Saturday 16 January 2016

Just because you are paranoid

You are going to like this one.

My client from the beautiful Oxfordshire manor house told me she needed a hearth stone for a fire-surround I had made for her, and said she would send a full-sized template so that there could be no mistake in dimensions. That was about a six weeks or so before Christmas.

After New Year's Eve, she called me up and asked if I had received the template, and I said that I had not. We blamed its non-arrival on the Christmas post rush and assumed it to be lost forever, so she said she would get a new one made and send it this week.

She called me yesterday morning and asked if it had arrived, and I told her 'not yet'. About half an hour later, the doorbell went and the postie was standing there with a huge cardboard covering containing the template.

I took it upstairs and opened one end of it, exposing the template. It is made from the sort of corrugated black plastic which is designed to protect floors from the footfall of messy builders, and was obviously the first flat stuff to come to hand for use as a template. It looked strangely familiar.

Then I remembered the black plastic bin-liner containing some dirty, black plastic rubbish which was sent to me weeks ago last year - the rubbish which I accused a few of you of sending to me maliciously; the rubbish which I spent many paranoid hours trying to work out who would have sent it and why; the rubbish which I decided to try and forget by taking it outside and stuffing it into a street bin to be taken away by the council...

20 comments:

  1. Oh Tom - worry not. The older we get the more we do these daft things. And yes, we have all done similar things.

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    1. What worries me (but makes me laugh more than worry) is the way I immediately leap to conspiracy theories without thinking things through. The fact that the first template was wrapped in a bin-liner without any covering note, just spelt out 'rubbish' to me.

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    2. Worry not my foot! I was on the receiving end of his wrath one evening, Weave, when I innocently turned to see what he had written about and found myself accused of sending him a pile of rubbish through the post for Christmas. The outcome of the story is funny though and I laughed as I read it going round Waitrose and all the way home.

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    3. I laughed and so did my client. At least I admitted to it.

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  2. Oh no....all those wasted hours of anxiety over nothing..and nobody was being malicious at all...did you subconsciously think you warranted rubbish being sent to you in the post?? lovely when all is explained though isn't it?

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    1. More than that - I started reading messages into the printing on the plastic, which say something like, 'for the protection of fragile and vulnerable...'.

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  3. Have you confessed to the lady of the manor, or just to we who cannot rat you out. A great story.

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    1. No, everyone. I immediately called her up and told her the whole story!

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  4. "Tie a yellow ribbon around the old oak tree", lalala - moral: always pack things nicely - add a card and a bow.

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    1. If it had a bow around it, I would have been twice as paranoid...

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    2. At the time he had just received Jackie's present and was paranoid about bloggers sending him stuff..

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    3. Don't put words into my mouth, Rachel. I know what I am scared of and I don't need any help to admit it.

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    4. And I was going to send you some goose eggs soon
      They start laying in feb

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  5. Well I am glad you sorted out who sent you the rubbish .

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    1. Yes. At least it provided a good laugh for everyone, even if it set the job back by a month.

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  6. And you said once that the Israelis are paranoids:), nice story anyway.

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    1. I am describing personal paranoia here, not national.

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  7. I know,that's why i am not commentig much on blogs,most of the times i am wrong.

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    1. Don't worry, most of the time I am always wrong, but still comment.

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