Mari Ness

U.S. Customs and Border Partol detains Italian tourist for ten days.

I recognize the need for border security. But I also live in a section of the country that is economically dependent on tourism, and this sort of thing does not bode well for the tourist trade.

My father is one of the most difficult people in the world to shop for, bar none. Which is exactly why I found myself frantically searching the internet on December 23rd, which is when I found, to my joy and excitement and relief, his perfect present. I clicked. I entered addresses and little numbers. The website told me, in equal glee, that the gift would be shipped December 27th (accounting for holidays and so on.) I slept in joy and contentment and glee because I -- I had achieved nirvana: I had found the perfect present for my father.

Days go by, and my mother e-mails me with the note that the gift hasn't arrived. Grumble. I call. No one picks up. I get a nasty shiver down my spine. I e-mail. No one answers. I begin to feel a bit twitchy.

So, this morning while waiting for Important E-mail, I give the group a call. The phone is answered by a very nice girl. Here are the more amusing parts of the conversation:

1) She initially tells me that I ordered the item on December 16. If true, this in fact makes the saga worse. I point out that I have a little printout saying otherwise. They correct themselves.

2) She then assured me that the item had been shipped on December 16. I mentioned my skepticism.

3) "Well," she said, "it was shipped."

4) Except, of course, that it hadn't been.

5) She then told me that my credit card hasn't been charged yet; I point out that Washington Mutual, a more trustworthy entity at this point, listed the charge as appearing on December 23. "Oh, well, you were charged, but we didn't actually receive the money."

Pause.

"I was always under the impression that if a charge appeared on my bank statement, that meant that the payment had been processed."

6) By this time we had moved on to a new story, which was that the item had not, in point of fact, been shipped (I'd guessed that) because the order had not gone through until December 27 and they needed five to seven days to process the order and at the end of five to seven days they had been in inventory so weren't shipping anything. Also, the item hadn't actually been in stock on the 27 but it was certainly in stock now. I said that aside from the part about the item not shipping, which I was inclined to believe, I was not overly convinced by the rest of the story.

7) She assured me that an e-mail had been sent out informing me of the delay in shipping. I assured her that it hadn't been received. She assured me that their e-mails frequently got caught in spam filters, so, it had been sent, just caught in a spam filter. As far as I can tell, that particular e-mail account has no spam filters whatsoever, unless, by spam filter, we mean a filter that lets everything through and indeed welcomes and solicits porn spam. So I can be forgiven for being slightly skeptical.

8) Shortly after this, she said that she would shoot me a confirmation e-mail to let me know that the item was shipping -- which was when she realized that the website did not actually have my e-mail address.

"Hmm," I said.

"So if you'll give me your e-mail address now --"

"What I find interesting about this," I said, "is that one minute ago you informed me that you had sent me e-mails regarding the status of my order."

"We did."

"Except that now you are claiming that you don't have my e-mail address."

"Yes."

"Do you sense a contradiction in these two statements?"

Pause.

9) "I can tell you," she said, returning to bright and happy persona, "that your item will be shipped on Monday via US Postal Service."

I wanted to make sure I'd heard this correctly.

"By Monday," I said.

"That's correct."

"Not today."

"No."

"Ok. Monday. United States Postal Service."

"Yes."

"Even though Monday is a federal holiday and the post office is closed."

Another pause.

"And, more to the point, this item is supposed to be sent via UPS, not the post office."

"It will be shipped," she said, brightly.

It perhaps speaks poorly of my faith in human nature to say that I find it difficult to trust her.

I must say, however, that it's not the lies that amuse me here, but the sheer incompetence of said lies. Doesn't anyone teach customer service reps to lie convincingly anymore?

********************

Aside from this incident, today is going much better than yesterday, and I'd like to express my personal appreciation to the universe for giving me a slight break here.

I always have mixed feelings when I watch the removal of Australian pine trees. On the one hand, I know that they are evil, evil trees that are destroying native wildlife and not incidentally making me cough and ruining water supplies and so on, and on the other hand, they're trees, and I can't see a tree fall without feeling upset about it.

Even evil trees that should be razed and burnt to the ground.

I do not, however, have any mixed feelings whatsoever about the group of tourists who win the award for Dumbest Tourist Stunt in 2004 (that I saw), who were trying to feed hamburgers to a manatee this afternoon.

"Mom! He's not eating them!"

"They're vegetarians," I said.

"They can't be," the mother told me in a "how dare you instruct my son" sort of voice. "They're too big to be vegetarians."

If they'd been feeding gators, I would have toppled them into the water, but I was pretty sure that all that the manatee would just continue floating there, so I stopped myself from pushing them over, repeated that manatees eat sea grass, not hamburgers, and that hamburgers are not good things to put into the water since they will attract gators which will eat tourists. (Well, we can hope. Admittedly gators have not been doing well in the eating stupid tourists department this year.)

"He's sniffing it, Mom! Look!"

Not to my surprise at all, the manatee just floated there, and, to my annoyance, not a single gator showed up to eat the tourists. I suppose that I should have tried harder to teach them interesting things about manatees, but I was trying to keep the holiday spirit alive, and left, to watch Broward County cutting down more trees.