[349/365] the presence of presents
Dec. 15th, 2021 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistLast Christmas was the first I hadn't spent with my family. My mom braved online shopping and managed to make such a godawful mess of it -- my favorite was that everything she ordered for us was turning up at her own house for a while! -- that she swore she'd never do it again.
I didn't think that'd be relevant but here we are, second covid Christmas, and I won't be traveling home again. This time I agitated harder for something I'd been begging for since my late teenage years: please don't buy me stuff. Donate to charity in my name (this is what I wanted as a teenager, when "dig a well for a village" or whatever felt novel), give me cash and I'll buy cute things and actually enjoy them...anything would be better than another layer of "I am not known or seen by my family at all" messages that presents send me every year.
My mom reluctantly agreed so I have money from my parents waiting in my U.S. bank account and I've been looking up cute Minnesota-themed art on Etsy (there's so much vintage travel/state parks type stuff! but the one with Paul Bunyan and an airplane might be too evocative of my past and my present to pass up) and stuff like that.
But then she told me that she was sending me a birthday present, and she'd also bought something fordiffrentcolours and mother_bones. Both were supposed to get here today, but the birthday present (a cute fuzzy oversized hoodie!) unexpectedly turned up on Sunday and last week she told me to expect the gift for the other two on Thursday. Then she had a message saying it'd been delivered, but there had been no sign of it here.
She was clearly so stressed about this and it was stressing me out; I feel for her but also she hadn't given me any of the information I might need to help track down this package. I was only assuming it was addressed to me because she doesn't know the other two's surnames. She told me the package was "in a ups building" -- I didn't even know there was UPS in the UK! -- and forwarded me an e-mail from Amazon that just had links to the various couriers' own websites, rather than a useful e-mail that had like the tracking number or anything in it. She'd maybe tried to get a refund? But either it hadn't worked or she was still just talking about how she should do that. I was getting very garbled information from someone who was out of her depth and really miserable so I didn't want to press her too much.
I stressed about it all weekend but quickly reached the limit of what was doable by e-mail and figured I'd just have to wait until the Weekly Call. On Skype it was easier to explain the difference between the Amazon order number -- which she'd also sent me -- and the UPS tracking number. When my dad said "We'll have to dig through the trash on our e-mail" I told him that it's possible to search e-mails now, but feared that it would've been deleted because my parents delete all e-mails immediately after they've replied to them or determined they are "junk" (i.e. things they've signed up for; I've also repeatedly explained about the magic word unsubscribe). I also told them about the importance of ordering me stuff from UK websites; amazon.co.uk is really different from amazon.com and wouldn't cause all these fucking problems. I told my mom this last year after all those things went wrong but clearly it didn't stick. My dad seemed to understand what I was trying to say though; he's a little better with new things than my poor mom is.
Right before I went to sleep Sunday night I had an e-mail from my mom with the tracking number and "It shows in Britain. I am just frustrated and not dealing with things well I guess." My poor mom! But I was also frustrated and not dealing with things well. Monday was a good day in this household but it was a lot of dog-wrangling for me after (as always) a poor night's sleep and when I could finally relax I nearly fell asleep. But I had this anxiety intensifying, one of the links or e-mails told me that the package would only be held for a week and I'd spent more than half of it without getting anywhere.
So I copied and pasted the tracking number from my mom's e-mail into the UPS website and...it said it couldn't find it! "Maybe the website isn't working!" the website chirped at me (I'm paraphrasing, but you know what I mean). "Try again later!" I kept trying, telling myself "three seconds later is a kind of later." But I kept getting the same result. I couldn't figure out how my mom had gotten as far as "it's in Britain"; I wasn't able to extract a single crumb of information.
The website told me it had a "virtual assistant" you could chat your problems at, but I couldn't actually find any link or button or anything to activate such a thing, on my phone or my computer. I was sent around and around in circles on the website trying to find some actual help. You couldn't e-mail them without registering a UPS login, a thing I was 1000% sure I would never need again. I tried the phone number and was told it was incorrect. After lots of glaring and swearing I realized this was because the version of the phone number on the website had both the "+44" country code and the "(0)" at the front and my stupid phone added both instead of choosing either which would have led to the number working correctly.
