I have an affliction. Loss of Time due to Unemployment.
Basically, because I'm unemployed, the days sort of melt into each other and I usually have
no clue what day or date it is, excepting weekends because my wife, who is employed, is off
work.
Normally, I enjoy this to the fullest - but now and then, as one would imagine, its a royal
pain in my neck. Take for instance, my wifes birthday.
No; I didn't forget it. Well, not entirely.
I knew what day of the month it was (14th) but at the time, I didn't know what day it was
at the present time - in other words, although it was the 13th - I thought it was the 10th.
So, naturally, when my wife made reference to 'tomorrow' being her birthday I nearly choked
on my own tongue.
I pride myself on, usually, not forgetting important things. However, I was in trouble and
I knew it - because I hadn't bothered to get any gifts for my wife as yet.
Sure, I knew what she wanted - a leather computer chair - but I just hadn't acquired it yet.
So, I pretended like I had forgotten (How convenient) and when Monday rolled around I leapt
into my Ford pickup and headed up to Mason City to the Staples, roughly a 45 minute journey.
I like Staples, all those office products just set my mind going in circles of productivity -
you know, if I WAS employed, I could use that... However. That day I was on a mission.
I quickly headed towards the furniture section in the back of the store and found the leather
chairs, and just as quickly, found a $128.99 chair that suited nicely.
I then spent five minutes rounding up a sales person - which, when you DO need them, is like
herding cats.
Said sales assistant looked up the chair model number and tottered into the back storage room,
and I waited. And waited. And waited. In the meantime I decided to further investigate the
available office products.
After lapping the store twice, the salesman returned to tell me they were out of stock and that
a truck would be in on Wednesday or Friday.
"Wednesday or Friday? Well which day? Wednesday OR Friday?"
"Well, if its not in on Wednesday... it'll be in on Friday"
Ah, the logic.
So I returned home somewhat dejected. And then a thought struck me - "Hey, I'm a new age kinda
guy, I'm pretty internet savvy - I mean, I'm only a web programmer - I'll buy it online!"
So I proceeded to look up staples.com and find the chair - which online was only $99.99.
Oh happy days! My luck was looking up - of course I had to use my wifes PC because my browser
doesn't do Java; but for a $30 saving, I wasn't going to complain.
Except my internet was terribly slow that day, and took me 30 minutes just to put the object
into my "cart" and wrangle the sign up process to add me.
After much messing around, I finally found the "Press this button and you will own it" page.
I pressed the button, and changed the window to close another browser - and when I returned,
the webpage had stopped - and to make matters worse, the little button was greyed out - meaning
I was now unable to click it again.
So, I did the natural human thing - I hit the Refresh button.
Lo and behold, up came a "Processing..." screen. I was just getting into the act when I heard
the front door open and my wife come home! I quickly closed the browser window and went back
to my computer and pretended to work.
Now I wasn't entirely sure if I had bought a chair or not. Heck, I could have even bought two
chairs.
I waited until Wednesday and checked our bank transactions to find no records of Staples taking
any money out of our account. I took this as a good sign.
On the Thursday I drove back to the Staples store in Mason City and picked out the chair, which
had been marked down from $129 to $99. Whoopee.
I put the rather large and awkward box into the back deck of the pickup and left for home, via
the florists. I had decided that since my wifes present was just a tad late, I should make up
for it with some flowers - so I bought $60 worth, a nice bouquet with none of this Babies Breath
crap or tonnes of fattening foliage - just petals and stems.
I then made my way home to pick up the spare set of keys to my wifes car, and while home took
the chair out of the pickup (lest the wife see me while dropping off flowers) and put it in
the living room.
I then made the trip to Rockwell (25 minutes), placed the flowers in her Caddy, and returned
home... only to open my front door and discover the UPS man had dropped off a rather large box.
A rather large box with a Staples sticker on it.
So I put the box I had bought that morning BACK into the pickup, drove BACK to Staples and
explained what had happened and received a refund.
Then I returned home, for the last time that day, to find my wife had beaten me home from
school and was fawning over the flowers.
And had completely missed the chair I had set up in the computer room.