I honestly don’t know what I’ll do without online shopping. I discovered it fairly early back in the days when having a Pentium 3 computer was the height of cool and we had dial-up connection that worked slower than Nicole Scherzinger’s brain cells. I can still remember using my mum’s credit card (I had a supplementary account) to order silly things like signed posters of the Spice Girls and “authentic” katanas. Luckily for me, no one shipped to the Philippines back then, so not only did I save my mother a few hundred dollars, I probably saved myself from a lifetime of being grounded.

Fast forward to a few years later. People in the west have now realized that the Philippines actually has real people that use (gasp!) computers, so one can now buy just about anything under the sun as long as one is willing to pay for ridiculous shipping costs and customs charges and wait for weeks (sometimes even months) to get one’s parcel. This is how The Fiance gets his Blu-ray movies.

I must say I totally admire the man’s patience. I, for one, will be climbing the walls by the second day; hence, why I prefer to do my online shopping on some of the local websites. As long as I pay early in the day and bug the seller senseless to ship before the courier’s cut-off time, it’s guaranteed that I’ll get it bright and early the next day. (And mind you, I’ve only been let down a couple of times.)

How true is it, though, that folks in the U.S. are getting their stuff delivered within minutes? I saw this video promoting an online site with an overenthusiastic Howie Mandel and a very amused little old lady named – wait for it! – Gay.

So a strange man (Howie) knocks on Gay’s front door and she actually lets him in, use her computer to order a smoothie maker, and lie on her kitchen counter. Then somewhere between the actual sale and him admiring her light fixtures, someone’s at the door again with – you guessed it! – said smoothie maker. And it doesn’t end there. Gay, displaying the best of American hospitality, even makes him a smoothie on the spot!

Farfetched or not, I think the video shows exactly how endless the possibilities of online shopping are. Although The Fiance will probably still have to wait several days for his imported movies, I can at least expect the sewing machine I ordered on behalf of my sister to turn up within the hour.

It does, indeed, sound super cool – in theory. For all I know, it might only work with Howie hyperventilating in my kitchen. If that’s the case, I think I can wait a day or two.