I worked at a store and can't remember how many customers had to use a different card or simply won't purchase anything because I won't take a credit card that won't swipe. It's the correct thing to do and a lot of times I saved someone else some money because of this.
No, it's not the correct thing to do. The correct thing to do is manually enter the credit card number from the card. When the receipt prints, you'll see a little line at the bottom which usually says "METHOD: SWIPED" but now says "METHOD: MANUAL ENTRY". So, in your example where it's a cloned credit card with no active magstripe, and Joe The Real Card Owner sees the charge (because of that pesky little $50/zero liability thing), he'll call his card provider who'll pull up the transaction, reverse it on his say-so, make a note of the big red flag of a manual entry or MOTO (mail order / telephone order) at a facility that normally uses swipe readers and that'll be passed along to the card provider.
The REAL reason you did it was not for the customer's benefit but for your benefit or the store's. After all, someone's walked out of your store with something, and paid for it with someone else's credit card. Now the rightful owner of that credit account has had the transaction reversed, your store is out the money, but has no goods, and you probably have little chance of seeing your fair compensation. Depending on the details of the fraud, and your position, that could mean anything from just adding a number to a line item on the corporate balance sheet, to a manager riding your ass, to being fired (rightly or wrongly) because too many fraudulent register transactions can be "linked" to you.
All of the above are valid reasons.
But don't piss around with "I'm only doing it to protect you, the customer, and save you money!" You say later:
a lot of times I saved someone else some money because of this
You PRESUME. Because if you never ran the card (and even if you did, unless it came back flagged as listed), you have NO IDEA as to whether the card was genuine or not. It just makes you feel better and massages your ego when you're "explaining to the customer" why you won't run their card.
If you can afford to have a team shooting an event, then you can afford Aperture, Lightroom, or one of several other products that lets you do automated renaming based on, amongst other attributes, Camera Serial Number. As long as your shooters aren't swapping cameras with each other, there you have it.
T-mobile is nice - if you have coverage. I used to work 5 miles away from their American head office, and a significant population base on the east side of Seattle. Zero bars. Fun times.
You should qualify that further. Some people consider Novell a "Linux company" but it's poison.
Alright twitter, I work for a healthcare company whose primary product runs under Linux, specifically Red Hat. We have a custom database-backed application that does exporting for reporting to MySQL, and a web interface built on top of Apache, PHP, and the Zend Framework. Internally, we also use MediaWiki, ht://dig, and many many other open source applications. We hold no patents, let alone any that would be used defensively. Better?
Most people would consider a company that works hard to avoid local taxes to be a significant burden instead of the economic contributor people expect. Why is it that more M$ employees don
Your link makes claims along the lines of the belief that Microsoft should be funding the 520 bridge, because so many MS employees use it. I notice it doesn't claim that Nintendo of America (which has an offshore parent, if you want to talk about tax minimization) should be funding the same bridge. I think that anyone that claims that MS is a "significant burden instead of the economic contributor people expect" has a very biased viewpoint. I'm sure most of the local business owners would agree, as MS makes a point of using local catering for business meetings, local haulage firms for moving, etc, etc.
Asking why more MS employees don't live in Redmond is a silly question. Why don't more SV business employees live in SV itself?? See my point? The 40,000 people of Redmond are footing the cost of a percentage of the bridge, because of the benefit TO THEM afforded by reduced traffic ON THEIR roads. MS is actually contributing in the order of FORTY PER CENT of the cost of the bridge.
About here is where I should roll my eyes, I suspect, and remember who I'm talking to.
The other killer use for this app I can think right off the top of my head, is being able to sit down at a computer, and actually *type* the message I want to send or forward to somebody with an actual keyboard, which you may or may not be aware, would get the job done with a much higher level of comfort, and unparalleled speed.
