About 15 years ago, a friend of mine lent me a chair. Not just a chair, a chair that his mother had purchased years before and that had a mate and a matching couch at home. Or davenport or sofa, pick your favorite word. I grew up with davenports but soon realized that most of the country has absolutely no clue what I was talking about so I've adopted "couch" as my own. A bit of research shows that Davenport was a company that made couches so it's the sofa equivalent of Kleenex. It's also a college; perhaps all you do there is sit.
Upon observation it's a pretty generic chair of average comfort which means that it has wooden arms so there is no way it'll ever get categorized as a comfy chair in my world. It lived in Ben's office, mostly holding papers he didn't know what to do with.
A few months ago my friend called me about the chair. He wants it back. I guess he's having a chair reunion and wanted to reupholtser them to give them new life. So how do you ship a chair halfway across the country?
He mailed us a huge box: 30" x 30" x 30" filled with some packing material. It cost him about $170! The box, of course, was damaged during shipment but we made the executive decision to use it anyway. I got the chair from the attic. The stairs are too narrow for the chair because they go around a chimney. That meant I had to find a way to toss the chair over a railing, keep it balanced there while I ran down the steps and lowered it from over my head to onto the stairs. I wasn't thinking so I got to scramble over the chair and take the door off the hinges since of course it didn't fit through there either. Sam was impressed by my ability to remove a door from its hinges. I think that may come back and haunt me at some point in the future.
The rest of the journey to the front porch was uneventual and I packed it up in the crushed box. See? There might be a little stowaway problem though.
Any guesses how much it cost to mail it back? We lucked out and the UPS man was coming up the street just as we were planning to haul the thing to them. He didn't even complain, in fact he RAN to the truck holding this monster box. Our UPS dude rocks.
I certainly hope this chair was worth all that effort. I hope it has lots of sentimental value. Unfortunately, now it also has cat hair.
2 comments:
Wait, he spent $170 to *ship* you an almost empty box with some packing material in it? Why didn't he ask you to just find a suitable box and material and he'd reimburse you the [almost certainly smaller] cost?
Strange.
What do you want to bet he had someone over who looked at the remaining set, decided they were priceless midcentury artifacts and convinced him to put the whole set up for sale to the highest bidder?
Wow, this is hilarious!
My guess for return shipping is $100, on top of the $170 he already spent. Am I close?
Theory - his dying mother just told him that she hid the family jewels somewhere, but she can't quite remember where...
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