A Birthday Present

For the past week or two Carrie had been asking me what I wanted for my birthday, but I never knew what to tell her; After all I’d just gotten paid for making a website and had used the money to buy all the things off my Christmas list I hadn’t received. What else could I want?

But then, Monday night we were sitting in the living room. I’d been on my laptop working on moving my website back to markegli.com (sorry to all of you whose RSS feeds exploded as a result) and Carrie had been on her laptop, probably seeing if her copy of The Sims Medieval had shipped yet. My laptop was plugged in and hers was not, and she kindly requested that I let her use the power cord for a while.

I unplugged the power cord from my laptop and BOOM. It was dead. Guess the battery doesn’t hold a charge anymore. And thus the thought was planted: “I wouldn’t mind a new laptop for my birthday…”

…and Carrie agreed! Excitement of excitements! A refurbished MacBook Air was promptly ordered (“what a smooth checkout process,” I thought, “I don’t need to enter any information because it knows it all from my AppleID”) and the giddy wait began.

But oh treacherous fortune! Apple’s checkout process which I was so ready to praise was the metaphorical Trojan horse. This morning I awoke, ready to track the shipment and see if my computer would arrive today, but what do I see? Destination: Champaign?!

How could this have happened? I tried to think back to Monday night. Why had I missed changing my shipping address? How could I have overlooked this crucial piece of information? My billing address was right; had I seen that and thought all was as it should be?

Panic sets in. I call FedEx to see if they can hold the package but it’s already out for delivery. I call my mom and she gets in touch with the new tenant to explain why a new laptop is going to show up at their door, but as it turns out they’re not going to be home. I arrange with my sister-in-law next door to put a release on the door that will enable them to leave it on the doorstep, but FedEx has already come and gone.

I call FedEx to see about picking it up, and they say the fastest thing is to wait for them to try delivering it again, but I don’t want to go through that all again. Can’t they hold it? It turns out they can hold it, but they have to redeliver it to a FedEx retail store (née Kinkos) for me to pick up so I can’t get it until tomorrow evening.

I can breathe again. I’m already going to be in Champaign tonight and tomorrow and having to wait a day to get my new computer is a small price to pay for it actually getting to me. You can bet that from now on I’ll double-check the shipping address on everything I order.

After all that delivery mix-up I’m thinking maybe I should name this laptop Adam Young. That would be problematic with Adam the Young Hawk alway about, though. Does anyone have any other ideas for a name?