Bingo. Reason why I love my Nokia N series. This is a full-blown, Python-powered web server for my cellphone. I can log into it via web browser, I can set profiles. I can view contacts and the in phone gallery. I can send and receive text and multimedia messages, from my web browser, via my phone - it even ties into the contact list on the phone to make it easier. You can set up AN RSS FEED(!) of all log events (placed, missed, received calls, texts, etc!)
My wife and I combined spend $6,100 a year (although 80% of it is reimbursed by my employer) for health "insurance" (cast back through my comment history to find what I think of this, and why I wrapped insurance in quotation marks)... Looking at ehealthinsurance.com, I could see it as a very accurate figure - the figure came from the WHO.
It is? We rank #27 in number of hospital beds per capita. We rank #47 in the world in life expectancy. We rank #52 in the world in number of physicians per capita. Cuba has three times as many per head. Significant portions of the developing world have more doctors than us. #13 in the number of nurses.
Shall I continue? #19 in the world on Acute Care Beds.
We DO, however, SPEND by far the most on health care. Over $4,000 per person per year. Our health expenditure increases over 3% per annum, in excess of inflation. Ask yourself what you got for that money some time, when you're talking about defining "best" healthcare.
We DON'T have some of the best healthcare in the world. But we ARE told that, in order to justify the fact that our premiums keep going up and up and up. (My wife and I went from $431 to $510 a month last year, despite no non-routine events).
In fact, according to the WHO, on an overall index of "overall health performance" we're not even in the top 20 countries in the world. On "levels of health" we rank SEVENTY SECOND, and on "level of health care performance", THIRTY SEVENTH (from http://www.photius.com/rankings/world_health_systems.html).
Microsoft actually does extremely well with their shuttling situation. For large, common routes, they use large buses. For smaller routes they use "commuter" buses, running on a regular schedule.
For on-demand shuttle usage, you go to any building reception, request a shuttle. They have an integrated dispatch network which will aggregate trips, so along comes a Prius (they only use the Prius), picks you up, makes as many pickups as possible in a beeline between you and your destination, attempting to fill the car where possible, and then drops you off in the optimal fashion. In this sense, it's pretty hard to fault Microsoft (who also offer all employees free public transport passes, paid for by the company).
Which is, gasp, exactly what they did. They offered it with the intention of it being used as an adjunct to Google services, which ties into their revenue base. Along came a bunch of freeloaders, bypassed that tie-in to get all the benefits with no 'cost' (advertising metrics, whatever), and it got turned off. Color me unsurprised.
When (and if) this is reintroduced, there'll be mechanisms in place to push you through something to get access. To those who mention POP3 and Gmail, realize you are in the minority. What you typically give Google in exchange for your non ad-sponsored mail experience is 'goodwill' that pays for your service by virtue of active or passive referrals.
How myopic. As someone who once worked at MS (and now at a Linux company, so sad that I feel I need to qualify that) - Redmond is a traffic nightmare, due to the sheer volume of intercampus transport for Microsoft (and other companies in the area, but MS is certainly the biggest).
Would an overpass benefit MS? Absolutely. Would it take SEVERAL THOUSAND VEHICLES A DAY off of Redmond's roads, much to the benefit of Redmond locals and other Washington residents? Absolutely.
This whole "Why MS? They've got money!" thing stinks more of people here's biases than an actual rational review of the situation. You want perspective? The city of Redmond is 47,000 people. There are 40,000 employees of Microsoft in Redmond every day. Not accounting for the overlap between the two, that means Redmond's population is DOUBLED during the day due to Microsoft alone, let alone Nintendo, Safeco Insurance, etc, etc, etc. See why reducing traffic on the area's arterial roads is a benefit for the entire community, not just MS?
As an addendum to my sister comment, QUIT WHINING. From Netflix's own agreement, shown to you prior to signing up:
Our 100 shipping points across the United States allow us to provide nearly 95% of our members with delivery of their DVDs within about one business day following shipment.
So throttle back your entitlement complex, seriously.
