It's Wednesday and I am in full on crisis mode. 4 weeks ago I returned to work from a weeks vacation to find out that my manager had announced he was retiring at the end of the month. This launched a chaotic chain of events and one mis calculation in spending resulting in one maxed out credit card. It all started when one of my co-workers volunteered to organize a party and I innocently asked where he was planning to have the party. Naturally this made me a founding member of the retirement party committee and so I took on the role of doing everything. Several months ago I attended a party for another co-worker where the gift was a glass statue. It was a really touching tribute to a long career and I thought it would be very appropriate as a gift to our retiree. This has been the bain of my existence for the last 3 weeks. Initially, due to an error on the sellers website, the first statue that came was the incorrect statue. After several e-mails of explanation the seller agreed to let me ship back the incorrect statue in exchange for the correct one. I should mention that this product was coming from the west coast of the US and I am in an eastern part of Canada. So I shipped back the first statue, thinking there was plenty of time for the new statue to make its way to us. Enter the courier company. Now remember, I have sent the first statue off with our office courier and assumed that everything was okay. Oh was I wrong. 4 days later I checked the status of the shipment only to find that it was sitting somewhere in a port awaiting paperwork for the Canada Border Agency before it could be returned to the States. After 3 hours of phone calls between the CBA & the courier I finally had things sorted, or so I thought. Imagine my surprise when I came into work the next day to find a very familiar looking box sitting on a co-workers desk. Yes, the courier, who'd I spoken to several times a day earlier, had shipped the bloody thing back. Now I'm no expert in ground transport, but somewhere, in one of those many conversations, shouldn't somebody have picked up on the fact the package was on its way back to me?? Now I have the statue back and I know what forms I have to send and I've been assured by the seller that the correct statue has been shipped to me so naturally I sent the package on its merry little way back to California, AGAIN. Now to the other statue, the correct statue. While the incorrect statue was available and shipped immediately, the correct statue was not ready and had to be made. Due to high temperatures in California the production was delayed which of course delayed the shipping, but I was assured it was en route last Thursday. Given that the first statue shipped on a Tuesday and arrived that Thursday, I was expecting it yesterday, or maybe today at the latest. Guess what didn't come in the mail today??? The party is two days away and we have no gift to give, perfect! I asked the seller (who has been brilliant in all this chaos) to see if she could find out from the shipper where the package was to which I got a reply from the shipper, and creator of these artworks, that some of his new creations include colour! Well shut my mouth and call me Cocoa! Colour! That surely solves all my problems! %&#$*!!!!! There's nothing I can do now, but cross my fingers and pray to the courier gods that this thing gets here, and in one piece, by Friday.
I should also point out that the co-worker who originally volunteered to organize this party and then handed it off to me when he realized he was an idiot who couldn't plan a snow ball fight in the arctic, will no doubt take 100% of the credit for the party.
And that, my blog followers, is why you never ask a question about a retirement party that is being planned. If you do, you could find yourself sucked into planning of the entire event. Just keep your eyes down and your mouth shut!
Cheers!
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