I got a neat (and probably boring) little story to share with you…

My mother-in-law is an interior decorator of sorts. She’s got an LLC and gets discounts and warehouse special pricing and that kind of thing. It’s more like a hobby these days, I think. Anyway, she got us some nice new Hunter Douglas blinds for our bedroom and bathroom. We hung them up a couple weeks ago and they look great. When we offered to pay her back for the blinds, she refused to take money from us. She said it was her treat. Hunter Douglas blinds aren’t cheap so this meant quite a lot to me. I wanted to thank her properly.

I decided to send her some flowers. There’s just something special about having a florist deliver flowers to your door, ya know? I went to 1-800-FLOWERS where I always order from and browsed their selection last week. I decided on two dozen multi colored sweetheart roses (they’re the small roses, not the teenie tiny ones but the ones that are about half the size of your basic long stemmed roses). They were specially priced and when you bought the two dozen, you got two more dozen free! That’s 48 roses!!! Crikey!

So I ordered them right up for around $40 on Wednesday. Had it all arranged to have them delivered to her on Friday. Wednesday night, Honey told me that his mom and dad were leaving town the next day for five days. YIKES! I emailed 1-800-FLOWERS and requested the delivery date be changed from Friday to Wednesday (yesterday). I didn’t get a response within, like, 15 seconds so I panicked and called their customer service department. I spoke with a nice young man who helped me out immensely…

He said for some reason those roses couldn’t be delivered on Wednesday or Thursday. So he suggested that I replace the order with something comparable. He chose a $70 bouquet of white long stem roses in a blue vase and said that they would eat the price difference. Sounded good to me! So then it was all changed and rearranged.

A couple days later, I got an email from them (in response to my first email) saying they put the order on hold and they refunded my money so that I could reorder or change the original order. I checked my bank account on Tuesday and found that indeed my account had not been charged. So I emailed them back and tried to explain my phone call with customer service and all that. It turned into a great big mess so I just requested to completely cancel my order. I was just going to start from scratch. I got another email confirmation that said my order had been completely cancelled.

I asked Honey to ask his dad yesterday if he and MIL would be in town for a few days so that I could reorder. When he asked his dad, he found out that the original order of 48 roses had been delivered to their house on Friday (original order) while they were out of town and that Honey’s sister stopped by to check on their house and brought the roses inside. When Mom got home Tuesday, she found them in her house.

We talked to mom last night and she adored the roses. She said they were still in good shape and she was awestruck that there were so many of them! It all turned out great. We warned her that the order had gotten so mixed up, she shouldn’t be surprised if she gets another bouquet of white roses in a blue vase later this week!

And the coolest part about this whole boring story? I was never charged for the 48 roses!!!! HAHAHAHA!!!

Damn, I love freebies! And 1-800-FLOWERS is a great company! Check them out if you ever have the need to send flowers!