Whose Lobster?

“I wish we had made the inscription say My Lobster,” Christa said. “That is much more personal.”

The glory of being the 25-percent-down owners of Tiffany wedding bands had faded so quickly away.

“Let’s call them and tell them to change it,” I said.

“It’s probably too late.”

“Let’s call and find out. They had to send it to New York for the engraving; it can’t be there yet,” I said.

“I don’t think they are going to let us change it,” she said dejectedly.

“Like they’re going to ignore us; we’re the customers.”

Wait. Let me rephrase that in more descriptive terms. Surely, having confirmed our status as two-time, four-figure Tiffany shoppers, not last-minute-holiday, shiny-stocking-stuffer shoppers, but true aficionados of partial-carat diamonds, they could make that change for us. I placed the call and described our problem.

“Well, sir, once we put it on paper and send it, it’s hard to make changes. You see—because we wrote it on paper,” they replied.

It felt like they were describing the abortion of a space mission, but in an archaic, yet surprisingly well-to-do manner.

Unfortunately, helping us add two letters to each of our inscriptions, a twenty-dollar value, caused them to have to reprocess the entire order, thereby invalidating the financing agreement, whereupon they tried to charge the entire balance to my credit card, which was declined, because it put me over my limit. It took several calls to get my accounts back in order. On top of which, they were still noncommittal about whether they could actually make the change in the inscription.

“We can try and accommodate you, but the order is already on the way to New York,” they continued.

Do they have phones there? Is there an order number you could use for tracking and referral? Did you send it by flying donkey? Don’t flying donkeys have pagers? I couldn’t imagine this was as hard as it seemed.

They made a point of saying several times, “We can’t promise you anything. It’s already left our store.”

They acted like there was a black hole that orders got tossed into. Have we told you the story of our invitations? We greatly preferred not to sit around and wait while our doomsday-prognosticating vendors tried to help us out.

Only when they called back and said our order was in, and I asked, “Were you able to make the inscription change?” did they congratulate themselves and say, “Yes, we were able to accomplish that for you.”
- Drew Lloyd
From "Will You?" to "I Do.": A Groom's Tale of Survival