Wait, nowhere in Netflix's contract with you does it say "We'll send out the next movie within minutes of it arriving back at our distribution center".
Why would you expect that Netflix runs 24/7 catering to your needs? They employ people to sort and mail movies. They received your DVD back on Friday? Congratulations. Maybe that meant you were after Friday's delivery run (you are aware that USPS doesn't do on-demand delivery 24 hours a day, yes?), and maybe Saturday staffing at your delivery center is low. Maybe that's when most of their movies go out.
Christ, bitching that someone receives mail from you on Friday and has something on its way back to you by Monday is really stretching it a bit.
Yep, and they're the same people who ran burning mills copying as many Netflix DVDs as they could, and forcing them to throttle things. I used to watch a friend on their 3 DVD plan who was fortunate enough to live in the same town as a distribution center - he proudly proclaimed that his record was 32 DVDS in a month. He'd often receive the DVD from the postman, have the discs ripped and on their way back to Netflix by morning (and made a point of delivering to a post office for dropping off) - and when not at work he'd have them ripped in order to have the discs at the post office for the evening pickup. Then he started bitching that they would sit on his mail outs for a day, then 2 days (though never more than that), refusing to see the correlation, and insisting that they 'were out to fuck him over'.
he's pissed that he went to an all you can eat buffet that decided they were going to charge him for every plate after his 3rd one without even telling him
Where's BadAnalogyGuy when you need him?
They did no such thing. They just said 'hey, slow down' as he was doing the equivalent of Homer just lifting out the serving bowls, rather than taking a plate at a time. No-one said he couldn't eat as much as he wanted, just off the plate, so other people could get more, not just wheelbarrowing the serving bowls straight from the buffet table.
There's no negative impact to his contract - he's not being charged more. He's just not being allowed to get away with things above and beyond what the contract entitled him to.
"Getting away with things above and beyond contract" also equals "bad way to run business".
Man, the entitlement mentality in this place is horrific.
"Do you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, believe that a/reasonable/ person would believe that there was nothing untoward in being able to buy US$200 iTunes gift cards from a website in China which advertised other nefarious services, for a price of US$1.61, as an ongoing service?"
Reasonable doubt would still allow me as a jury member on your fraud trial to convict you if you'd bought numerous $1.61 "$200 gift cards", whether or not you'd posted to a Slashdot discussion on the subject.
Touche. It was late. I had intended it as a reply to someone who commented about the questionability of linking to an article whose title/url contains the phrase 'skullfucking'.
Yeah, it's not like Wikipedia is a top 10 website, capable of exerting due or undue influence on all too many aspects of society, and we all know that people in power would never abuse that power, so far better for the common good to not even consider watching what goes on 'behind the scenes' of such a place.
Oh wait.
(That being said, there are some on WR, as there are on WP, who are a little too unhinged in their respective zealotries for general comfort.)
Doesn't surprise me. The submitter is David Gerard, so infamous for his abuses of power on Wikipedia he has his own subforum there.
This is, of course, when he's not maintaining his circle jerk of shock sites, like 'lemonparty.org', 'jarsquatter.org', 'yourmom.org', 'yellaface.com', and many others, not linked for your protection. What a scary, sad way to make a living.
Yeah, and no... one would presume that if one had a limit of $400, one could charge $400 to that card. Per my sister post, it was a non-issue three days later, when she was told her limit was $5,000 and a [middle-of-the-road] interest rate.
But very true. I'm yet to meet a credit card provider which won't take every opportunity afforded them to nail your balls to the wall and start juicing you.
Because someone who has taken your little finger to circumvent biometric security might somehow have a moral dilemma about torturing you for your password/PIN? Or that you're going to feel a desire to risk more limb and life for the sake of this security? (Obviously, if you're USSS, maybe...)
