Stepping Up to the Plate

I'm too old to be living the way I am.

My friend Jessica is getting married in a few months, so I, of course, had to shop for housewares. The task was made substantially easier by the fact that there exists a registry, and decisions regarding what to buy were pared down to one tiny consideration: price.

So I surfed through the Bloomingdale's web site and selected a few items for purchase, clicked a few times, entered a credit card, and happily completed my duty as a happy wedding celebrant.

Bloomingdale's appears to have (quite stupidly) misinterpreted my request to hold off on delivering the goods for a few months. To wit: Because I didn't want the gifts to arrive too terribly far in advance of the wedding, I asked Bloomie's to hold off on shipping them (two sets of items) for about a month. Bloomingdale's interpretation of my request: Please ship the items whenever you get around to it.

So Jessica got the wedding gifts early. I had to call to verify that she had received them, because, given the conflict between what I requested and what actually occurred, I couldn't be sure there wasn't some big, even stupider mix-up somewhere.

One of the gifts I sent were a set of plates. Very nice, apparently. Jessica's quite pleased with them. And, she reports, "Jason [the fiance] won't let us use them yet. He's not ready to throw out our old sets yet."

At which point it hit me that the plates I use on a routine basis at home are not "sets" of plates. They do not look "nice" by any stretch. In fact, they are literally leftover salad and dinner plates, and cereal bowls... as stolen from my college dining hall. And my alumni association is pestering me about my tenth-year reunion.

So, without a second thought, I asked Jessica if I could have the soon-to-be tossed plate set. I'm excited to get new plates and stuff. Even if they're hand-me-downs. I'm too cheap and poor to go buy new ones myself.