Dear Diary: 1 of 2
Journée de paperasse. As I intended it to be. For one thing, there was the lamp issue from Gracious Home to settle.
To understand the lamp issue, you must also understand the Quatorze frugality. Last Wednesday, I bought a pile of stuff at two branches of Gracious Home on Third Avenue. (There are three separate store-fronts at the moment: the original hardware store, the linens and china shop across the street, and the lamps and plumbing fitures outlet catercornered to the southeast. Quatorze and I foresee consolidation.) I bought stuff and “had it delivered.” Q was almost beside himself that I didn’t just carry what was carryable. Why have it delivered? Because I always have things delivered. I read once that a gentleman doesn’t even carry a handbag, much less a package, and while I’m not quite that austere, and often lug heavily laden tote bags to and from the storage unit, I take advantage of delivery services wherever they’re available.
When the halogen lamp, marked down, on sale, to $300, wasn’t delivered, Q swallowed his Schadenfreude and advised me to make some calls before the weekend. I disregarded that advice as well.
So, today, I had a situation. I was on the phone for quite a while, explaining various coded messages that I won’t bore you with to various personages. (Namely, the fact that I received two shopping bags, each of which was labeled “1 of 2,” an ominous mistake, especially as there ought to have been a 3rd.)
On the telephone this morning, the gentleman at Gracious Home’s shipping department was rightly skeptical for a while — I can only imagine what blue-haired scattiness keeps him hopping from day to day — but by deploying the scissorhands that I developed in law school (clarity and documentation!) I eventually coaxed a halfway grudging determination to cooperate. When the lamp was eventually located in a dark corner of the store’s premises, grudging cooperation became abject apology. I felt that I ought to apologise, too — if I hadn’t tried to combine two deliveries from different branches into one, the lamp would never have been mislaid (I’m quite sure of this) — and we wound up the conversation with wreaths of mutual thanks. The lamp arrived about two hours later, forty minutes before a further call told me that it was on its way.
A happy ending; but Q would have eschewed the drama.Â
Kathleen said, “I like the new lamp!” Of course it was for her — a halogen table lamp that will allow her to see what she’s doing at the writing table in the bedroom. She sounds forbearing in the story as I tell it because she decided to let me buy the lamp, and she decided to let me buy the lamp because she didn’t want to hear about an ugly purchase. So I bought a handsome lamp (reasonably handsome; halogen is so Sixties), and it took forever to arrive.
We all pick our battles. Even Quatorze.