Lovely parting gifts
Apr. 29th, 2006 06:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinAbout four years ago, I had been working at my then-current job for five years, and got a laser-printed certificate of appreciation, and my choice from a catalog of various lovely tokens of gratitude, some of them moderately substantial (Calphalon pots and pans, knife sets, etc.) There's apparently some company that just does these corporate awards. Busy with other stuff, I never bothered to fill out the order form, misplaced the associated materials and didn't think much about them after that.
About a year and a half later, the company got bought and ceased to exist, and not long after that, I quit my job and got a different job. Some time after that, a phone robot started calling, reminding me that I had yet to select my lovely 5-year appreciation gift from a company that neither employed me nor in fact existed. These calls would come once every few months, annoying the hell out of Sam, who kept telling me to do something about it.
They gave a number you could call. I tried calling it and the recording just asked for some access code that I didn't have. Total bafflement.
Lately we've been hit with the nesting urge, thinking this place is slightly cramped what with the baby coming along, and are cleaning up the house in preparation for selling it. I was de-cluttering the upstairs and came across a box of stuff from my old office. In there... was the gift catalog, with the order form with the access code on it.
I don't entirely care whether the offers of pots and pans and knives and such are still good; mostly I want them to stop calling me. So I figured this was my golden opportunity. But the instructions said not to use the phone or Internet ordering if the address information needed updating, and our zip code was wrong on there—they'd left off the leading zero (some software somewhere is choking on Massachusetts). So, on the off chance that I might actually get some free spiffy cookware, I decided to fill it out by mail instead.
I happily filled out the form, put it in the postage-paid envelope, sealed the envelope, put a return address label on it, and...
And I don't know what happened. I had a massive brain fart of some still-incomprehensible variety. I misplaced the envelope again. It evaporated. There was a lot of cleaning-related stuff going on today. I must have rifled through the trash half a dozen times. It's not in the trash.
The only copy of the access code is in that envelope, so I can't use the Internet or phone ordering either, even if I don't give a crap about the zip code. That stupid robot will keep calling me until the end of time about my unorderable gift from my defunct employer that I don't work for and there is no way no way to make it stop no way.
We were thinking about keeping our phone number when we moved. I'm starting to wonder if that is such a good idea.
About a year and a half later, the company got bought and ceased to exist, and not long after that, I quit my job and got a different job. Some time after that, a phone robot started calling, reminding me that I had yet to select my lovely 5-year appreciation gift from a company that neither employed me nor in fact existed. These calls would come once every few months, annoying the hell out of Sam, who kept telling me to do something about it.
They gave a number you could call. I tried calling it and the recording just asked for some access code that I didn't have. Total bafflement.
Lately we've been hit with the nesting urge, thinking this place is slightly cramped what with the baby coming along, and are cleaning up the house in preparation for selling it. I was de-cluttering the upstairs and came across a box of stuff from my old office. In there... was the gift catalog, with the order form with the access code on it.
I don't entirely care whether the offers of pots and pans and knives and such are still good; mostly I want them to stop calling me. So I figured this was my golden opportunity. But the instructions said not to use the phone or Internet ordering if the address information needed updating, and our zip code was wrong on there—they'd left off the leading zero (some software somewhere is choking on Massachusetts). So, on the off chance that I might actually get some free spiffy cookware, I decided to fill it out by mail instead.
I happily filled out the form, put it in the postage-paid envelope, sealed the envelope, put a return address label on it, and...
And I don't know what happened. I had a massive brain fart of some still-incomprehensible variety. I misplaced the envelope again. It evaporated. There was a lot of cleaning-related stuff going on today. I must have rifled through the trash half a dozen times. It's not in the trash.
The only copy of the access code is in that envelope, so I can't use the Internet or phone ordering either, even if I don't give a crap about the zip code. That stupid robot will keep calling me until the end of time about my unorderable gift from my defunct employer that I don't work for and there is no way no way to make it stop no way.
We were thinking about keeping our phone number when we moved. I'm starting to wonder if that is such a good idea.