The other day I was arguing with the Snook about something – I can’t remember what – but his general homebody-ness and antipathy to the world just made my head explode and I decided that meant it was time for me to do some Good Deeds so as to Contribute to Society. Somehow I ended up at the Clean Up Australia Day website. I found the work site closest to me and signed up. Today was the big day, so I headed over to the Ultimo Community Garden armed with a hat, sunscreen, bottle of water, and pair of thick gloves. (The Garden is lovely, by the way. I’d never seen it before!) Pauline the organiser put me to work on Macarthur Street picking up rubbish with a young guy named Matt. There are several nice little verge gardens filled with agapanthus and bushes, and JERKS LOVE TO THROW RUBBISH IN THEM. So Matt and I worked in the sun for an hour, pulling out old beer bottles and coffee cups and candy bar wrappers and bits of plastic and old takeaway containers and a lot of other icky crap. Oh, and we picked up ABOUT A BILLION CIGARETTE BUTTS. After a short break to rehydrate and reapply sunscreen, we went over to Jones Street to the pedestrian area near MSY to pick up ANOTHER BILLION CIGARETTE BUTTS. A few people talked to us, which was nice. “Oh, is it Clean Up Australia Day already?!” they’d ask. I was tempted to tell them no, I was just on work release from prison. At one point a young guy came past finishing off a can of Coke, and I said loudly, “YOU BETTER NOT THROW THAT IN THE BUSH.” He was like, “I wasn’t going to!” while ostentatiously putting it in the bin. Harrumph. Anyway, I finished my two hour shift and said goodbye to Pauline and Matt, happily heading home with a feeling of accomplishment… which lasted 2 minutes until I got on Wattle Street and passed my first empty beer bottle and pile of cigarette butts.

So when you buy something from a website, how do you know the order has been submitted? Because they email you right away, right? Well, what happens when they don’t?

I ordered my Dad something from Cabela’s for his birthday a few weeks ago. It’s a hunting/fishing shop, and I remembered that he always used to get their print catalogues. So I placed the order, being sure to click the “gift” option. When it directed me to the confirmation screen, I saw these words: “This order will ship as a gift. An email Confirmation will not be sent. Pricing will not be shown on the invoice.” Naturally I assumed they were talking about not sending an email confirmation to the recipient, right? Obviously that’s what the invoice part was talking about, and that’s the way Amazon and every other site does it. So I went about my day, and within a couple days started to get worried that I’d never received an email as the sender. Since I purchased as a guest (not bothering to create an account), I didn’t have a way to log in and see my orders. I checked my online banking but the charge hadn’t gone through. Crap. Did something screw up and they’d never gotten the order?

Luckily I’d printed the confirmation page, so I at least had something to contact customer support. Their online chat was at least quick and painless. It turns out that they actually do have a method for guests to check order status. That was unexpected but helpful. I could see that the order was indeed placed and was just waiting on the manufacturer to ship. Here’s how the conversation ended:

CSR: You’re welcome. Is there anything else we can do for you today?
Me: Nope – that was it. I do have a suggestion though that you email people who make gift orders
I found it very odd that I didn’t get any email confirmation or anything like that
given that every other ecommerce site does it!
CSR: Did you happen to mark gift on the order?
Me:I did
I understand not emailing the recipient
but it would be handy as the purchaser to have a record
CSR: That would be the reason for no emails. We do not send them so we do not spoil the supprise.
Me: But… I bought it for someone else?
Do you have a lot of people sharing email addresses who order gifts?
CSR: I do apologize. Most of our gift marked packages are to the same household who both use the same email address.

That’s weird, right? I didn’t realise there were still people who shared the same email address. I guess the Cabela’s demographic is right in the middle of that Venn diagram. But man, it does make it confusing for the rest of us who live in 2015. To me this is a textbook example of bad user experience, in that I expected the site to work like every other e-commerce site on the Internet. If Cabela’s ever want to expand beyond their traditional user base, I think they need to put a little more work into explaining the oddities of their processes.

Canvas Truckette Bag – ‘Stylus’ | Queen Bee by Rebecca Pearcy – Reminds me of my long gone, much lamented Record Album Truckette.

Sony Pictures Entertainment Brings Marvel Studios Into The Amazing World Of Spider-Man | News | Marvel.com – Very cool. Now they just need to get the X-Men rights away from Fox so they can take part as well. Mega crossover events in films!

People Who Use Emojis Have More Sex | TIME – I still maintain that emoticons > emoji though. I mean, come on. Emoji have yet to capture the brilliance that is “clown hat, curly hair, smiley face”!

The Best Decade Ever? The 1990s, Obviously – NYTimes.com – You know it’s true.

DeathHacks – The Message – Medium – Good essay by Jessamyn West on the “slow motion hackathon” that ensued when her father passed away. I appreciated the reminder to get our shit together. You should too.

AVENUE Q | Enmore Theatre – I finally found a musical that the Snook will happily attend with me. We’re booked in for the 4th of July!

Catmosphere Cat Café – A space-themed cat cafe in Sydney? I hope it’s close to work. I will definitely check it out. 🙂

I woke up this morning and had a look at Twitter (as you do). To my surprise, I saw this:

@web_goddess bahh! @neilhimself posted a link to your Dahl site (measles piece)! lol! 🙂

– miftik (@miftik) February 2, 2015

Wait, what? Neil Gaiman tweeted a link to my site? I went in search.

Heartbreaking and wise Roald Dahl letter to his readers about measles and his daughter Olivia. http://t.co/MdgLiLAMlb (via @timminchin)

– Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) February 1, 2015

Wow. He really did! Turns out he got it from Tim Minchin. (Tim, of course, wrote the music for “Matilda”.)

So here’s the very sad #oliviadahl letter again: http://t.co/viSDnWgpWU And now I’m off to have hot chocolate with my vaccinated kids.

– Tim Minchin (@timminchin) February 1, 2015

I discovered pretty quickly that a LOT of other people had picked up the story. They were all linking to this letter from Roald Dahl about why you should immunise your children. His daughter Olivia died from measles encephalitis. I posted that letter on the site about two years ago and then completely forgot about it. I’ve actually been following the story of the recent Disneyland measles outbreak with fascination (don’t even get me started on those stupid, stupid “anti-vaxxers”) and never remembered there was a big tie-in to Dahl. But somehow over the past three days it blew up in a really big way.

See? I’m still not sure who actually started it. People have been tweeting links to the page off and on for the past two years, but the most recent one that could have started the avalanche was from Charles Simmins. On the 30th someone wrote about the issue on Daily Kos. Was that where it picked up steam? Kottke tweeted about it, but it didn’t really go nuts until Tim Minchin and Neil Gaiman picked up on it. It spread to Facebook where it’s still trending. At some point the folks at the official site got wind of it and started emailing and tweeting sites, suggesting they instead link to the page on their site instead. (Fair enough. They contacted my site too so I happily put a note on the page.) Right now lots of sites are still writing about it but most are just reproducing the text themselves. So while my site did get a really big spike – about 10x its normal traffic – I suspect it’s not as big as it could have been. In the end most of my traffic was from Twitter and Facebook, where folks mostly don’t bother to go back and change links to things. And I’m still getting some clicks from sites like Get Off My Internets, Refinery29, Reddit, and even Metafilter.

So there’s my 15 minutes of Internet fame for 2015, I guess!