Mail Drama...Not to be Confused with Male Drama

Living on a rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean means that almost everything we buy, we buy on-line.  When we move back to a place were you can go to a store, I might still choose to shop this way, because frankly shopping on-line is fantastic.   That being said, sometimes you benefit from getting to hold the item you are buying.  Sometimes the ~7,000 mile journey proves to be too great and just sometimes the middleman isn't very smart.

Exhibit A--Too incompetent 

Our latest fiasco was waiting for Isaac's birthday present.  I bought it two months before his birthday to gaurantee it would arrive on time.  I had been sweating bullets for a few weeks before his birthday, because not only was his gift yet to arrive, but Peter was also going to be off island for business.  His birthday was shaping up to be lame.  Finally, two days before his birthday I called the main post office to explain my plight.  Well, not only did they track down the box, but they said it was on island and had been there for ONE AND A HALF MONTHS--a.k.a. 45 days!  With a glimmer of hope I biked to the local post office and inquired about the missing package.  If you insure your package it requires one extra step in processing it and apparently that extra step was too difficult for them to manage.  This experience made this satire  piece all the more hilarious.

Exhibit B--Too big

If you ever run out of fiberfill, do not {I repeat DO NOT} buy 5 lb. Five pounds doesn't sound like much but it is a lot...like make-your-own-mattress a lot.  This box doesn't do it justice.  We have very limited storage space, so I had to transfer the fluff to garbage bags and then shove them in a closet.  It filled 4 garbage bags, because unfortunately I can't compact it as tight as a machine.  This time I was the stupid one, not the middleman.





From this fluff I made this large snake, which is both a toy and draft pillow, and it didn't even make a dent in one of the garbage bags.  At least my mistake can provide some entertainment.

   

Here is another item that was bigger than anticipated.  I bought a mini-disco ball and thought it would be more the size of the small basketball photographed.  At least this mistake won't take years to get over.  Just a few hours of the kids playing with it and I'm sure it will break.

Exhibit C--Too small

You buy a pack of beads that cost $5-10 and then this arrives.  This teeny-tiny vial!  Need I say more?

  

I ordered mini-clips and expected them to be more the size of the black or at the very least the green.  These suckers are itty-bitty.  

I like to hang the children's art with mini clothes pins.  It took me a few tries to finally get the size I wanted.  The smallest pin is so teeny you practically need tweezers to open it.

Exhibit D--Too damaged

When you spend almost $100 on quality colored pencils, you would expect some quality packing.  At the very least, something better than the equivalent of a garbage bag.  You would think, but you'd be wrong.  I had the pleasure of sorting through all 180 pencils to see which and how many fell out of the hole in their lame excuse of a package.

Now this is one of my favorites.  An entire bottle of laundry detergent leaked due to poor packing.  The company was great and sent me not only one replacement bottle, but two.  However, they requested that I send that gooey mess back to them.  Are they insane?  I threw that pile of goo out the instant I finished snapping this picture.

Early in its journey the post office had to bag the entire saturated box and put it in another box