Thursday, August 5, 2010

make & believe: used books

I ordered my first used book on Amazon a few days ago. Just like having never ordered before from Subway, I see ordering used books the same way I see having to choose every ingredient on your sub: more complicated and messy than it (probably) actually is.

But I decided to go ahead and get a used book because if it were newly bought it would be around $130 and I had found one for less than $20 (excuse the grammar). Ah-mazing, right?

Then an issue came up. Yesterday I got a package in the mail from the seller and it was the wrong book. Instead of Comparative Politics Today, it was Let's Weigh the Evidence. A book about which version of the Bible was the best or something. WOW. Of all the wrong genres of books to send me. Not only did I get hindsight bias, I thought God was punishing me for being an anti-religious, unforgiving brat these past months, even though "which Bible is the most accurate?" had nothing to do with "are you going to end up in hell?" The seller had awesome ratings, so I couldn't believe my bad luck.

Now an ordinary religious person would perhaps at this point pray and pray and hope and pray, please please that they would not have to send the book back or demand a refund, or that their actual book is still coming. Of course an ordinary person like me did none of these things, so I just emailed the dude and went to sleep.

Today I got the right book in the mail, and it was in better condition than I hoped for. I guess the seller did deserve a decent rating after all for that. The ordinary religious person would now be running around shouting, "Hallelujah! My prayer was answered! PTL!" at this point. But because nothing encouraged me to pray to begin with, I feel that if anything, this event only further chucked my faith into oblivion and irrelevance. What a world, really.

Be careful buying used books.