NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2022 Oct 5, 09:51 -0700
Jim Rives, you wrote:
"Ordered it online from the GPO last week. So, the link does work."
The link did work. There are plenty of reports from people who successfully bought it at the low price reported. But now there are mutiple reports (including from me) of a vanished product. See the image below. That's what the link says now: "access denied". Maybe some of you who purchased already could try purchasing another copy (as an experiment, to confirm that there's nothing else going on here ...cancel before you get to the payment stage). Visit the purchasing link for the 2023 Nautical Almanac as given: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/nautical-almanac-year-2023. Does it report anything besides "Access denied" as in the image below?
The GPO is not a business. It's a government function with minimal profit motive. They have ample staff apparently operating like a hierarchical corps, similar to some other government bureaucracies (and government-allied bureaucracies like the US postal service). Clearly, from the point of view of making sales and communicating with customers, displaying a generic "access denied" message --as if the product doesn't exist-- when the problem is simple a temporary stock outage is "bad for business". But they don't operate on such terms.
Just to reiterate, support staff at the GPO have suggested a nice old-fashioned method of placing an order. They suggest making a "phone call" and providing credit card details over the phone. Instructions from my previous NavList post:
"if you now want to Preorder, you may call 866-512-1800 and give the technician your card information and mailing address and it will be charged and processed when the item comes in stock. There is just no exact date at this time. May be within 3-4 weeks."
Naturally, it would make far more sense if their online ordering system handled this. A simple message that stated "Temporarily out-of-stock. Your credit card will not be charged until we ship" would satisfy the needs of both sides. But... they don't operate on such terms!
Has anyone tried the phone call method? Did the "technician" sound confused by the issue or informed?
Frank Reed
