Like a good son, I bought my dad a Father's Day present from Amazon.com last week. A couple days after ordering I received the shipment confirmation email and proceded to login to my account to track the package–except there's no record of this order in the "Where's My Stuff?" section. It's gone. A previous order shows up from several months ago, but not my most recent one. So, I chalk it up to a backend system error, and figure I'll come back later and maybe it will be there.

I login today and the order is still not showing up. Funny thing is, though, using the tracking number from the shipment confirmation email, I can track the package from the USPS site–just not from within my Amazon account. Oh great–this means I have to contact customer support.

A few canned-response customer support emails later and I'm completely dumbfounded. Apparently I have two Amazon accounts with orders in each. The real kicker, though, is that both accounts have the exact same login email address. The only thing that distinguishes the two accounts is the password! I'm not sure how this happened or why Amazon even allows it to happen, but it's terribly frustrating. And, they will not merge the two accounts into one because of "security concerns." Argh!