It's Andy Fish!

A couple of weeks ago, or maybe it was the start of the season, Veronica I ate dinner at the bar at Oli’s Italian Eatery– seated at the corner was an older gent and his wife– and the guy looked great– he was wearing a Tommy Bahama ™ ¾ zip pullover in Sunshine Yellow– it was sharp and bright and I had to have one.

I zipped over to the Tommy Bahama ™ website, a site I know quite well, and quickly found the correct item but the color was not to be. For some reason lately Tommy has been bringing in more subtle colors– c’mon your name is Tommy Bahama ™ and your mascot is a leaping swordfish– that says Miami Beach more than anything and Miami Beach means color.

I found one at Brook Taverner ™ a fantastic mens shop in the UK, they have some great looking clothes. I love the pink suit they show matched with a dark blue shirt, the coral pants scream Summer to me, although I don’t know if I could pull off either one. Maybe.

I found the ¾ zip in “All Season” material.

“All Season” means to me that it’s not so thin you can’t wear it in Winter– but you’d have to layer with it– and it’s not so thick that you can’t wear it in Summer- well they do an amazing job of shipping, my order was here in less than three days from Jolly Ol’ England and unfortantely they were so thick I’m not sure they would even work on anything but the absolute frigid days we suffer in Winter. No worries, free returns– only when I printed the return label it looked like hyroglyphics.

Note- the distortions are there to protect the innocent.

No address, no return address, in fact nothing to indicate if I was even supposed to attach this to the package or hand it to the driver (they automatically scheduled a driver pickup for the next day– which sadly I didn’t want because I was going to be out of town).

After standing there staring at it for about four hours Veronica nudged me and said “Why don’t we take it to the UPS store?”

“Nah,” I said numbingly looking at the package in one hand and the label in the other. “UPS is sending a driver to pick it up tomorrow.” A long string of drool formed out of my hanging mouth.

“No, let’s take it up there and just ask the guy if you should attach the label, he should have a bar code reader so he can tell if the return address is there.”

Brilliant, as my friends in the UK often say.

We went up there and the kid behind the desk was a Marvel. He bleeped and blooped the label and the package and sure enough it was all there. He then printed out a label, attached it and said he could take it.

I began to mutter that there was a driver coming to get it the next day– he shook his head and said by doing all this it would cancel the pickup.

Brilliant! I think I’m turning British.

We took off for the weekend, the return in the hands of the UPS Powers. When we got back I saw a UPS sticker on my door– sure enough the driver had shown up to pickup the package and he wasn’t happy neither a package or I was there.

Fingers crossed the rest of it goes smoothly.