And my first rant

is about Amazon.com. Where the hell do these dickheads get off telling us that we can't download mp3s from them because we're outside of the States?! I live on a goddamn US army base in Germany - that's technically US soil!!! I have an APO address, an American bank account and was trying to pay in dollars!!!

What the hell?!

This isn't our first brush with the feckbags at amazon.com either!

A few weeks ago, hubby and I got the idea to do our own podcast and so off we toddled to the Power Zone (the electronics store on post) and found a mic.

'Oh great!' we both thought. But no.

We got it home and it wasn't even assembled when we got it out of the box. We had to assemble it ourselves, I mean come on...really? 60 bucks and you have to assemble your own mic? Then came the doozy, it didn't work. Not on my husband's giant 'going-to-take-over-the-world' computer, or my laptop or his laptop (yes, we're geeks).

So we took it back and were dealt with by the one employee in the Power Zone that makes me want to smack them in the face as soon as I see them. It's something about the face, that smirking, smarmy face and constantly masticating mouth - like they're chewing cud (notice I'm playing the pronoun game? That's in the interests of anonymity).

We then decided to look online for a mic, because we *really* want to inflict ourselves onto the world. Because of my accent, I'm near enough unintelligible to Americans when I'm excited and my husband sounds like a radio broadcaster so it would be like 'The Broadcaster and the Monkey'. It would rock.

We found a mic for about 35 dollars on amazon.com that had been reduced from about 80. 'Good deal!' we think and try to purchase said mic only to have some crappy notice from amazon saying that they don't ship electronic equipment outside of the US, not even to APOs!!!

So my conclusion is this Amazon, you suck.