Very Expensive $19.99 skirt

Very expensive $19.99 skirt

As a special beginning-of-the-season holiday shopping season treat, I’m going to tell you the worst shopping story you’ve ever heard. It’s about my friend Susan and her $19.99 skirt.

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful slim, intelligent, successful, 90’s kind of woman named Susan who had never owned a short skirt because, like all true beautiful, slim, blah, blah, blah 90’s kind of woman, she hated he body, especially her legs.

She does wellness training—good mental health, stress management, ect. –for large corporations all over the country. She was in Washington, D.C. last month with a woman named Valerie who also does stress management training. Valerie had to be in New Jersey on Sunday night. It was important that she leave immediately after the Washington session and catch a plane to New Jersey at the Washington airport two hours away.

One night during their week-long session together, Valerie bought this cute short skirt for $19.99 and talked Susan into trying it on. Surprise—Susan, of the cute figure and intelligent brain, figured out that she looked good in the skirt and decided that she’d buy one and take it home and try the whole short skirt concept for a while.

They would stop at the shopping center on the way to the airport and it would take them ten minutes to run into the store, grab the skirt off the rack—not even to try it on—and race back out to the car. Everything went exactly according to plan except that when they got back to the car, there were no keys. ANYWHERE. They looked EVERYWHERE. No keys.

Maybe they were in Valerie’s coat pocket which was lying on the back seat of the rental car. A locksmith promised them he could get there in twenty minutes. BOOM—he got there in an hour and a half and charged them $60 for the 60 seconds it took him to open the car door. They were SO HAPPY—but there were no keys in Valerie’s coat pocket!

Would the locksmith take them to the airport for say, $50. Yes, he would! Off they went in his tow truck, so fast they feared for their lives. Alamo charged them $100 to come pick up the car from the shopping center parking lot.

Total, so far: $210.

When they got to the airport, Susan, with minutes to spare, decided to try and just gate-check the two suitcases, carry on, and lap-top she had, so she stuffed it all on the “people-mover.” Her plane left from gate C2 (C1 was the furthest gate.)

Susan’s really athletic so she booked it, hurled herself down there—top speed—within sight of the gate—BOOM, in another tough break for our heroine, she twisted her foot under her and went down. She yelled, “Hold the plane, hold the plane!”

Instead, they called the paramedics who insisted that she go to the hospital because they were pretty sure she’d pulled all the ligaments in her ankle, but all were equally sure it wasn’t broken.

You know how you get when, after, awhile, you just have to make things work your way? You are no longer willing to be the victim of circumstances? She “just said no” to going to the hospital, even though the next plane didn’t leave for three hours.

They wrapped her leg in an Ace bandage and iced her down. A particularly humiliating moment came when she had to ask someone to wheel her to the restroom where she had to practically crawl into a stall. But eventually, she got to Denver International Airport, her leg swollen to the size of a twenty-two pound Thanksgiving turkey with that same ugly, puffy, dimply white disgusting look raw poultry has.

They had a guy wheel her out to the baggage and he asked her about her ride. No one was picking her up—her husband was in Boulder, and hour and a half away, with their three-year-old daughter. After all she’d been through, there didn’t seem to be any point in getting them out of bed to pick her up.

She offered the airline person $20 to wheel her out to the long term parking and she got home at three in the morning.

She’s be in a brace for four to six weeks and she probably can’t ski this year which she and her husband do.

So, is this the worst shopping story you’ve ever heard? If you’ve got a better on, let me know at elder@itsnet.com.

The worst part is that she really doesn’t love the skirt, she just thinks it’s ok.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Winning Christmas

Trivial? Hardly!

Wild Old Women, Wild Times