Intrigued yet? :)
A couple of days ago, in a rare moment of planning ahead, I ordered a bunch of stuff for Sadie's upcoming Harry Potter birthday party. At the same time, I decided to add a bunch of cool kids' reference books to my cart. Happy with my purchase, I clicked on "order" and sat back, waiting for my packages to arrive from Amazon and four other vendors I purchased from via Amazon.
Fast-forward to today, when I received the shipping notice for the Bertie Bott's beans and noticed that the package was heading for...wait for it...the little rent-controlled cottage on the beach in Santa Monica where I lived from October 1997-December 1998. (Where, mind you, I lived next door to Donald Sutherland. I never officially met him, but he used to greet me in the mornings with a gruff "Good morning," while he was walking his yippy little dogs as I set out for my teaching job in South Central LA - we were usually the only people on the beach at that ungodly morning hour.) I gasped, realizing the larger implications, and immediately started chatting online with a nice fellow named Justin at Amazon, who informed me that this book on the rainforest:
which I ordered from Amazon as part of my campaign to convert Sadie to nonfiction reading (cute animals!), had shipped to Santa Monica. However, Mad-Eye Moody's eye, the Harry Potter glasses, and the six other books had not yet shipped and could indeed be rerouted to my current address. (Huge bullet dodged there, as one of the six books is going to Eli as part of my campaign to not have to answer daily questions about puberty. Phew!)
Justin couldn't help me with the orders from the four other vendors, so I found this little "contact the seller" button on Amazon and did a copy and paste of a desperate message to see whether I could reroute shipped packages or pre-emptively change the shipping address for as-yet-unshipped packages. I got a "no problem!" from the butterbeer folks, an "I feel your pain but there's not much we can do" message from a nice lady named Jennie at the Bertie Bott's company, and no sympathy from the owl people or the people from whom I ordered this book on the economy:
(Said book being part of my "congratulations to you!" gift for Eli for getting into the international studies magnet middle school.)
So...now I have to wait, track the packages online, and see if whoever lives in the multi-million dollar mansion that sits on the site of my old dinky beach cottage accepts these packages. If they do, I am out of luck (and I will hope they eat the rotten egg- and earwax-flavored jelly beans). If they refuse them I get to go another round with Jennie and the other folks and see if they can reroute the boxes to me.
Nothing like a little panic and problem-solving on a Monday!
1 comment:
Oh my word! That is crazy. Hope you get the stuff in time! As if party planning isn't stressful enough.
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