R’lyeh…was built in measureless eons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars

I waited. Neither impatiently, nor patiently exactly. Waiting for news when you have blindly sent money to a faceless company in a different country, on the other side of the globe, is not like dropping money at Amazon. It’s a wholly different form of “Did I make a mistake?”

To the credit of Alibaba, the have a program called Trade Assurance, which is designed to allay your anxiety of having just put your money in the electronic equivalent of a dead drop box. the bigger players in the marketplace all use it and it offers a simple premise. If your vendor doesn’t deliver within the allotted time, agreed on by both parties, you get your money back plus a bit extra for your troubles. I can’t speak as to its actual efficacy, as thankfully, I didn’t have to try to cash in on it.

As I said, I waited. three more days to be exact when I received a picture

Well, it was 3 vessels, the system I designed had three. The skeptic in me said, “yeah, but are those really yours or are they just trying to reel you in”. The optimist in me said, “They’ve started working on it.”

Over the next week I received several more photos, all via WhatsApp, did I mention they love WhatsApp?



Again, the skeptic in me wondered but so did the optimist.

Then my rep there “Emily” asked if I had a logo in SVG format, and woudl I email it to her. Well, I did, so I did. 3 days later I get another update

Hey, look my logo, etched on Stainless, that’s neat! And so it went, about once a week I would get an update on progress. Sometimes a picture, sometimes a video. This went on for 5 weeks; then I get the It’s finished message with a picture.

They placed it in front of their corporate mural or whatever and sent it to me. It was then that I had the “Holy shit, is that my system?” moment, followed quickly by the “That’s my system moment”. I was getting excited, which if you know me means I was less of my normally curmudgeonly self. I looked at the calendar 46 days from receipt of deposit to the finished product.

Next came the second time to drop money blindly into an electronic box and hope for the best.

Continued in next post