Be careful, you could be the next Slingbox Santa

I talk a lot about Amazon.com and how easy it is, even for noobies, to order products on their web site. But a recent series of events made me realize it may be too easy.

I wanted to order a Slingbox Pro and have it delivered in one day. The only problem was I was running out of time to meet the shipping deadline and I was smack dab in the middle of a fantasy football draft.

My wife came to my rescue. She ordered the Slingbox Pro for me. She also ordered one for her dad and my sister.

The latter two were accidental. My wife used Amazon's 1-click ordering to order the Slingbox Pro. But the problem with Amazon's 1-click ordering is that you have to be careful what shipping address you use. Amazon does provide a drop-down list of all of the people you have shipped to in the past but if you're not looking for it, it's easy to miss.

So the first time my wife used the 1-click ordering option, the order was set to ship to her dad, probably because he was the first person listed in the ship-to drop down list. After she realized what happened, my wife canceled that order and tried again but this time it went to my sister.

This is known as the scroll wheel syndrome (yeah, I just made that up). If you select an item in a drop-down list and then use the scroll wheel on your mouse to scroll up or down the web page, often you end up scrolling to other items in the drop-down list instead.

So now a Slingbox Pro was en route to my sister. Luckily Amazon.com made it easy to cancel this order as well and my wife was able to place a third order that correctly shipped to our own address.

For a few days, I called my wife the Slingbox Santa. Ironically, I slept on the couch those same few nights.