When I did get the phone number right, I was almost relieved to only hear a robot voice; I didn't think I could cope with humans by this point (I'd had to flee upstairs away from the perfectly inoffensive noises of a video game on the TV because I Just Could Not Cope), but then the fucking robot told me to read out the tracking number. This is like twenty digits! I complained to myself. I just checked, I think it's eighteen. It's a lot of numbers to read out to speech-detection software! "It probably starts "one-zed," she helpfully told me. Mine started "one-two" so I didn't feel good about this already. I read out this novel of a number and the robot read it back to me perfectly...except it said "one-zed" at the beginning. And then it told me what my mom already had said in her initial e-mails: "your parcel is waiting at a UPS site" or something like that. Just so thoroughly unhelpful!
Only then did I realize that my mom doesn't know about copy-and-paste. Here she is, typing out eighteen random fucking letters and numbers, on her iPad. It's a miracle only one of them was wrong, and that it was one of the two that are guaranteed to be a certain thing.
But! Armed with this new knowledge about the "2" that should be a "Z," I went back to the UPS tracking website, altered the number I'd copy-pasted, and out popped an address not far from me at all. The tears at the corners of my eyes quickly shifted from frustration to relief. I looked up the address of this incredibly-generically-named establishment and it seemed to be a corner-shop, in walking distance! Both my mom and I had pessimistically declared this package was probably still in the U.S., so this was a pleasant surprise.
Once I knew it was just over there and had been for like five days, I had to go get it right away. I came back downstairs and updateddiffrentcolours in broken sentences, being so incapable of functioning that I was already worried at the prospect of having to put shoes on and apparently looking like it because he insisted on coming with me.
I forgot a mask and something to cover my head in the rain, both very unlike me. But we got there eventually, the store is just a random one I've walked past a ton and never really noticed. Inside was a very patient dude who was unfazed by...well, anything about me and my no-doubt inadequate explanation of why I was there. He only wanted the last four digits of the tracking number, thank goodness, and then to know if it was a big or small package (luckily by this point I knew what was in it, my mom had included that in her rants). Thendiffrentcolours asked me if I wanted a drink or a snack so by the time the guy came back and held out a package to me I literally couldn't see him there and had to be told where it was to grab it. Sugar was a great suggestion though; I did get my favorite drink (cherry Coke) and my favorite snack (Reese's peanut butter cups), and downed most of the Coke on the few-minute walk back home, my brain clearly starved for calories, as I clutched my precious package, still hardly believing it was real.
When we got home I opened it so I could wrap it and it is actually really fucking cool. I'm delighted that all this work was worth it. Mom's picked something that I would have gotten them myself, and that I think they're really going to like. So I was glad all that effort was worth it! But, as I told myself when I finally could relax in the big armchair, the real gift is that, with my birthday present turning up early on Sunday and me finally sorting this present out, I did not have to worry about any more packages from my parents. That's all I really wanted this holiday season.
I told you all that so you would appreciate the depth of my feeling last night, a mere 24 hours later, when I saw another e-mail from my mom. "You will be receiving either one two or three packages from Amazon for you for Christmas. I just some surprises for you."
Honestly my blood ran cold.
Likemother_bones said, sometimes you just gotta keep telling yourself "It's the thought that counts. It's the thought that counts," even if you're rocking in a corner while you do it.
I didn't think that'd be relevant but here we are, second covid Christmas, and I won't be traveling home again. This time I agitated harder for something I'd been begging for since my late teenage years: please don't buy me stuff. Donate to charity in my name (this is what I wanted as a teenager, when "dig a well for a village" or whatever felt novel), give me cash and I'll buy cute things and actually enjoy them...anything would be better than another layer of "I am not known or seen by my family at all" messages that presents send me every year.
My mom reluctantly agreed so I have money from my parents waiting in my U.S. bank account and I've been looking up cute Minnesota-themed art on Etsy (there's so much vintage travel/state parks type stuff! but the one with Paul Bunyan and an airplane might be too evocative of my past and my present to pass up) and stuff like that.
