Okay, this is just getting too bizarre for words. Last Wednesday morning, we awoke from unsettling dreams to trudge downstairs and order the Mac OS X public beta from the Apple Store. While we can't include the $29.95 price tag for beta software too out of the ordinary (somehow that just utterly failed to surprise us), little did we suspect that everything after clicking the "Add To Order" button would be weird enough to make Franz Kafka hang up his pen, because truth is indeed more surreal than fiction.

It's not that anything's been particularly inexplicable about our beta-buying process, but lots of little strangenesses are really starting to stack up. First there was the odd claim that our Mac OS X beta CD-ROM was "being assembled" for two days; either they're talking about nanotechnological molecular construction, or every order for the beta CD includes a fabulous hand-tooled leather wallet. Then there was the report that Apple had, in its infinite product forecasting wisdom, decided that a thousand copies of the beta ought to be plenty to go around. According to MacCentral, the Apple Store has now booked over 80,000 orders for the software, and expects to crack the six-figure unit sales barrier within the "next few days." There's nothing quite like underforecasting by two orders of magnitude.

Next, there's the whole shipping saga. When we received email confirmation that our order had shipped on Friday night via Federal Express, it included a tracking number for UPS instead. The online Apple Store reported the same incorrect information. Okay, so Apple's shipping system had a glitch... fine. If our order shipped Friday via FedEx (and we had been assured that it had), we figured we'd receive it on Monday. We didn't. What we did receive was a snail-mailed order confirmation telling us that we had paid ten bucks for FedEx three-day delivery. Oops. Never order online first thing in the morning, folks-- it makes you susceptible to glossing over important little details like that.

So, given this latest development, now we're expecting our copy of the beta to show up tomorrow. In the meantime, the Apple Store still reports that our order shipped via FedEx with a UPS tracking number, but at least the Powers That Be have removed the link to FedEx's tracking page. And for some reason, we've now received three copies of the same enthusiastic email message from Apple stating that our order has shipped, but that "due to an error we encountered with our shipment tracking system, your tracking information may not be correct." Tell us something we don't already know, bubby. And tell us three times, just to be sure.