I try to avoid Amazon for various reasons but they are also seductively convenient. Still, they keep adding reasons for me to look elsewhere. In various ways, for me it felt as if they were at their peak maybe twenty years ago or so.

The latest surprised me. I order something marked as a gift for someone in a time zone rather ahead of mine. It turns out that the delivery driver will need to be told a shared secret that is conveyed to me on the day of delivery.

If they're going to assume that, on whatever the delivery day happens to be, I'll have chance to check my e-mail and convey the secret to the recipient in some rather further advanced time zone, before the driver reaches them, then they could at least warn me of that before I order.

Amazon has enough money to pay people to actually think things through. Perhaps it's still incompetence but I suspect it's simply that they just don't care. Maybe nearly everyone works day shift and can bring their phone into the office and has access to e-mail through it and buys only for people in their same country and never does anything that keeps them from their e-mail for a few hours and the rest of us don't matter.

Given that I have long-haul travel coming, I realized that one thing that could make it more bearable might be taking the opportunity to watch plenty more of The Expanse (2015) on my Amazon Fire 10. After all, it may be that I can download the remaining episodes now then watch even in airplane mode.

This turned out to not be a quick check. Amazon doesn't easily handle multi-country activity so I must have both US and UK accounts. My Fire 10 was last associated with my UK Amazon account so it couldn't see my Prime subscription. It appears not to be able to switch my Prime Video viewing to my US account without switching the whole tablet, and various other app-related data or whatever seems tied to the account, not simply the tablet. No doubt it makes sense for others somehow but, for me, the sole user of the tablet but with multiple accounts, it's a real pain. Even my ssh client stopped working after the switch.

Apps are now reinstalled, rechecked, etc., my Prime subscription has become visible and, indeed, I can download whole seasons of a show, put the tablet into airplane mode, reboot it, then watch episodes. So, it worked out in the end but, goodness, what a fuss to get there.