But then she told me that she was sending me a birthday present, and she'd also bought something for
diffrentcolours and mother_bones. Both were supposed to get here today, but the birthday present (a cute fuzzy oversized hoodie!) unexpectedly turned up on Sunday and last week she told me to expect the gift for the other two on Thursday. Then she had a message saying it'd been delivered, but there had been no sign of it here. She was clearly so stressed about this and it was stressing me out; I feel for her but also she hadn't given me any of the information I might need to help track down this package. I was only assuming it was addressed to me because she doesn't know the other two's surnames. She told me the package was "in a ups building" -- I didn't even know there was UPS in the UK! -- and forwarded me an e-mail from Amazon that just had links to the various couriers' own websites, rather than a useful e-mail that had like the tracking number or anything in it. She'd maybe tried to get a refund? But either it hadn't worked or she was still just talking about how she should do that. I was getting very garbled information from someone who was out of her depth and really miserable so I didn't want to press her too much.
I stressed about it all weekend but quickly reached the limit of what was doable by e-mail and figured I'd just have to wait until the Weekly Call. On Skype it was easier to explain the difference between the Amazon order number -- which she'd also sent me -- and the UPS tracking number. When my dad said "We'll have to dig through the trash on our e-mail" I told him that it's possible to search e-mails now, but feared that it would've been deleted because my parents delete all e-mails immediately after they've replied to them or determined they are "junk" (i.e. things they've signed up for; I've also repeatedly explained about the magic word unsubscribe). I also told them about the importance of ordering me stuff from UK websites; amazon.co.uk is really different from amazon.com and wouldn't cause all these fucking problems. I told my mom this last year after all those things went wrong but clearly it didn't stick. My dad seemed to understand what I was trying to say though; he's a little better with new things than my poor mom is.
Right before I went to sleep Sunday night I had an e-mail from my mom with the tracking number and "It shows in Britain. I am just frustrated and not dealing with things well I guess." My poor mom! But I was also frustrated and not dealing with things well. Monday was a good day in this household but it was a lot of dog-wrangling for me after (as always) a poor night's sleep and when I could finally relax I nearly fell asleep. But I had this anxiety intensifying, one of the links or e-mails told me that the package would only be held for a week and I'd spent more than half of it without getting anywhere.
So I copied and pasted the tracking number from my mom's e-mail into the UPS website and...it said it couldn't find it! "Maybe the website isn't working!" the website chirped at me (I'm paraphrasing, but you know what I mean). "Try again later!" I kept trying, telling myself "three seconds later is a kind of later." But I kept getting the same result. I couldn't figure out how my mom had gotten as far as "it's in Britain"; I wasn't able to extract a single crumb of information.
The website told me it had a "virtual assistant" you could chat your problems at, but I couldn't actually find any link or button or anything to activate such a thing, on my phone or my computer. I was sent around and around in circles on the website trying to find some actual help. You couldn't e-mail them without registering a UPS login, a thing I was 1000% sure I would never need again. I tried the phone number and was told it was incorrect. After lots of glaring and swearing I realized this was because the version of the phone number on the website had both the "+44" country code and the "(0)" at the front and my stupid phone added both instead of choosing either which would have led to the number working correctly.
When I did get the phone number right, I was almost relieved to only hear a robot voice; I didn't think I could cope with humans by this point (I'd had to flee upstairs away from the perfectly inoffensive noises of a video game on the TV because I Just Could Not Cope), but then the fucking robot told me to read out the tracking number. This is like twenty digits! I complained to myself. I just checked, I think it's eighteen. It's a lot of numbers to read out to speech-detection software! "It probably starts "one-zed," she helpfully told me. Mine started "one-two" so I didn't feel good about this already. I read out this novel of a number and the robot read it back to me perfectly...except it said "one-zed" at the beginning. And then it told me what my mom already had said in her initial e-mails: "your parcel is waiting at a UPS site" or something like that. Just so thoroughly unhelpful!
Only then did I realize that my mom doesn't know about copy-and-paste. Here she is, typing out eighteen random fucking letters and numbers, on her iPad. It's a miracle only one of them was wrong, and that it was one of the two that are guaranteed to be a certain thing.
