Things got interesting on the second day, our first full day of sailing, starting with a war against Barnes & Noble. We had downloaded books directly to our nook before leaving. Nearly ten books in all, and each purchase was confirmed as having been completed. It wasn't until we were on the ship and attempted to read the aforementioned books did we discover that whoever designed the system should be shot.

Each new book was lacking in the license category. But then why did the damn nook say that the purchase and download was complete after each checkout? Because it is retarded, of course! Apparently if there is an issue charging the credit card on file, it still appears as having gone through on the nook until you try to open the book. Meanwhile, they send you an email saying that there was an issue with the card, and that if you do not contact them, they will automatically try again after seven days. Therefore, if you didn't realize that you had used a now deprecated credit card because CitiBank decided to change your card number again (which is a different rant), you are shit out of luck.

Having already paid an exorbitant amount to get online long enough to discovered the emails, we were particularly happy with what we turned up next. Entering a new credit card number online was not sufficient; I was expected to call their standard help line. From a cruise ship. For $7.99 a minute. Well, fuck.

After some deliberation, we decided that two weeks on a ship without reading materials would result in Bad Things, I placed the horrific call. After five minutes on hold, I hung up and swore profusely. There were only so many times I could here the "we will be with you as soon as we help the eighty-seven people in front of you" message before homicidal rage took over. Luckily Matt had the presence of mind to distract me, and we found ourselves playing bingo.

I must say, bingo is surprisingly fun. However, the desire to misuse the bingo daubers is overwhelming; I wanted to put green dots on everything, starting with Matt's forehead. I didn't win, nor did I sufficiently polkadot the world. But I did stop threatening to exsanguinate the product manager who decided to get rid of error messages.