View From the Tenth Level

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

My eBay addiction caught up with me today in the form of the guys in my department that I am supposedly managing.

I was out sick from work yesterday, due to exploding sinuses, which usually happens a few times a year. If I could ask God for replacement parts, better sinuses would be near the top of my list. Longer legs would be number two.

I’ve been expecting some packages from my eBay shopping, and one arrived while I was out of work. Fine. Guys in my department picked it up from reception for me. Fine.

I got back into work today and got a message on my answering service that notified me that a package had come in and my department had picked it up for me. I was happy to see that it was a handbag I had purchased a couple of weeks back. The box it arrived in sat on top of my desk, cheerily staring at me until I could find a spare moment to open it.

Lunch time arrived and I decided to open the box. I don’t usually open boxes at work, but this one was a little bulky and I didn’t want to carry it on the train home. It would have been easier to just carry the little purse I knew was inside.

The guys in my department were at lunch, so I was alone with my box. It seemed as good a time as any to open it. Eagerly, I slit the tape that held the box together and moved the packing paper aside.

This wasn’t my bag! I didn’t order a vinyl Pantone zip bag! I paid $88 for a designer bag – not this little piece of vinyl!

Immediately, I thought of the Seller. How in the world did she get it mixed up? So I wrote to her, told her she had made a mistake, and to please send me the correct bag and I would send the wrong bag back. I probably wasn’t that polite about it, having been ripped off by handbag sellers before.

That’s when M-, one of the two young men in question, came back from his lunch. I explained what had happened and was just about to go tape up the offending Pantone bag (Pantone bag! Was the Seller into graphic design, I mused?) and send it back with REFUSED written in dark, angry strokes all over the box, when he then sheepishly confessed that he and B- had decided to play a prank on me.

They switched bags on me when I was out, and did a good job of making the box look like no one had tampered with it.

I wrote back to the poor Seller, who probably wonders what kind of batty woman she sold a bag to, and explained the prank.

Just wait until M- and B- start getting mail from strange dating sites.

posted by Melanie O. at 2:10 PM -

1 Comments:

At 9:06 AM, gardenbug said…

ha Ha Ha Ha ha....you work with good people. Have fun. Re: sinus...give up dairy products and watch your sinuses heal. Mine did. That includes butter, ice cream, cow's cheese, yogurt, etc. You can have any dairy product if it comes from a sheep or a goat...good sources of calcium.