When we did this, we were in a unique situation, of both building credit. My wife was a young student, and I was a recent immigrant with a high paying job. Differing credit histories. As it happened, after the 'initial limit' phase, we were informed about three days later that her credit limit on the card was a much more realistic value ($5,000, IIRC). It was just that the combination of circumstances meant that their automated system didn't run it through.
True... I've had fantastic, similar experiences with Amazon overnighting replacement faulty goods, and non-delivered goods (I work from home, and basically do all my online ordering for work from Amazon).
I've also had downright abysmal experiences:
My wife decided she'd buy me an Epson Stylus Photo R1800 for Christmas (great printer btw). What a travesty.
She signed up for an Amazon card. Approved with an initial limit of $400, or so. Fine. Pay the balance on a second card. Oh no, you can't do that. You'll have to buy a gift certificate. If we must, sure. All good, we think.
An hour later - "Your card has been declined". Uhh? You just issued me a card with a $400 limit, I charged $400 to it and it's declined?
On the phone to Amazon: sure enough, they put a $1 pre-auth on the card, so $399 is the balance. Are they able to do something about that in the interim, so I can get my Christmas present. "Oh no, you'll have to speak to the bank."
Uhh.
More screwing around on Chase's (Amazon Visa provider) part about doing something about it. End result, no can do. Fine.
Problem. Card charge still not going to be approved. We have to cancel order, on phone with Amazon support.
We then cannot re-order because the system has "forgotten" that we have an Amazon Visa card (you don't get access to the actual 16 digit number until you receive the physical card), but eventually someone works something out, is able to re-do things. We have to buy a SECOND gift card to cover this discrepancy, and in conjunction with the CSR , we re-order the printer. Yay.
Or not. An hour later, "Your card was declined." Manage to get through again, of course, another pre-auth. "Available balance: $398". Ye gods.
Back on the phone with Amazon (this was now the next day). We go to place the order with the CSR working through these issues on the phone. Problem. Item is coming from external merchant. When we placed the order? Shipping would be fine for Christmas. Now? Big warning: "Your product is unlikely to arrive until Dec 26 or later".
Gah.
Amazon CSR and CSR manager's helpful suggestion?
We, as the customer, email the merchant, and ask that they expedite shipping, at their expense, for an issue that has absolutely nothing to do with them, other than their choice of Amazon as an outlet for their products. Not that Amazon ask them, or cover the shipping upgrade themselves (they flat out refused that, though they acknowledged that the system in place a) did not account for the fact that someone might actually use their new account straight away, and b) that imperfections in the system caused us to spend two days trying to get this printer ordered through them).
So here I am, writing a humble email saying etc, etc, that it wasn't their fault, blah blah blah.
Of course, in the intervening time, the CSR has recreated the order, and I eventually get an email from the confused merchant who asks "I can't see your order in our system, why are you asking us to pay expedited shipping for a problem that isn't our fault, when you're not actually buying a printer from us?"
Amazon CSR had found another merchant who could deliver by Christmas and re-placed the order... but for the fact that that would be $40 more in shipping - not that they were intending to pay.
Long story short? I got the printer - and it is gorgeous - for Christmas, by Christmas...
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not the correct thing to do. The correct thing to do is manually enter the credit card number from the card. When the receipt prints, you'll see a little line at the bottom which usually says "METHOD: SWIPED" but now says "METHOD: MANUAL ENTRY". So, in your example where it's a cloned credit card with no active magstripe, and Joe The Real Card Owner sees the charge (because of that pesky little $50/zero liability thing), he'll call his card provider who'll pull up the transaction, reverse it on his say-so, make a note of the big red flag of a manual entry or MOTO (mail order / telephone order) at a facility that normally uses swipe readers and that'll be passed along to the card provider.
