Brainrub

Starting around the second week of December, I started experimenting with interesting ways to give gifts or other random things to friends of mine who live quite far away from me. It’s been interesting to say the least, and has brought to light many of the security risks inherent to long-distance gift giving while using the web as the intermediary.

Keep in mind: I’m in Toronto, Canada.

Here are three examples:

1) Pizza delivery, San Diego, CA.

I have a female friend who lives in San Diego who I talk to very regularly. She was at home one afternoon while I was working and was starving, but didn’t have available cash on hand. On a total whim I decided: I’m gonna buy my friend some lunch. This turned out to be more problematic than it seemed. I first tried using online pizza ordering services like Dominoes, Pizza Hut, etc. All of these require that whoever’s credit card is in use should be present at the address to sign for the order. They both flatly disallowed any third-party purchase without the card owner being present. I suggested to both that they should have a “buy a friend a pizza” option, but both were dismissive of the idea.

I can understand why this would be the case. Any maliciously-minded person could just abuse any credit card and send random pizzas with no checks or balances in place. I get that. But there are several sites out there that offer “this is a gift” options, with reasonable means of verification. (Amazon and ThinkGeek immediately spring to mind.) But, no go.

So I asked her: if you were to order a pizza, where would you order it from. She suggested a place right in her neighborhood: Pizza Gourmet Express [link] They have a website, but no online ordering. It’s a fairly small but popular local operation. So I decided instead that I would call. As luck would have it, I got the actual owner of the establishment on the phone. He turned out to be very receptive. He even knew who I was talking about when I said who I was buying for. He made it clear this was an unusual request, but I made sure he knew he could call me back to confirm who I was, or even call my work to verify my identity further. He said that sounded fine. So I said I’d like to place an order for a pizza and some dessert. Fifteen minutes later my friend sauntered over and picked up her pizza.

Total time to find one pizza place that would accept my remote order: 25 minutes.

Total order time: 5 – 10 minutes.

Time from initial discussion to friend receiving and eating pizza: ~45 minutes.

Success!

I do believe this functionality will likely show up in the future. I just think about parents with their kids away at University wanting to surprise them with a nice dinner or some other little extra. Campusfood.com should offer this option but does not. I think it would be a huge success, and again: the technology to cover all the bases for this process does exist already. Hopefully this is a good “next step” that these restaurants can take.

2) Order a surprise book gift for my friend, Kim, in Seattle, WA

Kim, as you may know, co-authors this blog (though lately neither of us has had much available free time to do so.)

She and I had a lengthy online discussion about all manner of things and at the end of it I was inspired and wanted to send her a book I knew she would enjoy. I had never used any gift feature of any site, and I wanted to remain in my quick and spontaneous moment. I found the book, ordered it, chose to ship it to her address, and Amazon smartly recognized I had never shipped to a third-party address before. It asked me to confirm my credit card. I did so. A few clicks later and off it went. The entire experience lasted maybe 3 minutes, tops. I received a confirmation email 30 minutes later. The package had been shipped. She received it two days later.

This is easily one of the most convenient features of Amazon.com, or indeed any shopping site I’ve ever used.

3) Third party purchase of a DVD for me, via a friend in Austin, TX

I have a friend in Austin, Texas who I converse with regularly about film and music. We’ve known each other for nearly ten years now. He’s a quirky guy and he’s adamant about recommending films for me. I had heard that one of my favorite French films, Betty Blue (or: “37°2 le matin” [wiki]) directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix had had a re-release on dvd adding some 70 minutes to its original length. I had never been able to find a copy anywhere locally so I asked him if he knew where I could find one. He said he’d just go buy it for me but I said I wanted to compensate him for it, since this was a reasonably rare find. (Speaking of which: if anyone has a line on the director’s cut of Michael Mann’s 1985 film Manhunter, I’m all ears.)

He said (via MSN) “well you could do a wire transfer.” I thought that might be too much work. Instead I said “how about a straight online banking transfer?” He felt that would be too complicated. I went to my bank’s online banking section. They actually offer a “transfer to another account” option. Previously this was for accounts which my own bank handled, but I guess they now offer it for any account. I asked him for the details of his account based on the numbers on a typical cheque. He provided this. Approximately 30 minutes later: he had the money transfer.

He went out later that night to buy it, and shipped it the next morning. I received it five days later. (This guy is a pathologically efficient man.)

That may not be the most obvious way to do things but I was surprised to discover this expanded functionality from my online banking. As one would expect, there was a lot of prerequisite “are you sure?” moments in setting up the actual funds transfer, and I did overshoot the actual dollar amount due to the exchange rate. (Call it a gratuity for my film friend’s access to the rare dvd.)

I’m intrigued to see if this kind of transaction becomes more common in the future. When the Internet started to first get popular, I remember seeing pizza delivery sites based solely in Manhattan, which had really comprehensive ordering menus. That was in 1996. Maybe in the coming decade I can buy my friend in San Diego a pizza shipped from Manhattan. That’s obviously a bit of a long shot, but it’s the kind of wacky undertaking I’d love to explore.

Thanks for reading.

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