It's time to know that Grit is a Luddite

ecommerce. Everyone is using ecommerce! Dig tells me that is what it is called. ecommerce. I am so zeitgeist. I must add it to my linguistic repertoire and then people will think I know what I am talking about.

ecommerce ecommerce ecommerce

What it means in reality is that I am peering at the monitor screen and from that online shop today I want that book and those lovelycolouredrolls of adorablesoft felt.

Ssh. Don't tell anyone, but I have wanted to possess them for weeks, since the day we went over here. Secretly and silently I have dribbled over these screens of felt and imagined their lovely tender fibres soapyrolling under my fingertips.

You are right. Home educated kids are just an excuse. I am a totally unsocialised self-absorbed weirdo on the fringes of society whose only goal in life is to make her own handbag.

So I am peering at the screen and I decide this is the moment.

Oh yes it is. I have to manage this budget carefully, and I just paid the bill for our summer adventures and now the drawing-in days of autumn are here. In the coming months we will be kicked out, chastened from those fields at the late afternoon darkening times at 4pm. We must retreat to our mud and straw hut and to our cosy family hours round the hearth with our home educating craft projects, like weaving granola, sewing with our own hair, growing our own underwear and making felt handbags.

It takes me a good hour to go through the screens of heavenly delight, choosing all the lovely colours. I have to ignore the way Shark has locked herself in the bathroom to have a big scream and how Tiger has fallen down the stairs, tripped over by a four foot long homemade narrowboat. Dig is here. He can attend to those minor problems because I am engaging in ecommerce.

When I have finally chosen - and what a hard choice it has been! - but when I finally choose, then the reality hits me. I must actually complete the shopping online. This, apparently, is what ecommerce means.

Really at this point I would like to throw myself on the floor and claim I am dying in the hope that Dig will take pity and do it for me, but I know I must learn to do this newfangledtechnology. Anyway, he is still trying to prise Shark out of a bathroom.

First I must cross over the Paypal screen of death.

Now I am not entirely lost! I did have a Paypal account! I even paid for something once and it worked! Or at least I think it did: no-one came round to strap explosives under my car or shove dogshit through the letterbox. But then someone started to send me death threats, like your account is now late, or dead, or suspended; you have failed the great Paypal exam; we will dismember your pathetic non-ecommerce-managing body and stick your head on a pole as a warning to all non-ecommerce-managing body types. Well of course I wondered if the death threats from Paypal were really a cunning ruse: Mr Big, who is running an Colombian drugs cartel, sends those messages to me personally, and he wants to lay his hands on my £6.99.

Either way, I could no longer bear the dramatic tension of Paypal; waiting to be targetted by outofpocket death squads or be scammed for my £6.99 life savings which I have taken to shovelling under the mattress in consequence. I stopped using Paypal.

So I choose to bypass the Paypal and settle for the lovelydribblyfelt with credit card! I have one of those, because I am a fully working trusted human being! Really, believe me! I can take a responsible role in ecommerce!

Only I am outraged by my own stupidity because I cannot find the bloody credit card, and there is no way I'm putting in my regular bank card to any screen anywhere because Mr Big is out there, waiting to steal my £6.99. He is merely biding his time.

But I must find the credit card. Otherwise the bank will stick my head on a pole. It takes an hour and I only have to smash apart half the office to locate that credit card which is hiding in terror under a five foot pile of papers, the top of which says Quick Start Guide to Installing your ecommerce Software.

When I finally hold that credit card safe in my hands, I enter all the details, ever so carefully, like a real girl. I accord every keystroke the great significance and importance of that final exam at university, because I want to get everything right. And then I reach the expiry date. Expired? EXPIRED! How did that happen? How did September turn into October? Did anyone tell me? Where is the new card in this office of unopened envelopes? Where is an atom of dust flying around the stratosphere? Why don't we all look for that?

Now there is only one solution. Send pathetic pleading emails offering to pay by cheque.

And this shows you how good ecommerce is. Because so far I have spent two hours negotiating those ecommerce screens, getting nowhere, and I am not kidding, because in seconds of pressing send I receive an email back saying No problem! Send a cheque!

And I am so thankful about such friendly and prompt service from a real human person I am sorely tempted to go back to those lovelyscreens of dribblymakingfelt, and say Here's my bank account. Take it all.