How Not To Buy A Couch

Last night’s pitch went well, and then I got lost leaving the lot. It gets dark at five now, a pitch black darkness that was even stranger yesterday due to the clouds overhead. I somehow turned the wrong direction and was driving through empty, dark sets. I’d be driving through some town square, then some kind of Brooklyn street, then a Mission, and then some kind of frontier town. It’s very difficult to figure out where you are going if your location keeps changing time periods.

I am sipping my well-earned glass of wine. The programs have been printed and folded. I’ve rehearsed my monologues for tomorrow. The two pitches today went well. Laundry is in the machine. Kitchen clean. Phone calls returned. Originally I thought I’d be able to do a recap today. I don’t exactly know how I thought that would be possible. See, after dinner tonight we have to take apart the futon that’s been in our living room since we moved in and put it in the office where it belongs. It’s a heavy, two-person job, but we have to do it because our couch arrives on Friday.

Our couch arrives on Friday!

For anybody who has been near us since we moved into the house, you know this is a huge ordeal. We bought a couch at Macy’s, the week we moved into the house. That was August. We painted the living room around the color scheme of the couch. We were very happy with the comfy couch, which was quite affordable and was going to look wonderful in our new home.

And then they called to say the couch would be an extra week before it was delivered. This put a bit of a strain on things, as we were having Couch Baron over for a week, but we knew he was easygoing, and probably willing to be the Futon Baron for a few days until the couch arrived.

I called Macy’s on the date the couch was to be delivered the warehouse, only to find it’d be another month before they’d be able to deliver the couch. It wasn’t at the warehouse, and they seemed to be mystified with the whole concept of their warehouse. They told me this was up to the vendor, that the couch was very popular and nobody has been able to get this couch that they sold, in any color, for at least another month.

Don’t think we didn’t go to the store and sit on that couch again and ask when we could get that couch delivered. When the woman said, “Oh, this week!” I started into her. “Then HOW COME we bought this couch A MONTH AGO and we still don’t have it?”

She did a few clicks on her keyboard and told us it’d be a month before we had the couch.

It was at this point we were idiots for believing that Macy’s had our best interests in mind. We threatened to pull our wedding registry. We whined and moaned and were escalated from manager to manager. They all said the same thing: One month.

Well, I was working at Oxygen and then stee was going to be out of town and then I was going to be out of town, so we figured another month wasn’t going to be that big of a deal. They said the couch would be delivered before Halloween, when we were in New York but Dan would be here to accept our wonderful couch with loving arms.

November 1st they told me they estimated a delivery date of sometime in December.

And that’s when I told Macy’s to shove their couch wherever it would hurt the most. I got so upset I was pacing our tiny hallway, saying sentences like, “You really want to know how to make me happy? Then I want you to go back into the past and deliver this couch. In the months it has taken for you to continually lie to me about a delivery date, I could have made my own couch. I could have gone to couch school, bought the materials, and fashioned my own couch out of polyester and fabric.”

They blamed labor disputes, and said nobody who had ordered any furniture from Macy’s since sometime in July had ever received their items. How is this store still in business? And why is that couch still in their showroom?

I canceled the order. We went to Crate & Barrel, because we’re keeping it in the registry family, and found a couch we loved. We could afford it and it was close to the old couch that never really existed and we were very happy. Then the saleswoman told us that couch could be delivered in twelve weeks, unless we’d like it in sky blue.

How does anybody own a couch?

We found one in stock, in a color that was fine, that was comfortable and out of our price range, but at least it existed. Macy’s said it’ll be another two weeks before they’ll credit my Am Ex. I asked for an address to write a letter of complaint, but when they said the words “P.O. Box…” I stopped listening. I’m not crafting a letter for some mailbox in Phoenix.

Anyway, the couch is coming on Friday, but stee leaves in the morning for his crazy bachelor party weekend, where I truly hope he doesn’t get a tattoo on his hand, so tonight we take apart the damn futon that’s been driving me crazy in the living room for months. And tomorrow night I will sit on the floor and watch The O.C. and then recap until my couch arrives Friday afternoon. I truly feel I will find some peace when that couch is pushed through my living room window.

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