My Sundays are reserved for sleeping until noon, brunch, and then practicing my Aikido in Central Park with my Lithuanian stable boy Haraldas. But when you spend your ENTIRE Sunday waiting for a couch that never comes, you begin to understand why the whole world is against you.
This is what the internet is for. Outside of porn, stalking ex-girlfriends, and looking for trivia on the Battle of Plataea, the internet is designed to bitch. To complain. To vent. And taking a page from Aquaman's rant about Sprint last year, I've decided to give Downtown Furniture, Inc a piece of my passive-aggressive mind.
I should start off by telling you that my father is an accountant. As such, he taught me that everything has a price. Growing up we ate Hydrox, we never (and my parents still don't) had cable, and the cashiers at T.J. Maxx knew me by my first name. Why spend money when you can get (almost) the same exact thing at a reduced price? As much as I love to deny it, this mentality has washed off on me. I'm always looking for a bargain. So when I found myself in need of a new couch, a friend directed me toward Downtown Furniture on Grand Street in Manhattan. And the prices are incredible; couches cost less than $1000, which is a rarity in New York.
Outside of the place smelling like mold, and having the interior design of Dana Barrett's apartment post-Zuul possession, the couches weren't bad. My sales person was nice. I even half-joked with her about why the prices were so cheap. (Were they made from human skin?) She laughed it off and said they were amazing deals and very sturdy. So I picked out a nice gray couch that would look great in my apartment. She checked the inventory, I signed my credit card away, and smiled when she told me about the free delivery. If all went as planned I'd have my couch on March 3rd.
All did not go as planned. Downtown calls you when they're outside your apartment, which is discouraging when you work in Midtown but live on the Upper West Side. So I spent the entire day with my phone set to "loud" waiting for them to call and ready to hop in a taxi uptown. And like my prom night, the call never came. Finally, at around 8pm that night, I called them and was informed that not only were they not delivering my couch, but they no longer had that couch in my color. But I was welcome to choose another couch in a different color, they said, mock enthusiasm spilling out of their mouths.
I called the woman a whore.
OK, not really. I was angry and she could tell. Reluctantly, I switched from gray to a light brown assuming that, at some point, I'd probably spill coffee on it anyway. They promised that I'd get a whopping $30 off the order and it would definitely be at my apartment on March 16th.
So yesterday, mid-hangover, I sat in my apartment watching the pigeons fly outside my windows. I wondered if I had time to run to the grocery for orange juice. Not wanting to risk missing the delivery, and fearful that they'd simply dump the couch on my street, I stayed couped up in a Salingerian cave of reclusion.
The couch never came. I called at 8pm and got yelled at for expecting someone to come out and give me my ugly brown couch at such a late time of day. In my head I threw my phone against my wall watching it splatter into a thousand pieces of plastic glass and metal. Instead, I simply bit my tongue and asked in the most polite voice possible if it would be coming tomorrow. She insisted it would. I hung up. I growled. And then sat (on the floor) in front of my television watching John Adams while finishing off a pint of Ben & Jerrys.
The couch came today. I was given a call 30 minutes before they arrived. And because I'm incredibly bad at confrontation, I just let them deliver it quietly, all the while drafting this poor excuse of an entry in my head.
And so, I have a couch in a color I didn't want, two weeks late, and with a Sunday wasted in my closet of an apartment. The lesson learned here is, if it's too good to be true, it probably is. I do, however, have a great deal on someswampland beach-front property in Florida.
I should start off by telling you that my father is an accountant. As such, he taught me that everything has a price. Growing up we ate Hydrox, we never (and my parents still don't) had cable, and the cashiers at T.J. Maxx knew me by my first name. Why spend money when you can get (almost) the same exact thing at a reduced price? As much as I love to deny it, this mentality has washed off on me. I'm always looking for a bargain. So when I found myself in need of a new couch, a friend directed me toward Downtown Furniture on Grand Street in Manhattan. And the prices are incredible; couches cost less than $1000, which is a rarity in New York.
Outside of the place smelling like mold, and having the interior design of Dana Barrett's apartment post-Zuul possession, the couches weren't bad. My sales person was nice. I even half-joked with her about why the prices were so cheap. (Were they made from human skin?) She laughed it off and said they were amazing deals and very sturdy. So I picked out a nice gray couch that would look great in my apartment. She checked the inventory, I signed my credit card away, and smiled when she told me about the free delivery. If all went as planned I'd have my couch on March 3rd.
All did not go as planned. Downtown calls you when they're outside your apartment, which is discouraging when you work in Midtown but live on the Upper West Side. So I spent the entire day with my phone set to "loud" waiting for them to call and ready to hop in a taxi uptown. And like my prom night, the call never came. Finally, at around 8pm that night, I called them and was informed that not only were they not delivering my couch, but they no longer had that couch in my color. But I was welcome to choose another couch in a different color, they said, mock enthusiasm spilling out of their mouths.
I called the woman a whore.
OK, not really. I was angry and she could tell. Reluctantly, I switched from gray to a light brown assuming that, at some point, I'd probably spill coffee on it anyway. They promised that I'd get a whopping $30 off the order and it would definitely be at my apartment on March 16th.
So yesterday, mid-hangover, I sat in my apartment watching the pigeons fly outside my windows. I wondered if I had time to run to the grocery for orange juice. Not wanting to risk missing the delivery, and fearful that they'd simply dump the couch on my street, I stayed couped up in a Salingerian cave of reclusion.
The couch never came. I called at 8pm and got yelled at for expecting someone to come out and give me my ugly brown couch at such a late time of day. In my head I threw my phone against my wall watching it splatter into a thousand pieces of plastic glass and metal. Instead, I simply bit my tongue and asked in the most polite voice possible if it would be coming tomorrow. She insisted it would. I hung up. I growled. And then sat (on the floor) in front of my television watching John Adams while finishing off a pint of Ben & Jerrys.
The couch came today. I was given a call 30 minutes before they arrived. And because I'm incredibly bad at confrontation, I just let them deliver it quietly, all the while drafting this poor excuse of an entry in my head.
And so, I have a couch in a color I didn't want, two weeks late, and with a Sunday wasted in my closet of an apartment. The lesson learned here is, if it's too good to be true, it probably is. I do, however, have a great deal on some
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