The REAL reason you did it was not for the customer's benefit but for your benefit or the store's. After all, someone's walked out of your store with something, and paid for it with someone else's credit card. Now the rightful owner of that credit account has had the transaction reversed, your store is out the money, but has no goods, and you probably have little chance of seeing your fair compensation. Depending on the details of the fraud, and your position, that could mean anything from just adding a number to a line item on the corporate balance sheet, to a manager riding your ass, to being fired (rightly or wrongly) because too many fraudulent register transactions can be "linked" to you.
All of the above are valid reasons.
But don't piss around with "I'm only doing it to protect you, the customer, and save you money!" You say later:
You PRESUME. Because if you never ran the card (and even if you did, unless it came back flagged as listed), you have NO IDEA as to whether the card was genuine or not. It just makes you feel better and massages your ego when you're "explaining to the customer" why you won't run their card.
If you can afford to have a team shooting an event, then you can afford Aperture, Lightroom, or one of several other products that lets you do automated renaming based on, amongst other attributes, Camera Serial Number. As long as your shooters aren't swapping cameras with each other, there you have it.
T-mobile is nice - if you have coverage. I used to work 5 miles away from their American head office, and a significant population base on the east side of Seattle. Zero bars. Fun times.
Alright twitter, I work for a healthcare company whose primary product runs under Linux, specifically Red Hat. We have a custom database-backed application that does exporting for reporting to MySQL, and a web interface built on top of Apache, PHP, and the Zend Framework. Internally, we also use MediaWiki, ht://dig, and many many other open source applications. We hold no patents, let alone any that would be used defensively. Better?
Your link makes claims along the lines of the belief that Microsoft should be funding the 520 bridge, because so many MS employees use it. I notice it doesn't claim that Nintendo of America (which has an offshore parent, if you want to talk about tax minimization) should be funding the same bridge. I think that anyone that claims that MS is a "significant burden instead of the economic contributor people expect" has a very biased viewpoint. I'm sure most of the local business owners would agree, as MS makes a point of using local catering for business meetings, local haulage firms for moving, etc, etc.
Asking why more MS employees don't live in Redmond is a silly question. Why don't more SV business employees live in SV itself?? See my point? The 40,000 people of Redmond are footing the cost of a percentage of the bridge, because of the benefit TO THEM afforded by reduced traffic ON THEIR roads. MS is actually contributing in the order of FORTY PER CENT of the cost of the bridge.
About here is where I should roll my eyes, I suspect, and remember who I'm talking to.
Bingo. Reason why I love my Nokia N series. This is a full-blown, Python-powered web server for my cellphone. I can log into it via web browser, I can set profiles. I can view contacts and the in phone gallery. I can send and receive text and multimedia messages, from my web browser, via my phone - it even ties into the contact list on the phone to make it easier. You can set up AN RSS FEED(!) of all log events (placed, missed, received calls, texts, etc!)
And it's free.
Check the screenshots here
I don't want to sound like a booster, but THIS = killer app.
My wife and I combined spend $6,100 a year (although 80% of it is reimbursed by my employer) for health "insurance" (cast back through my comment history to find what I think of this, and why I wrapped insurance in quotation marks)... Looking at ehealthinsurance.com, I could see it as a very accurate figure - the figure came from the WHO.
Shall I continue? #19 in the world on Acute Care Beds.
We DO, however, SPEND by far the most on health care. Over $4,000 per person per year. Our health expenditure increases over 3% per annum, in excess of inflation. Ask yourself what you got for that money some time, when you're talking about defining "best" healthcare.
We DON'T have some of the best healthcare in the world. But we ARE told that, in order to justify the fact that our premiums keep going up and up and up. (My wife and I went from $431 to $510 a month last year, despite no non-routine events).
In fact, according to the WHO, on an overall index of "overall health performance" we're not even in the top 20 countries in the world. On "levels of health" we rank SEVENTY SECOND, and on "level of health care performance", THIRTY SEVENTH (from http://www.photius.com/rankings/world_health_systems.html).
