Waiting, waiting, waiting

There's far too much waiting involved in this hobby at the moment. I mistakenly bid on and won an eBay auction from Hong Kong which is estimated to arrive a month after the auction ended. That's a mistake that I'll never make again.

I'm still waiting for my two packs of Bowman Chrome wrapper redemption packs which were supposedly sent out by Topps last Friday. If they don't arrive tomorrow then I'll be sending an e-mail to Topps requesting replacements. There's no way anything should take a week to get from Duryea to Massachusetts.

On the Panini front, I'm waiting for a replacement of a Chris Kaman autograph card from Studio and redemption autographs of Pat Summitt and Cheryl Miller. It's been almost 4 months on the Summitt and 2 on the Miller.

Then there's Upper Deck which just might be the most frustrating of all. On 12/30 and 12/31, I submitted seven codes for redemption cards from my Draft Basketball case. The website stated that they were "in stock, item will be shipped soon."  Apparently, Upper Deck and I have differing ideas on the definition of the word soon. It is now the middle of February and these cards haven't even shipped from Upper Deck. Redemption cards are frustrating enough when they're for cards that don't yet exist, but there's no excuse for this kind of wait when the cards are supposedly sitting there in their warehouse.

There's also the issue of the Michael Johnson autographed redemption for a card that doesn't exist and never will. The first frustrating this is that they still made me wait 45 days to request a replacement from a set that's been out for a year and a half. There's no way that this card is ever going to be made. If anything, they would have tried to acquire Johnson autographs to include in the recent World of Horrible Pictureless Sticker Autograph Cards release.

So, I entered the code on January 3rd. 45 days after that is February 17th if I'm figuring things out correctly. I got an e-mail from them on the 2nd saying that "a replacement of comparable value will be sent out in 6-8 weeks." Here's the list of players that I sent to them. Who do you think that I'm going to get?

1. Larry Bird
2. Tom Brady
3. Bill Russell
4. Kevin Garnett
5. Multi-auto Celtics card
6. Mike Piazza
7. Ray Allen
8. Rajon Rondo

Looks like I'll have to wait two months to find out what they're going to send me. It's a shame that this isn't Panini or else I'd be looking forward to getting a nice 1/1 card in the mail.

I've never been more down on the hobby and it sucks. I don't want to be. I want this to be fun, but at times it can be tough to have fun when every major company out there currently producing sports trading cards is pulling ridiculous bullshit. Maybe I'll start busting cases of Rittenhouse Archives non-sports stuff instead. Sketch cards do pretty well on eBay.

I guess that's why other than the case break, I really haven't opened much of anything and have instead purchased a bunch of singles from eBay. I really hope things change because these companies have made me really good at waiting and I can wait a while before opening up my wallet to support them.