by Henry VIII attempts to buy a television during the Black Friday sale and discovers the internet cannot handle genuine national desire
I once redistributed an entire nation’s wealth through the dissolution of the monasteries, a process that, whatever its faults, never once crashed. The television retailer’s website crashed within four minutes of Black Friday opening, taking my basket with it.
The Countdown
I had set an alarm for the exact moment the sale opened, sitting with my finger poised over the buy button the way I once sat poised over a treaty requiring only my signature, and at the stroke of midnight the page simply refused to load, replaced by a small apologetic message about high demand that offered no genuine comfort whatsoever.
The Refresh War
I refreshed the page continuously for eleven minutes, joined, I later learned, by several hundred thousand other people attempting the exact same manoeuvre simultaneously, a collective national impulse I found genuinely moving in its intensity, the closest thing to unified public will I have witnessed since my own actual coronation.
The Basket Timer
When the site finally returned, my television had vanished from stock entirely, replaced in my basket by a small red timer counting down fifteen minutes on an entirely different, more expensive model, a pressure tactic I recognised instantly from certain particularly aggressive Venetian arms dealers, and I bought it anyway, out of pure adrenaline rather than genuine need.
The Confirmation Email
The confirmation email arrived twenty minutes later listing a delivery window of six weeks, a timeframe considerably longer than the sale itself, and I reflected that I once received urgent dispatches from the far side of Europe faster than this television is expected to travel across a single city.
The Verdict
The television did eventually arrive, five weeks and six days later, working perfectly, and I have decided the entire ordeal was, on balance, a genuinely fair trade for the modest saving achieved. I once seized property through force of arms. I now simply refresh a webpage at midnight alongside several hundred thousand fellow citizens, all of us equally desperate, equally polite, and equally certain this year would be different.
The Delivery Day
When the television finally arrived, I unboxed it with a ceremony entirely disproportionate to the actual event, Dev filming the unveiling for reasons I still do not fully understand. It works perfectly. I have decided the five weeks of waiting were, in hindsight, simply the price of a genuinely fair deal, and I would do the whole ordeal again next November without hesitation.
I have also learned, from the whole ordeal, to check delivery estimates considerably more carefully before committing to anything requiring genuine patience. I have also decided that patience, however reluctantly learned, remains a genuinely useful skill in this century. I have also concluded that whatever the internet’s failings during a genuine national rush, the eventual outcome usually justifies the wait, however long that wait turns out to be. None of this helped my diet plan either, frozen yoghurt included. Further reading on the wider chaos of modern Britain: Amazon’s own recent acquisition of considerably more than a shoebox, Apple’s warning that memory itself is now in short supply, the original account of my own return to Britain.