For on-demand shuttle usage, you go to any building reception, request a shuttle. They have an integrated dispatch network which will aggregate trips, so along comes a Prius (they only use the Prius), picks you up, makes as many pickups as possible in a beeline between you and your destination, attempting to fill the car where possible, and then drops you off in the optimal fashion. In this sense, it's pretty hard to fault Microsoft (who also offer all employees free public transport passes, paid for by the company).
Which is, gasp, exactly what they did. They offered it with the intention of it being used as an adjunct to Google services, which ties into their revenue base. Along came a bunch of freeloaders, bypassed that tie-in to get all the benefits with no 'cost' (advertising metrics, whatever), and it got turned off. Color me unsurprised.
When (and if) this is reintroduced, there'll be mechanisms in place to push you through something to get access. To those who mention POP3 and Gmail, realize you are in the minority. What you typically give Google in exchange for your non ad-sponsored mail experience is 'goodwill' that pays for your service by virtue of active or passive referrals.
Would an overpass benefit MS? Absolutely. Would it take SEVERAL THOUSAND VEHICLES A DAY off of Redmond's roads, much to the benefit of Redmond locals and other Washington residents? Absolutely.
This whole "Why MS? They've got money!" thing stinks more of people here's biases than an actual rational review of the situation. You want perspective? The city of Redmond is 47,000 people. There are 40,000 employees of Microsoft in Redmond every day. Not accounting for the overlap between the two, that means Redmond's population is DOUBLED during the day due to Microsoft alone, let alone Nintendo, Safeco Insurance, etc, etc, etc. See why reducing traffic on the area's arterial roads is a benefit for the entire community, not just MS?
So throttle back your entitlement complex, seriously.
Wait, nowhere in Netflix's contract with you does it say "We'll send out the next movie within minutes of it arriving back at our distribution center".
Mod parent up, insightful and informative, speaking as someone in the Healthcare IT field. On both the certification angle and the GPL issue.
Why would you expect that Netflix runs 24/7 catering to your needs? They employ people to sort and mail movies. They received your DVD back on Friday? Congratulations. Maybe that meant you were after Friday's delivery run (you are aware that USPS doesn't do on-demand delivery 24 hours a day, yes?), and maybe Saturday staffing at your delivery center is low. Maybe that's when most of their movies go out.
Christ, bitching that someone receives mail from you on Friday and has something on its way back to you by Monday is really stretching it a bit.
Yep, and they're the same people who ran burning mills copying as many Netflix DVDs as they could, and forcing them to throttle things. I used to watch a friend on their 3 DVD plan who was fortunate enough to live in the same town as a distribution center - he proudly proclaimed that his record was 32 DVDS in a month. He'd often receive the DVD from the postman, have the discs ripped and on their way back to Netflix by morning (and made a point of delivering to a post office for dropping off) - and when not at work he'd have them ripped in order to have the discs at the post office for the evening pickup. Then he started bitching that they would sit on his mail outs for a day, then 2 days (though never more than that), refusing to see the correlation, and insisting that they 'were out to fuck him over'.
Where's BadAnalogyGuy when you need him?
They did no such thing. They just said 'hey, slow down' as he was doing the equivalent of Homer just lifting out the serving bowls, rather than taking a plate at a time. No-one said he couldn't eat as much as he wanted, just off the plate, so other people could get more, not just wheelbarrowing the serving bowls straight from the buffet table.
There's no negative impact to his contract - he's not being charged more. He's just not being allowed to get away with things above and beyond what the contract entitled him to.
"Getting away with things above and beyond contract" also equals "bad way to run business".
Man, the entitlement mentality in this place is horrific.
Reasonable doubt would still allow me as a jury member on your fraud trial to convict you if you'd bought numerous $1.61 "$200 gift cards", whether or not you'd posted to a Slashdot discussion on the subject.
Touche. It was late. I had intended it as a reply to someone who commented about the questionability of linking to an article whose title/url contains the phrase 'skullfucking'.
