Seldom in this lifetime…

This is the continuing saga of the missing shelves. If you are bored with the topic – try me again some other time for a different one. But just now my mind is rather occupied with this one…

I didn’t actually TELL the moving company to “bring them on” as I may have suggested in my last posting. It was more of a rhetorical thing. But “bring them on” is exactly what they did. Some bright spark had the idea of loading up ALL the shelves in our shipment and bringing them to the apartment, to just ‘try them out.’ Surely some of them would fit, sort of thing. Someone, (obviously someone who failed math in high school and is, therefore, distrustful of any numbers) was sure that I’d simply lied or made up the dimensions. Or possibly that dimensions didn’t matter as much as, for example, ‘hope.’

So, in come these two lovely ladies with their truckload of shelves. Before starting to schlep them all up the stairs (3rd floor apartment) they want to come in to look at the piece of furniture whose shelves are missing. While the one woman is telling me that the company has had extra crews working overtime all week sorting through each of our storage vaults, and that they had finally decided to load up all the shelves and bring them out, and other murmurings to the effect that this had all been A LOT of trouble… the other woman looks down at the lower cupboard and realizes that the shelves are stacked there, right underneath the TV.

They’ve been right here, all along.

I didn’t know what to say. I was mortified.

They were hysterical. They couldn’t wait to get back to the warehouse and gloat. They wanted to know who had delivered the stuff in the first place and immediately started plotting how to make fun of him. I had to give them each a $20 tip just to get them out.

OK. In my defense, they are each only about ½ inch thick. They just blended in. I didn’t even suspect that they would have been transported like that, unprotected. Oh well. What am I going to say to the ‘move coordinator’ with whom I’ve been having all these phone conversations? Thank goodness we remained pleasant and cordial throughout. Boy would I feel ridiculous if I’d gotten nasty and impatient with them all besides. It really isn’t my fault – they are responsible for delivery and set-up and they are the ones who looked for the shelves in the rest of the shipment and couldn’t find them, which started this whole thing. But still. I’ve been looking at it for two weeks and never saw it.

Seldom in this lifetime does one get so spectacular an opportunity to make an ass of oneself. I am SO glad that I didn’t actually do it. It could have been so much worse. Well, from MY point of view, anyway.