I’d been looking forward to getting a new telescope for my birthday, and found the perfect one for my area and budget. My parents had planned to get it right away, but they’ve been working full time and my mom especially just kept forgetting to actually purchase it.
I guess she got fed up with constant reminders, so she just ended up handing me her credit and telling me to do it myself. Of course what follows is me saying yes, and trying to do it on my phone (which has notoriously malfunctioned when it comes to online purchases in the past.)
So I attempt to buy the telescope, but after filling out all the payment info and pressing purchase it tells me the purchase failed. Cool. So I tried again, same thing. Did it one last time and got the same results so I decide to wait a bit and try again on my computer.
I buy it on my computer and all is well and dandy, except when I go to find the confirmation email, I see not one but two. One from twenty minutes earlier. That I clearly did not think to check for. Cue me freaking out, like, FULL blown panic attack in the face of my stupidity.
Everything ended up fine after I contacted the company and they canceled one of the two orders, but I think that hour of waiting to hear back from them was the most stressful hour of my entire life.
TL;DR I purchased two telescopes accidentally because I didn’t think to check my email after the original purchase appeared to have failed.
Comments
So lesson learned and problem averted.
Yay You
Next time remember that purchases that expensive will have to be confirmed sometimes so if it “failed” it most likely was needing to be confirmed it was real. Let her know what happened and ask her to check if the card was charged twice. It MIGHT now have been but if it was it’s a simple call/ email to cancel and refund the duplicate transaction ✨
Oh don’t worry. You will buy more. It is an addictive hobby. Especially once you get into astrophotography.
I bought two PS5s from two stores on launch day because one of them said it failed to go through. Then I got an email saying both were paid for 30 minutes later. I was scared to cancel one in case it was a mistake so I just ended up selling one on Facebook which was a nightmare with all the sketchy scammers and resellers.
I had exactly the same thing happen ordering a $1300 bed cover for my truck. No confirmation on the first attempt. No confirmation on the second attempt. Ok I guess I’ll do it on Monday when they open up. A couple hours later I thought to check my credit card status. Sure enough, two truck covers charged. By the time the weekend was over and I called them Monday morning, both had been shipped. The company was decent about straightening it out, but what a thing.
Tape them together… binoculars!!
two telescopes…two eyes…