Oh wait.
(That being said, there are some on WR, as there are on WP, who are a little too unhinged in their respective zealotries for general comfort.)
This is, of course, when he's not maintaining his circle jerk of shock sites, like 'lemonparty.org', 'jarsquatter.org', 'yourmom.org', 'yellaface.com', and many others, not linked for your protection. What a scary, sad way to make a living.
Then again, he is a scary, sad "guy".
But very true. I'm yet to meet a credit card provider which won't take every opportunity afforded them to nail your balls to the wall and start juicing you.
Because someone who has taken your little finger to circumvent biometric security might somehow have a moral dilemma about torturing you for your password/PIN? Or that you're going to feel a desire to risk more limb and life for the sake of this security? (Obviously, if you're USSS, maybe...)
Which would be why they're trying to pass a law to make it legal, perhaps?!?
When we did this, we were in a unique situation, of both building credit. My wife was a young student, and I was a recent immigrant with a high paying job. Differing credit histories. As it happened, after the 'initial limit' phase, we were informed about three days later that her credit limit on the card was a much more realistic value ($5,000, IIRC). It was just that the combination of circumstances meant that their automated system didn't run it through.
I've also had downright abysmal experiences:
My wife decided she'd buy me an Epson Stylus Photo R1800 for Christmas (great printer btw). What a travesty.
She signed up for an Amazon card. Approved with an initial limit of $400, or so. Fine. Pay the balance on a second card. Oh no, you can't do that. You'll have to buy a gift certificate. If we must, sure. All good, we think.
An hour later - "Your card has been declined". Uhh? You just issued me a card with a $400 limit, I charged $400 to it and it's declined?
On the phone to Amazon: sure enough, they put a $1 pre-auth on the card, so $399 is the balance. Are they able to do something about that in the interim, so I can get my Christmas present. "Oh no, you'll have to speak to the bank."
Uhh.
More screwing around on Chase's (Amazon Visa provider) part about doing something about it. End result, no can do. Fine.
Problem. Card charge still not going to be approved. We have to cancel order, on phone with Amazon support.
We then cannot re-order because the system has "forgotten" that we have an Amazon Visa card (you don't get access to the actual 16 digit number until you receive the physical card), but eventually someone works something out, is able to re-do things. We have to buy a SECOND gift card to cover this discrepancy, and in conjunction with the CSR , we re-order the printer. Yay.
Or not. An hour later, "Your card was declined." Manage to get through again, of course, another pre-auth. "Available balance: $398". Ye gods.
Back on the phone with Amazon (this was now the next day). We go to place the order with the CSR working through these issues on the phone. Problem. Item is coming from external merchant. When we placed the order? Shipping would be fine for Christmas. Now? Big warning: "Your product is unlikely to arrive until Dec 26 or later".
Gah.
Amazon CSR and CSR manager's helpful suggestion?
We, as the customer, email the merchant, and ask that they expedite shipping, at their expense, for an issue that has absolutely nothing to do with them, other than their choice of Amazon as an outlet for their products. Not that Amazon ask them, or cover the shipping upgrade themselves (they flat out refused that, though they acknowledged that the system in place a) did not account for the fact that someone might actually use their new account straight away, and b) that imperfections in the system caused us to spend two days trying to get this printer ordered through them).
So here I am, writing a humble email saying etc, etc, that it wasn't their fault, blah blah blah.
Of course, in the intervening time, the CSR has recreated the order, and I eventually get an email from the confused merchant who asks "I can't see your order in our system, why are you asking us to pay expedited shipping for a problem that isn't our fault, when you're not actually buying a printer from us?"
Amazon CSR had found another merchant who could deliver by Christmas and re-placed the order... but for the fact that that would be $40 more in shipping - not that they were intending to pay.
Long story short? I got the printer - and it is gorgeous - for Christmas, by Christmas...
No thanks to Amazon, though.