Casing The Joint

So there’s this bench.

It’s a bench I’ve been coveting online for about a month now and it would go perfectly in our entryway.  It’s more than reasonably priced (I haven’t seen anything that’s just like it anywhere else, which is a plus, but anything else that serves the same purpose runs at least $100 more — and that’s on sale).  After leaving it open in my browser for weeks Matt finally said that we should go ahead and get the thing.  Then came the rub: the online shipping instructions said that we should “allow 4-6 weeks” for shipping.

Because we’ve ordered from this place before and the last time we received our packages in 2-3 weeks (missing being out of town by about 2 days, if I recall correctly) we decided to play it safe for our vacation this year and have it shipped to the house of some friends in the neighborhood.  That way if we’re out of town when it’s delivered they can keep it for us for a bit and if we’re here I could run right over and pick it up after we received delivery confirmation.  Yesterday we received notice that it had shipped (three days after placing the order) and that it would be here today.

I was keeping an eye on it online before I left to run errands, but it still said it was “out for delivery” on the truck.  I even called Matt to check as I pulled out of the grocery store so that I could run by and get it while I was still out.  Matt checked and it was a no-go.  I got home, unloaded the groceries, and immediately checked it again (I had a feeling) to find that it had been delivered.

I quickly put Liam back into his carseat (he was not excited) and left as fast as I could since it was 12:05 and he needed to have lunch and be down by 1:00 (Liam was even less excited when we managed to pass his favorite park and he squealed with delight, only to find that we weren’t slowing down.  Poor kid).  I went to our friends’ house and found nothing at the door.  I called Matt who IMd one of the people who live in the house to which the package was supposedly delivered to make sure the dogs were in the house and not in the backyard and then I starting poking around like a criminal.  There was nothing out front, nothing at the side door, and nothing (that I could see) out back, either.  I called Matt back and he looked at the detailed information on the FedEx website and told me that it said “left at front door.”  Clearly, this was either not the case or someone had made off with a large 35 pound box in the span of the 10 minutes it took me to get there.  I started walking around looking at the nearby neighbors’ front doors (looking a bit less like a criminal since I now had Liam and my purse in tow).  Nothing.  It then occurs to me and Matt (who was still on the phone) that the name of the street I was on was the same as an adjacent street, with a different suffix.

I got back in the car and started driving slowly down the other street with the same name (which is a much-used cut-through in the neighborhood, so I passed at least 10 cars while trying to track down the same street number as our friends’ house on a different street looking for all the world, again, like a criminal).  When I found the house, there was our package, in full view, on the front porch.  I pulled over and didn’t see any cars in the drive but did see a ton of kid things in the yard and on the porch so I knew that it was still possible that someone was home and I didn’t want to ring the doorbell and wake up any sleeping children.  I decided to pull in the driveway and knock on the door.  No one appeared to be home.

I grabbed the box (with my name and the correct address clearly written on the front) and the FedEx slip off the door and hurriedly took it back to my car where I eventually stuffed it into the trunk (looking this time like a straight-up thief except that if it were the case it would have made much more sense for me to steal the $600 running stroller that was sitting right next to our box) and drove off.

This bench better be worth all the hype.