I introduced my wife to Scott Pilgrim via the books, and despite reluctance at first, she ended up loving the series (as it tends to be with all the books I recommend for her, though she would never admit it). Back in September, during our trip to London, we saw the movie. It's nice to find common ground like this, as we both love everything about Scott Pilgrim.
In some level I think we see ourselves reflected in Scott and Ramona. Not because of the epic fights I had to go through to earn her love (though there were some of those), but rather in the general lesson that true love can be found, but it most always be fought for, and that it takes an effort to stay in a healthy relationship.
Then in early December, when I was thinking of Christmas gifts for my wife, I had the bright idea of buying her a set of Scott Pilgrim plushies, pictured above. More than a month later, I finally received them today. It was a long wait, but I finally got her gift.
Why did it take this long? These bastards must be incredibly popular to begin with, as everywhere I looked they seemed to be sold out completely, or they only had one of the characters. It was imperative that I was able to purchase both, or else the gift wouldn't make much sense. I hunted for it, and I was finally able to find it in a seller in the German version of Amazon. I had to pay a pretty penny for it, but it was worth it. So I waited and waited for the gift to get there. I knew it would take some time, but if everything went to plan, it would get there in time for Christmas.
Things didn't go according to the plan.
On the week prior to Christmas, I was coming to the realization that it might not get there in time after all. I enacted a back-up plan, as I went and purchased a secondary gift (a bonsai tree), and I explained to her the situation. You see, our wedding anniversary is only a few days after Christmas, so I told her that the bonsai would be the X-mas present, and the other one (that must surely arrive any day now!) would be the anniversary present. All the while, she had no clue what the gift was, and she was hunting for clues as to what I had bought.
Needless to say, our Anniversary passed and there was still no sight of the damn Scott Pilgrim plushies I had ordered more than three weeks ago. Germany is not that far, and even with the bad weather conditions in December, it should have gotten there earlier. It was at this point that I decided to contact the seller, to see what was going on. This was going to be hard, and something that I was hoping not to do, because, as I mentioned above, it was a German seller. I don't speak on word of German.
It was when I went to check the receipt that I noticed something odd. In case you don't know, when you purchase through a seller in Amazon, they send you two receipts: one from the seller and another from Amazon itself. Everything was fine on the Amazon email, but the receipt from the seller had one tiny bit of information wrong. It had my correct name, and my address, and even the correct city.
It did, however, have the wrong country on it. It said "El Salvador".
Needless to say, I do not live in El Salvador, nor even in the same continent. I was sure that I had put the correct information, and I had the Amazon email to confirm that. I could not even mistake "Spain" for "El Salvador" in the list to choose, as they are very far apart on it. At least now I knew why the package was taking so long: because it was going to another country. Meanwhile, I had to tell my wife what was going on, and I had to reveal what the gift was (or rather, she guessed it after I ran out of clues to give her while she waited).
So I contacted the seller. I wrote the email in English, hoping for the best, and as it turned out, the person spoke it as well. It appears that because of a database error on their end, when the information was transferred from Amazon, it selected the wrong country. So it wasn't my fault after all, and thankfully they still had more stock of the plushies, so they could send a brand new order without having to wait for the other one to come back from El Salvador.
Which brings us to today, when the gift finally arrived in the mail. My wife was at the academy (where she studies) when they got here, so I was able to surprise her when she got home. She really liked them, so at least there's that.
And there must also be a very confused Matias Duarte in El Salvador, wondering why he got two random dolls in the mail.
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