Off piste

Early on The Blob would insert Amazon or Amazon-affiliate links next to books I was recommending. Often sharing the delight that such a book was available for $0.01 . . . + $3.95 postage and packing. Even at 4 bucks delivered to my door, it seemed a good deal. Later, schooled by my family and para-social pals, I made a decided about-face and refused to have any dealings At All with the Amazon BezoSphere. It is all white hat vs black hat with me.

Many will express Schadenfreude when Amazon shits-the-bed, takes a pounding or is made to look stupid. Metafilter was delirah [along with BBC, Guardian, NYT, MSN, Reddit] when a sub-contractor driving an Amazon-liveried van followed their GPS into the sea writing it off when the tide came in. Icing on the cake was the news that the driver, on their third day in the job, phoned their supervisor and was instructed to Obey the GPS which would know better than any mere driver. The Broomway, which had mis-led the GPS, is a medieval trackway across tidal mudflats in Essex. It didn't take long for MetaFilter to veer judgmental:

clearly reveals the supervisor as an idiot, but lacking the gumption to force a GPS reroute and tell the supervisor to go fuck themself makes the driver a worse one.
Which was a little bit triggering for me:

Ouch, That's a bit harsh. When I was ~19, I had a job driving an Amazon-like van around rural Devon delivering books to primary schools, using a 1:200,000 scale map with the targets marked as pink blobs.
One afternoon, I set off down a lane which pointed in the right direction. But the median grass got longer and longer until the lane terminated at a farm gate. My available gumption concluded that it would be easier to turn round in the field than reverse for 3or4 km. After a couple of swings at that, each one further down hill, I left the van and trudged across the valley towards a distant farmstead. Kindly farmer looked back at my attempts to plough pasture and took me back there in his tractor, with which he extracted the van pointing in the right direction. It all seemed normal adulting at the time, my toes are curling now. 

That was the second job in my gap year after leaving school. Head office wrote letters to school principals to expect me during one week to deliver the samples; returning to collect the box a week later. It was The Best fun. They reckoned, in consultation with local sales reps, that 20 drops a day was an achievable target. I found out that 40 drops a day was possible (unless, like, doing the ploughing); which gave me half a week to drive my bus around Dartmoor and the Devon coast on someone else's nickel. I am amazed at the luck and Can Do of my 19 y.o. self: I'm less bouncy, not to say immortal, now.

NotAmazon Independents who deliver the goods:

• kennys.ie for books delivered Free to Ireland; 
• uk.bookshop.org for books to England: 
• lenehans.ie/ for any non-book stuff