An Exception-free Christmas to all....

[captainsblog]

I am the poster child for Last Minute Christmas Giving. Through seven years of post-secondary education, I always seemed to get stuck with a final exam on the afternoon of December 23rd, and thus couldn't focus on the holiday until it was practically over. For most of the next decade, I was in a law firm that made a perverted point of making us all dependent on Christmas bonus checks that didn't get given out until the final hour of the final Friday before the begrudgingly-offered holiday of 12/25. Despite not having quite those excuses anymore, I've never gotten ahead of the curve, and of course did most of my gifting for family and clients in the past 72 hours.

One client gift was inspired by my sister's sending of an Edible Arrangement as a get-well gift for my wife last week. When she and I were making the rounds of Wegmans earlier this week, Eleanor called me over to the catering station, where one of her friends there very much wanted to meet me. It then clicked that I could send something edible, and even arranged, right from there to a client who had been berry berry good to us all through the year. I suspected that the local store could arrange delivery to the client's office in suburban Rochester, since that, after all, is where Wegmans itself is based.

Well, yeah, Marie explained, but for logistical reasons, that would neither hurt nor help, since all of their deliveries- even ones local to here- are handled by UPS. This, I understood; they can probably lock in shipping rates through their entire five-state coverage area that way, even though it means that the shipments wind up going through the hub-and-spoke system of air freight delivery. In which a shipment goes from Gates, New York to Pittsford, New York by way of Memphis, Tennessee.

Even so, it only added 10 bucks of shipping to the gift basket, and it would get there before Christmas, so I plunged for it and waited for the confirming email to arrive.

Which did. Confirming what, though, is the Holy Mystery of this post.

I clicked through from the Weggies email to the tracking status in the UPS system, and got this utterly surreal display:



Experienced an exception? Wow. I didn't know if I should get mad or send the shipment a pack of cigarettes and a tube of red lipstick. The Experienced Exception could join the Immaculate Conception in the annals of pre-Christmas lore.

Turns out, simply, that the client was out when the package was delivered, and it will be there next week. As it will still be wrapped and kept, most likely, in a nicely-chilled warehouse until then, I am sure there will be no great loss from the delay.  Even better, we've added a new catchphrase to our holiday lexicon, and I can now wish every one of you a Christmas filled with meaning, light and experiences- without exception.

Comments

[headbanger118.livejournal.com]

My Christmas was full of exceptions, and yet I managed to survive! So, I expect, will the package. :D