Sleeping tablets and Amazon

This is my life now. My literal, true, happened last night, honest to god story of my life.

Last night I was tired but couldn't sleep, business as usual. Monday morning meetings with no sleep are, frankly, worse than waking with a hangover to a 5 year old learning the violin, so I popped a sleeping tablet, hoping to present the world with a less violin-smashy version of myself in the morning.

My bedtime routine includes removing various creatures my cats have brought in during the day and checking under the covers for any cockroaches that may have escaped their claws (one night I failed to do this, which resulted in my extremely abrupt ejection from the bed, doing the "ITS STILL ON ME" dance in the nude in the middle of the night - zolpidem notwithstanding. I assure you, a 10cm cockroach does NOT make for a pleasant bed-mate). Once all was clear I settled in, launched the kindle and awaited the fluffy effects of the pills.

I awoke this morning feeling refreshed and well rested, with no obvious signs of co-sleeping with small creatures, ready for a day of meetings with various people frothing about the water crisis. As is usual, I take the first few minutes of my day to clear my phone of all the marketing emails and SMS' I get overnight, and check my calendar to make sure I haven't forgotten an appointment with the apocalypse or something. This morning however, I had an entire bevy of SMS notifications that made no sense, and which I had no recollection of generating. I spent some time re-creating a timeline and the following is what I have pieced together from notifications, my banking app and my Amazon account.

It would appear that I finished my book shortly after lying down to read. Not feeling ready to sleep just yet, I browsed online on my kindle to find another book and made a purchase. This purchase was declined, due to insufficient funds on the card registered on my Amazon account. I appear to have been in denial, for I then attempted to purchase a further 23 books, all of which were declined.  I then (I assume) logged into my Amazon account and tried to change the card assigned to Kindle purchases. However, when one changes a credit card, Amazon will prompt you to verify security, usually by asking you to complete a phone number. The last phone number on my account is from my stay in India, and I have about as much memory of it as I do of the Pi sequence. At some point I must have locked myself out of my account as I appear to have tried to reset my password. I know I was persistent though, as I have 9 reset password emails in my inbox.

In what I can only assume was an almost insensate drooling state of book-reading desperation, I clearly finally twigged that perhaps just checking the card might be a good idea. I logged into my banking app and transferred R100 to the card in question though it’s possible I meant to transfer R1000. The book (God knows which one by now), was R121 and the payment was once again declined. At this stage I must have given up on reason completely, and I accepted one of those "INCREASE YOUR CREDIT LIMIT TO SOMETHING OUTRAGEOUS NOW" offers. I awoke this morning to a brand new credit limit of R125,000.00. It would also appear that every one of the book purchases went through, all 23 of them.

That was one seriously expensive sleeping tablet.