I had ordered a sparkly little bauble from Amazon online that I’d invested ridiculous amounts of time (days’ worth) into researching and selecting, and was crazy-excited to receive it in the mail last week. It was gorgeous and fit my hand, both in size and in appearance, like a dream. The ring had so much shine even Mr. W was impressed. Later the same evening, I noticed one of the tiny side stones under the beaded prong of the center stone looked irregular. The metal next to that stone also appeared to be scraped. There definitely was some poor workmanship going there. I wasn’t happy about that, but Mr. W pointed out that it wasn’t like I paid thousands of bucks for a real diamond ring. But still, it wasn’t free, and it wasn’t inexpensive…I thought I’d see if I could live with it.

A few days went by. I still love the look of the ring on my hand, but my eye was always drawn to the irregular part the way the tip of a tongue is drawn to a hole in a tooth. I finally took a really, really good, close look at it last night in the light. And saw that the tiny stone was actually broken, partially chipped off. It looked irregular there because half the stone is missing where the metal holding it is scraped and the light, instead of bouncing off a shiny surface, just gets lost in a dark tiny hole. Now I was really unhappy, seeing that it is damage and not irregularity.

Last night, I tried to find a way to contact the seller via Amazon, and couldn’t find contact information. So I wrote an email to Amazon customer service, selecting on the drop-down options that the item had arrived damaged although no damage was done to the shipping box. My simple message requested contact information for the seller as I would like the item to be replaced.

This morning, I saw two emails from Amazon customer service. One was a notice that they’d looked into the delivery status of my item and saw that there was no delivery confirmation, so it appeared as if I’d never received the item. This notice was full of apologies and an explanation that they aren’t able to replace the item via Amazon since the item was from a 3rd party seller, so instead, I can reorder the item via the same seller and they’ll upgrade my shipping to next-day for free, and/or I can have my money refunded for the “unarrived” ring now. The second email is a confirmation that shows all my money refunded.

I was immediately horrified. Somehow communication got crossed and they didn’t get the drop-down selections I’d clicked that I’d received the item damaged. Now they think I don’t have a ring and I already got my money credited back to my card. I could now keep the ring (damaged) and it’d be free. This did not sit well with me at all and I clicked around frantically trying to find a way to respond to Amazon’s customer service to clear this up, but all the emails were automatically generated and contained a line that said “Do not reply to this email.” I went to the Amazon site a few times, trying to find a way to link off of there for a reference to the current issue, and eventually found a “feedback” section for Amazon customer service to call me immediately. In my haste I didn’t even type my phone number correctly the first time and wondered why the call never came through. The second attempt, a very nice man called me immediately.

I explained myself, and he remedied it immediately while I was on the phone with him. He told me to let the refund go through and he was meanwhile generating a free return label for me to return the damaged ring (which is supposed to be what happens), and said I can repurchase the item via the seller right now and he’ll do the upgrade to free next-day shipping. He even looked up UPS places near me that I can drop off the damaged ring to be returned, and said I have 30 days so to not stress about getting it done immediately. I repurchased the item from the seller while he was on the line, he immediately, on his end, upgraded my shipping to next-day, and I was able to print the prepaid return labels to return the damaged ring. I was impressed when I hung up the phone.

And then I thought, Am I a total sucker? How many people would’ve been all, “I don’t know what happened to the delivery confirmation, but woohoo, free ring! It’s a holiday miracle!”? If it had been more difficult to contact Amazon customer service so that I’d be forced to sit on my hands longer, would I have just decided to let it go, keep the ring and money? Does questioning this mean that I have a dishonest side, too?

Next, I thought, No, given how uncomfortable I was, how strong the urgency was to rectify this, I would’ve never been okay with letting things stay wrong. It’s unfair to the selling company, to Amazon as the middle man, to the delivery service that was going to eat the cost of ‘losing’ an item. I chose to stop thinking there.