Nabbed
Ok, so Jamie and I suspected it wasn’t allowed, the Co-op has house rules on this sort of thing, but we scheduled our refrigerator delivery for this past Sunday. We were desperate to get as much done before this week, the last week before the move, the week we are not able to get into the apartment because the floors are being refinished, so we broke the rule: No deliveries on weekends.
So, when you place an order with Sears for delivery, they give you a date, but the time is not announced until the day before the delivery. We knew the frige was coming on Sunday. We knew we had to take off our apartment door so it could fit through. (Yes, it’s big; lovely, stainless-steel, side-by-side, and big. We cook… a lot.) We had a notion we were breaking the house rules, although we weren’t positive. What we didn’t know was when the thing was arriving.
Saturday evening we found out. Our delivery window, as I previously mentioned, was between 7:45 & 9:45 AM. Not great, not great at all. Nothing like trying to sneak a hulking machine into the building in the quiet, early Sunday morning hours.
We got up at 5:45 so we could get to the apartment by 7 to get ready for the delivery. “5:45?” you say. “I thought you were only 15 minutes from the new place.” Well indeed we are, but the subway was running oddly due to track repairs and we thought we could stop by Dunkin’ D’s to grab a quick coffee and breakfast croissant and mentally prepare ourselves. But no. No it didn’t happen like that. Why?
At 6:45, as we were sitting on the 1 train, waiting to go “express” to our stop, the delivery guy called saying, “Just wanted you to know that we’ll be there in 10 minutes.” 10 minutes? That, for the mathematically challenged, or just to drive home a point, would put the delivery time at, oh, 6:55, or nearly a full hour before the earliest point in the delivery window. Prompt? Overly so.
Jamie explained that we were on our way and would meet them in the lobby.
We arrived shortly thereafter at our station, hurried up the street to our building. I to the apartment, Jamie to the lobby. I wildly removing screws from our front – steel – door, Jamie escorting the delivery men and refrigerator up in the elevator, all the while explaining the need (as if it needed to be explained that one should be extremely quiet, or as quiet as one can be whilst lugging a refrigerator, at 7AM on a weekend) to be quiet. The quartet of Jamie, deliverymen and frige processioning through our doorless doorway. The frige placed gingerly in its proper kitchen space. The brief whine of the screwgun (not brief enough and oh so loud) as the doors were attached. The departure of the deliverymen with the old hulking, non-functioning machine with, once again, Jamie as escort and door-opener. The replacement of the apartment door.
All very smoothly done. Except… Jamie informend me that as the delivery truck was pulling out, our Co-op board president ran up chiding him, “Bad, bad. No deliveries on the weekend.”
I was horrified. Nothing like making a good impression with your Co-op board. Well, we did what one does with that kind of embarrassment, we laughed at ourselves. Nabbed, indeed. And we decided that we would do no drilling that day.
A while later, at breakfast, I queried Jamie further about the incident. “Was she in her nightgown?,” I asked. Jamie looked at me curiously. “No, she was dressed for running, she was out jogging and just happened to be coming back to the building as the truck was pullling away.”
I explained that I had a picture of her flying out of the building, robe aflutter, hair streaming behind, fire issuing from her nostrils. Although, in the light of understanding, that did seem absurd because she is quite a lovely woman.
No, Jamie explained, it was nothing like that at all, while she did indeed say, “Bad, bad. No deliveries on the weekend” it was said in a gently chiding, non-threatening, but still blush-inducing way. Pshew.
As Jamie said, we have now played our Mulligan.
And we have now rescheduled next Saturday’s delivery of our couch and missing Ikea sink (more on that in another post) for a week day.
(Some new pix added to the Renovations Gallery.)
Nite,
k.
