list of user IDs and a #FF tacked on. The problem with this, though, is that it had nothing about why to follow someone. As this new list style became more and more pervasive, Follow Friday became less useful and fewer people participated.

But there are still some diehards who tweet out their list of names for Follow Friday every week, and in an aggravating twist, those who were part of this list began retweeting the #FF post.

Maybe it's just me, but the only Follow Friday mentions I see anywhere on Twitter right now are from the people doing it to promote themselves. With those they mention either retweeting the tweet (which means everyone who's friended them sees it) or my style, which is to say thank you and then put the user ID (which means all of my friends see it).

Again, maybe it's just me, but when I see a #FF with a list of names that fills all 140 characters, I don't even read it anymore let alone check anyone out to see if I want to follow them. This defeats the whole purpose of the hashtag and why I think it's time for it to end

The value to this type of tweet is long, long gone.

For Follow Friday to be worth anything again (as well as it's less well known cousin, Writer Wednesday (#WW)), it means that those sending out the tweets need to go back to adding a reason why I should care about following this person. You know like this: "#FF @Patti_OShea because she always retweets the best science stories and loves to say good morning to people."

And if I'm interested in science stories, I might check out this Patti O'Shea. ;-) But just a list of names? Um, no. We might as well call Follow Friday done and move on.

BTW, if you want to follow me on Twitter, you can find me here: https://twitter.com/Patti_OShea