So when school started about a month ago, I decided to shop online and try to save some money for some of my books. I ended up ordering a textbook from Buy.com and later cancelled the order because they were unable to change the shipping address on my order. (I had inadvertently told them to ship to my PO Box!) Not only would they not change my shipping address, but after a few days they still had not shipped my order. Cancelling was a whole nother ordeal, but I’ll stick to the point at hand for now.

You can imagine my surprise when I got this email from Buy.com yesterday:

Just wanted to let you know that the item(s) listed below from your order #28927013 have shipped and are on the way to your door.

And this one from Google Checkout this morning:

Great news! Your order has shipped, and should arrive soon. Your credit card has successfully been charged for this order.

I sent them this response:

This order was cancelled a month ago.

Please confirm that nothing is being shipped!

I got a reply from them today, which you’ll find below with my response to them:

On Sep 13, 2006, at 6:21 PM, support@customerservice.buy.com wrote:

We apologize for the inconvenience you have experienced with this order. However, our records shows that your order has been shipped out on 9/12/2006. However, if you do not wish to receive your item, we can offer you two options:

Do you normally take a month to ship a product?

Do you normally ship cancelled orders?

I got the following confirmations that the order was cancelled:

From Buy.com customer service on 8/21:

We have received and processed your cancellation request regarding your order #28927013.

We have cancelled the following item(s) from your order:

Order #28927013

sku – 30694732 : description – Cost Accounting: A Managerial Emphasis

From Google Checkout on 8/21:

Buy.com has cancelled your order. Your credit card was refunded in full.

Buy.com has cancelled your order for the following reason: Order cancelled by Buy.com. You should receive an email shortly regarding the cancellation.

Google refunded the money to me on Aug 21 as well.

First, you can refuse the shipment and the carrier will return it to us with no questions asked.

I will attempt to refuse the package, but that may not be possible if no one is available to refuse the shipment. Why don’t you call UPS or whoever and tell them to stop the shipment?

Second, you can accept the package and return it to us yourself. You will find that most unopened items can be easily returned for a refund of the product price within 30 days of shipment. You can review our Return Policy at:

I WILL NOT return this product to you if it is delivered to my house.

I WILL fax this email and supporting documents to my credit card company this evening telling them to immediately revoke any and all charges to Buy.com and permanently put your name on a blocked vendor list.

I WILL also begin filing claim procedures with Google if I see any new transactions related to this purchase.

Additionally, I will post this transcript on my website to show what a horrible company Buy.com is and will make sure that I inform as many people as possible that you guys can’t ship an order as promised to begin with and then a month after the order has been cancelled you’ll go ahead and ship the cancelled order!

Thanks for a good laugh today… I’ll probably fall out of my chair if you guys actually deliver the book to me and I never have to pay for it. Too bad I already bought one from another vendor and have no use for a free book.

I of course had forgotten that the original problem with the order was the PO Box before I sent the email. I guess I can just never pick up the box from there – if it even ever gets delivered there. We’ll see how this develops in a couple days I guess.

For the rest of you that have spent hours searching for how to fix the problem with the wordpress table (or any other table for that matter) that needs to be flushed because it didn’t get closed properly, here’s the short and sweet story of how to do it and get on with your life.

First, you can try going into phpMyAdmin and flushing the table, but that didn’t work for me. I fortunately have SSH access to the server, so I got in to the server and then issued the following:
mysql -u USER_NAME -p TABLE_NAME
Obviously, you need to substitute your own username and table name.
Once you’re into the mysql prompt, all you need to type is:
repair table wp_comments;
or, if you have another table to repair, the name of the table there.

Good luck! BTW – Comments should be working again. It was kind of nice not getting spam constatly while they were down though!