A fairly strange thing happened…..
Last Friday, the UPS man came by with packages. That in and of itself is not so strange; he often comes by to deliver things and my dog Natasha loves to bark her head off at him and/or the brown UPS truck (she hates them for some reason). So these two big boxes came and I was thinking to myself, “Wow. Your brain is degenerating even faster than you know!” because I couldn’t remember buying that much of anything, like, ever. I do order things and then immediately forget about it but they are small things like a skein of yarn, a book, a cd, etc., and the last thing I remembered ordering was a magazine.
Once I got these large boxes inside, I glanced at the sender’s address: Interweave Press. Well, that whom I had ordered the magazine from! Did I win something? I was a little excited, and so were the kids. Louisa was saying loudly, ‘I thought we didn’t have any money right now!” and I agreed that it was true; cashflow right now is down to a trickle…..
I opened the boxes and found a packing slip: it was almost $500.00 worth of knitting books that was supposed to be sent to a yarn store in Georgia. Ian was all for my looking through the books – there were some in there that I really wanted to see, but I was a good bunny and didn’t. And the magazine that I ordered from them also arrived but in the post.
On Monday, I called Interweave Press and described what had happened. They said they’d arrange to have the “evil brown truck” come back and pick them up in a couple of days, which did happen.
My little devil that sits on my shoulder keeps asking, “What if you hadn’t called them? What if you had kept the books? it wasn’t your mistake,” and so forth. I know what would happen – I wouldn’t be able to sleep and my dishonesty would haunt me for the rest of my life; it’d be like stealing. But I do wonder just a bit; the person I spoke to at IP didn’t even say, “Thank you for your honesty,” or “Sorry for the inconvenience,” or even”Thank you for calling us.” I mean, I did just find almost $500 worth of books and I think I should’ve been thanked….just a little.
It sure was weird to receive those books though. On a practical level, it was a silly shipping mistake, but on a deeper level I wonder why the universe sent that shipment to me?
I must say, tonight I think it was the first time I’ve ever had to cancel choir rehearsal on account of SNOW. Like John Prine says, “It’s a big ole goofy world.”
<cross posted to my LJ (and you can hear the song there too)>
Secret Pal 13
