Chocolate . . .

MUST. HAVE. CHOCOLATE.

Here is your chance to torment me: post your favorite recipe which you make when you absolutely have to have a chocolate fix. Mine, of course, is chocolate microwave cake. And you? And do you go for white, milk or dark? (I go for dark, myself.)

I am trying to lose weight. This is not helping. Um . . . lo-cal recipes to enjoy chocolate while not busting the calorie budget are welcome, too.

More food: And now for something completely different

Watermelon sculpture!

Gacked from kalquessa.

Defeated by technology

I decided to take the plunge and try to order a polyphonic ringtone off the web. I had never done this sort of thing before. Hey, it was only $5.00, and I had a PayPal account. How difficult could this be?

Well, I didn't know what I was doing, and I didn't even know what questions to ask. I put in my PayPal payment, and the website said, "Now we will redirect you to the website where you ordered your product" and then a string of gobbledygook. The redirect failed. I kept checking for messages, but nothing came in.

So I e-mailed technical support, and I asked nicely, where is my ringtone, please? I think there was some kind of problem because my transaction did not seem to be completed. They e-mailed back and said we have no record of your transaction; provide further detail, please. So I e-mailed back the information on my PayPal receipt. They sent me a few e-mails back and forth.

Then this is what irritated me: today I had forty-five e-mails in my in-box. I chose one of the latest ones first, seeing it was from the tech department. It sent me a link and said, "download this into your phone's WAP browser." I know nothing about my phone's WAP browser, but I blundered around the menu until I found a place to input bookmarks, hunt-and-pecked to type it in and hopefully hit "Send." My phone said "Response unknown."

I went to Rob and made frustrated noises and he said, "I actually don't think we HAVE a WAP browser on the phone. We didn't sign up for it."

So I e-mailed the tech department and said, "I'm sorry, but I guess I don't have a WAP browser, which I guess means I can't get the ringtone. Is there anything else you can do, or can I get a refund?"

Rob then suggested, "Maybe you could download whatever-it-is on your computer and then swap it over with a cable or something?"

So I typed the link into my computer browser and got a string of gobbledygook. No love there.

Then I noticed in my older e-mails another message from the tech department and THIS one said, "Do not input this link into your computer, because if you do, you will not get the ringtone, and you will not get a refund."

Well, @#$*&(. Of course I saw this after I had already looked at the link on my computer. The first e-mail I checked (actually the second one sent) had no such warning.

So: no ring tone. And unless they are very nice to me, no refund. I have sent yet another e-mail explaining what happened and asking for a refund anyway (on the basis of the fact that the second e-mail, the first one I checked, had no such warning).

Damn. It is a very small amount of money, but I am still ticked off.