My wife fell in love with a 200 year old apothecary cabinet at an antique mall in St. Francisville, Louisiana. It's one of those places where people have a bunch of individual booths inside of a large building. She actually had me drive over an hour to go back with her and look at it. They were asking $800 for it, so I brushed it off as an “I'd never pay that much for it” item and acted like I forgot.
Later I called the place and made arrangements to meet the booth owner and discuss possibly trading the cabinet for a gun. She agreed to meet me and I took the gun and not only showed it to her but accompanied her to a restaurant to show an acquaintance who knew more about guns. She said she'd have to talk to her son and get back to me.
The very next day she texted me and asked me to meet her again to make the trade. She wanted me to meet her at the restaurant. I took the gun there where she had another acquaintance check it out and verify its value. I then left the gun there with her friend and accompanied her back to the antique mall where we retrieved a furniture dolly and started carefully moving the many items blocking the large cabinet in.
A woman walked up and asked about the cabinet. The lady I had just traded my gun to for this cabinet starts trying to sell it to this new woman! The woman says, “My dad is Dr. So-and-so and this would be perfect in his front room.”
Now at this point the woman has my gun, I've left it with her friend, this cabinet is mine. She proceeds to instruct the newcomer to take a photo of it and send it to her dad, and see if he wants to purchase it. Inside I'm boiling, raging in fact, but my wife loves this cabinet and I don't want to spoil the deal if this new lady is just blowing smoke. So I just continue moving items, then pull the cabinet out, all while she's spouting off about the history and all these reasons why the doctor should buy this cabinet.
I'm now loading the cabinet on to the furniture dolly and pulling it out into the aisle. The booth owner starts demonstrating how the drawers work and continuing to push hard for this other lady to buy it. That lady then gets a call and she's on the phone saying, “Well we've got to decide right now, there's another gentleman here buying it.”
No duh! I'm buying it, I've bought it! It's a done deal! She asked me to come back and make the trade! I didn't drive all the way out here to get snookered by some 11th hour arrival!
To say I'm livid at this point is a gross understatement. Again, I'm trying to be cool as a cucumber on the outside, while inside I'm planning the slew of words I'm going to spew forth if she decides to try and sell the cabinet out from underneath me. I text her the make, model, and serial number on the gun and ask for a receipt. She seems confused by this, almost like “Gun? What gun?”
If my wife didn't want this cabinet so badly I would have retreived that gun right then and there and walked away, leaving the items of her booth spread out in the aisles, along with a few choice words. Instead I say I need a paper trail showing transfer of ownership of the gun. She looks to this woman and says “Have you heard back from your father?”
I could have torn that place apart in that second. I could've gone total Hulk and thrown that cabinet through the window. Instead I just interjected with an explanation of what the receipt should show. She retrieved a piece of paper and wrote up a receipt. I asked her to sign it.
I felt better with that signed piece of paper, but it did nothing to deter her sales efforts to this new customer. I'm actually wheeling the cabinet away on the dolly to my truck, the signed contract in a drawer, and she's still trying to sell it to this lady.
The lady finally seemed a little confused by this, as if suddenly realizing that I was actually taking the cabinet away, but regardless they both followed me to my truck and continued discussing the cabinet while I was wrapping it in plastic and loading it into my truck. The booth owner then tells me, “Hope your wife loves it. Let me know if you have any more guns or anything to trade!”
I'm thinking, “You've got to be out of your mind,” but I just say goodbye and leave, flabbergasted at the rudeness and utter cluelessness of both women.
Update: Several commenters asked about how my wife liked the surprise of receiving the cabinet. When I originally wrote this it was fairly recently after it had happened and I had not actually given her the cabinet at that point. Here’s how it went down:
We were going to Florida for Christmas and this cabinet is very large and heavy, so I had to give it to her a little early. I had been storing it in my office, which is in a nuclear power plant so it is safe from her popping by for a visit (this is the only time I’ve really appreciated this fact). I had it wrapped up in heavy orange plastic, so of course everyone that seen it in the office had to ask about it and eventually heard the above story, the result of which had grown into somewhat of an air of great anticipation with my coworkers who were seemingly as excited as I was to see her reaction.
Luckily the weather was nice on the day that I was going to give it to her, allowing me to load it into the back of my truck and gift wrap it during my lunch break. I had bought a 4-pack of wrapping paper, which turned out to be just barely enough to cover it. When I realized I didn’t have a tarp in my tool box like I thought I did, I ended up completely taping all the seams of the wrapping paper so it wouldn’t tear in the wind on the way home.
When I got home the kids were playing in the driveway. I told them to go get their mother and tell her I wanted to show her something. I stood the cabinet up in the back of the truck and began videoing. Sorry, I’m not going to post the video because my kids are in it and I don’t post pictures of my kids online, but I’ve got some screen shots for you.
When she came outside and saw me videoing she gave me a pretty hard “So what’s all this then?” look and I directed her to the truck. She asked “What did you do?” and although I thought she’d know immediately (remember I’d been building this up in my own mind for quite some time) she didn’t realize what it was. She was in fact shocked at the size of it and kept asking “What did you do?” repeatedly as she climbed into the truck and began trying to find a purchase in the paper, which again had been thoroughly taped down.
0 Comments