The answer to my Christmas gift-giving is not online shopping after all. I thought it was, and I hoped it was, and I acted as if it were the answer, but it’s a partial answer at best. When you’re at the mercy of people you don’t see face to face, you have to accept that there will be glitches. By “accept,” I don’t mean sit back and let them take your money even when the stuff you order doesn’t get here on time. Or at all.

This happened with just one online company this year, and it’s a company I’ve shopped with before with no problem. But since there had been no problem before, I wasn’t familiar with the way they dealt with problems when they do come up. The short answer is that they don’t. The slightly longer answer is that they give you the runaround and don’t let you talk to a person.

But wait. It’s even worse than that. This company won’t even let you email a real person. You go to their customer service page, and they have a form that lets you vent. You give them all the information: order number, tracking number, and the shipping date that they provided. That date, in my case, was almost a month ago. I think that if they shipped something a month ago, and it isn’t here by now, we might have a problem.

They did have a tracking link on their site that I could click, but it led to a dead-end page that asked me to be sure I’d entered the right tracking number. Since I hadn’t entered anything, but had only clicked on their link, I got worried. So I emailed customer service with all the information and got an immediate response. It just wasn’t a response to the particular questions I asked. It was a generic response that ended with an instruction that if they hadn’t solved my problem (they hadn’t), I should phone their 24/7 customer service line.

So now we’re getting somewhere, right? Isn’t that what you’d think? I don’t like making phone calls, and I avoid them whenever I can, but I called their 24/7 line. I had a hard time finding that number, because it wasn’t in their generic email and it wasn’t on their customer service page. They tell you on that page to call the number, but they don’t tell you what the number is. You have to hunt around the site for half an hour to find the actual number, in small print at the bottom of the main page.

So I called. I even waited until business hours, even though it was supposedly a 24/7 number. After getting through the first two menus, I got to a recorded voice that told me to speak my order number clearly but at normal speed. Then it asked me to speak my zip code. Then it told me to wait while it looked up my order information. Then it came back on the line and said, “It appears we have a technical difficulty.” Then it hung up on me. I went through the whole sequence again and it hung up on me again.

I haven’t given up. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was enough that I wouldn’t say the principle is more important than they money. The principle is important, but so is the money, and so is the fact that three gifts, inexpensive as they might be and insignificant as they would seem to anyone but me, including probably the recipients, will not be under anyone’s tree this Christmas. They might still be at the warehouse, or they might have been delivered to someone else, who didn’t pay for them. I intend to find out, even if it takes another phone call, or a letter, or an appeal to the Action 7 News Team.

I know it’s a mistake, and not a big company trying to cheat me, but I want to make them wish they’d helped me the first time I asked.