By Laura Hutchinson
IT was a day like any other. And, by that, I of course mean that it was totally jinxed. I had ordered three dresses online a few weeks previously, two of which were bridesmaids’ dresses, and I wasn’t expecting them to be delivered until after Christmas. Actually, with my luck, part of me wasn’t expecting them to be delivered at all. The crowd I ordered from had already taken my money, and I half feared that that would be the end of the matter.
So when I got a call from TNT to say that they had a package for me, I was both surprised and delighted. The only snag was that the dresses were being held hostage by customs and they needed me to prove how much I had paid for them so that they could calculate how much tax they were going to overcharge me, and I had to sign forms for their safe release. Essentially, my dresses had been imprisoned and I had to bail them out. The guy from TNT said that as long as I managed to do that straight away, he should have them delivered to me later that day. Fantastic, I thought.
Being the tech-savvy person that I am, I emailed him a copy of the receipt for the dresses and a signed copy of the forms he needed. I had paid only €305 for the garb, so wasn’t expecting to pay too much in tax. How naive! Mr TNT emailed back to say he’d be taking €105 in cold hard cash from me. It was a bitter pill to swallow. But, having no choice, and realising I’d be single-handedly bailing the country out of recession, I had to agree, and asked if he could give me an approximate delivery time. What I got back was even more infuriating than the tax bill – an out-of-office reply.
Assuming there must be some mistake, I called TNT and asked to speak to him. But no, apparently he goes home at 1pm. Because he has the handiest job in the whole world. I mean, I’m busy juggling five billion jobs, and there are thousands out there who are unemployed and would be only too grateful for some work, and this guy’s swanning off home at lunch time! So I get through to some other guy who says my dresses won’t be out until the following day, thus re-affirming my view that everyone just lies to me all the time. (You see, people, I’m not exaggerating!)
So I was pretty much a burning ball of rage. I mean, I know I only had to wait an extra day, but patience certainly isn’t one of my strong suits. I expect instant results in everything or I pretty much lose all interest. Nonetheless, I made it to the next day without setting fire to anything. First thing I did that morning was ring TNT and spoke to the original guy (who had, very kindly, bothered to show up for work). “What time will my dresses be here?”, I wanted to know. “Sometime tomorrow”, he replied. Hmm...
As it turns out, and as could only happen to me, my dresses had inexplicably been delivered to Tallaght. Tallaght! The driver was going to have to go back out and get them. “Well can’t he just bring them straight here then?”, I asked. Oh no, because you see, that would be far too easy. No, what TNT wanted to do was to go all the way back out to Tallaght to retrieve them, and then bring them all the way back to Dublin bloody airport to be reprocessed. Which would take the whole day.
Well! I won’t tell you what I said next because this is a family paper and I don’t want to shock or offend anyone, but needless to say, Mr TNT and I had words. He said he’d ring around to see if anything could be done sooner. I asked him to ring me back. “Oh I can’t, I’m going home now”. Cue deep breaths.
When it finally became evident that I was going to have to wait yet another 24 hours, I decided to try and salvage what was left of the day. The other half and I got ourselves ready and out the door to go to Dundrum for some shopping. We had bags, keys, wallets, hats, scarves, gloves... the lot! Everything was switched off, the doors and windows were locked. I joked that it would be just my luck that TNT would call while we were in Dundrum to say they could actually make it after all. Oh how we laughed!
We had pulled into Dundrum car park all of twenty seconds when my phone rang. “This is TNT. I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”
And people wonder why I have anger management issues.