Why make it difficult for me to buy stuff?

We’re addressing the problem in our flat of not having enough space to put things, by looking in cupboards (often for the first time in years) and finding things we don’t need, and throwing them away. And, as part of this radical re-invention of our living environment, we’ve been discussing the possibility of having a sound system in the kitchen that doesn’t completely and utterly suck.

(We’d like, at a minimum, to have the CD player play the CD from start to finish, without deciding part way through a track that, hell, it likes that bit it played 40 seconds ago, so let’s play it again. Sometimes it gets so confused that it rummages around on the CD for a while, before deciding that, hell, you can’t still be listening, so why should it carry on trying to play something? and gives up.)

The plan always was to put the laptop, when it’s charging, in the kitchen, and use it as a sound system, on the basis that it can play MP3s and, hey, what else do you want? This became even more of a good idea when I realised, belatedly, once we’d clicked a button on each of our computers, that the laptop can, via Airport (I’ll stop the geek porn in a bit), stream MP3s from either Cleodhna’s or my computer. At a push, we can even put a CD in it and have it play it.

So I decided to look at speakers, on the basis that we’d get some decent speakers for my machine, and use my current speakers for the iBook in the kitchen. I thought I’d get some of the funky Apple speakers, until I read reviews that said they sounded like shit, and saw others that said other types of speakers were far better.

So, here I am, having decided, through a bunch of Googling, that the Monsoon Planar Media speakers would be the best choice - and can I buy them? Can I fuck.

It’s exactly the same problem as the airline industry, except that the hi-fi industry doesn’t have the excuse of having antiquated fucked-up systems that can’t be replaced because they cost a bunch of money to set up, there’s a lot of people whose job depends on them, and, hey, the VP that introduced them hasn’t retired yet. (On a similar note, you know those cute microbe plushies? Well, they wouldn’t accept my credit card, because their AVS stuff decided I was wrong. I emailed them pointing out that, maybe, there was a problem with my being in the UK - they never responded.)

For crying out loud, here I am, going to Comet’s website, and I enter something in the search field, and it doesn’t fucking work because some madman decided that they needed Javascript so they could pass a text string to a fucking CGI script. (Actually, it looks like they’re using Javascript as a templating system, which just boggles me.)

As it is, I’ve emailed the manufacturer (sorry - I’ve filled out their contact form, so God knows where that’s gone), and asked them where I can buy their product in the UK. I’m not holding my breath, and if this was 1998, I would have thought, fair enough, they’re not ready to sell abroad yet, this is early days in the Internet after all.

But it’s not early days. For Christ’s sake, Amazon is close to making a profit. Surely, if you advertise the fact that your product (unlike some of your other products) comes in an international version, you should make some effort to tell those international people where they can damn well get it?