But! Armed with this new knowledge about the "2" that should be a "Z," I went back to the UPS tracking website, altered the number I'd copy-pasted, and out popped an address not far from me at all. The tears at the corners of my eyes quickly shifted from frustration to relief. I looked up the address of this incredibly-generically-named establishment and it seemed to be a corner-shop, in walking distance! Both my mom and I had pessimistically declared this package was probably still in the U.S., so this was a pleasant surprise.
Once I knew it was just over there and had been for like five days, I had to go get it right away. I came back downstairs and updated
diffrentcolours in broken sentences, being so incapable of functioning that I was already worried at the prospect of having to put shoes on and apparently looking like it because he insisted on coming with me. I forgot a mask and something to cover my head in the rain, both very unlike me. But we got there eventually, the store is just a random one I've walked past a ton and never really noticed. Inside was a very patient dude who was unfazed by...well, anything about me and my no-doubt inadequate explanation of why I was there. He only wanted the last four digits of the tracking number, thank goodness, and then to know if it was a big or small package (luckily by this point I knew what was in it, my mom had included that in her rants). Then
diffrentcolours asked me if I wanted a drink or a snack so by the time the guy came back and held out a package to me I literally couldn't see him there and had to be told where it was to grab it. Sugar was a great suggestion though; I did get my favorite drink (cherry Coke) and my favorite snack (Reese's peanut butter cups), and downed most of the Coke on the few-minute walk back home, my brain clearly starved for calories, as I clutched my precious package, still hardly believing it was real.When we got home I opened it so I could wrap it and it is actually really fucking cool. I'm delighted that all this work was worth it. Mom's picked something that I would have gotten them myself, and that I think they're really going to like. So I was glad all that effort was worth it! But, as I told myself when I finally could relax in the big armchair, the real gift is that, with my birthday present turning up early on Sunday and me finally sorting this present out, I did not have to worry about any more packages from my parents. That's all I really wanted this holiday season.
I told you all that so you would appreciate the depth of my feeling last night, a mere 24 hours later, when I saw another e-mail from my mom. "You will be receiving either one two or three packages from Amazon for you for Christmas. I just some surprises for you."
Honestly my blood ran cold.
Like
mother_bones said, sometimes you just gotta keep telling yourself "It's the thought that counts. It's the thought that counts," even if you're rocking in a corner while you do it.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-15 09:43 pm (UTC)ARG to sending you stuff even though it's super stressful. Well done for working out what was going on and it being actually at a place within a civilised distance.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-15 10:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-15 10:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-16 08:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-16 01:33 am (UTC)Glad she chose things this time around that are more suited to the recipients :)
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-16 08:26 am (UTC)Though the first of these "extra" presents has arrived already and it's a pair of earrings that are so exactly to her tastes that I might save them just to sneak into her jewelry box the next time I go back. :) Honestly they are no use to me and she'd love them. So that's back to normal too!
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-16 07:10 am (UTC)I have so much solidarity and empathy with you on this!
My mother = knows I am violently allergic to wool, buys me an expensive mohair blanket anyway
Me = I can't use that
My mother = buys me a YAK'S WOOL scarf, acts surprised that I can't wear that either
See also: buying me jewellery that is in no way my taste AND has little-to-no resale-value;
buying me books and DVDs that in no way reflect my interests.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-16 07:14 am (UTC)and trans women giving the unwanted "masc" products they received to trans men.
It's better than nothing, but I am sorry that there are so many people whose biofamilies refuse to see/acknowledge who people are.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-16 08:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-16 08:41 am (UTC)[It was a basketball. I am in no way sporty]
I have... issues... with receiving presents that make me feel unseen.
I feel sad/wistful when I see people's friends giving them presents that make them feel seen, but pretty much no present I have received from ANYONE has ever made me feel seen.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-16 08:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-16 09:00 pm (UTC)She believes in getting presents for kids that are things she thinks they should have/like, rather than things they actually want.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-16 04:51 pm (UTC)Yikes!
Yikes!
What a train wreck!
I'm glad there's some tiny utility in this blizzard of difficult packages.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-17 05:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-18 01:25 pm (UTC)