A couple of weeks ago, something that I did't use very often broke and given that I did't use it very often, I thought to myself... should I replace it or could I repair it?
It was something electrical so I'm not sure repairing it with 2 young children puttering around and insisting upon looking at things with their hands (just like the-mrs-gorilla does) was a good idea so it was replace it, or bin it (it actually ended up in my garage awaiting a decision).
But whilst thinking about it, I thought I'd find out how much I paid for it and what it would cost to buy now. I assumed that I'd bought it from Amazon (at some point within the last 3 years) and I set about trying to find the order. I didn't find it but whilst looking, my purchase history started to tell me a story. Amazon seems to be the "go-to" destination when it comes to buying stuff so it makes sense that your purchase history can tell a story, so this is my Amazon story from 2016 - a year chosen at random.
Page 4: January - April
I won't list everything I bought - that would be boring (and the idea for this post is already starting to fail to live up to my expectations of how awesome a topic this would be but I'll plough on for now).
Ok, so the most interesting thing on page 4 is a few books but these tell me a few things:
- I lived in Bristol and had fairly recently started my job there - The Impact Mapping book had been recommended to me by a colleague.
- I was studying for my MBA and was doing my Finance Module and Probably HR too - Why else would anybody buy a book about "Key Management Ratios".
Page 3: May - June
I bought plenty of DVDs on this page - all part of my quest to watch the IMDB top 250 Movies and with the likes of "The Lives of Others" and "Apocalypse Now" being bought, I must've been around ranks 50-60 at the time. The more interesting purchase though (in my opinion), is this:
I've still got about 3/4 of the bag in a kitchen cupboard where we've not eaten many. I had a "Mug Crumble" book and these were one of the ingredients. It can't have been up to much otherwise we'd probably have eaten more of them!
Page 2: July - October
Having thought that in January - April I'd just started my job, July appears to signal the start of my new life down in Eastbourne with the purchase of some gym mats. A strange purchase to make you think of moving home and they were bought to put on the floor in the conservatory of the house we were renting so that it wasn't so cold to use.
I also must have got a new tenant for my flat that I rented out in Wimbledon as I'd bought her a pocket-sprung mattress that she'd requested before moving in. I was a nice landlord. The previous tenant had fled the country to Bulgaria having racked up 10's of thousands of pounds worth of debt with various lenders. Perhaps strangely though, they'd always paid their rent and even posted the front door key back after they'd disappeared. The mind of a criminal...?
In this period, I'd also bought a Wedding Page Boy outfit. When I saw this, I initially thought it was for the-toddler-gorilla but he wasn't born until 2018 so that would've been some serious pre-planning. It must have been bought for the-nephew-gorilla for mine and the-mrs-gorilla's wedding in October that year. A very smart suit indeed...
Page 1: October - December
The month of our wedding (October) celebrated with the Amazon purchase of a "Giant Wine Glass". As part of my speech, I welcomed the-mrs-gorilla to the-gorilla family and since the women in my family drink far too much wine, it felt like a fitting gift. Later, I discovered that the-mother-in-law-gorilla has a habit of finishing off wine bottles because they're "cluttering up the side" in the kitchen. So it seems that our families were destined to be united.
I also bought a lot of books that month for my kindle - obviously preparing for our honeymoon and plenty of time doing very little on an island in the Indian Ocean. Ohhhh, the good old days...
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I hope you enjoyed my Amazon story. It felt a bit like I was writing Season 6 of Lost at the beginning but I think it turned out ok in the end. If you're inspired at all to write your Amazon story, tag me in and I'll be sure to have a read.