I asked my fiancée what she wants for Christmas and she was nice enough to e-mail me a specific suggestion for a hard-to-find item.
I copied the product name from her e-mail, pasted it into the Froogle search engine, and found the cheapest one on the Internet. That took about 12 seconds. It took another minute to enter my address and credit card information.
When it comes to gift-giving, they say it’s the thought that counts. So far I had 72 seconds invested in my future wife. I wondered if that was enough.
I knew that my fiancee’s job of shopping for me wouldn’t be so easy. I have the deadly combination of not caring much about material possessions plus a high disposable income. In the unlikely event that I decide I want something that’s small enough to fit in a box, I buy it that same day. I figure she’s spent about 2 weeks shopping for something for me. And I’m not much help. When she asks what I want, I say stuff like, “Well, I need some shoes. But I have weird feet, so don’t get those.” As I write this, she’s frantically shopping for something that fits the category of “not shoes” and “doesn’t already have.”
Grudgingly, I knew I had to close the “gift thought gap.” So I went to the tennis store and shopped as slowly as I could for a nice bag to hold her tennis racket. I probably lose some points for shopping in my own favorite store where I get a contact high by touching tennis rackets and giving them practice swings. I picked out a nice bag, but as it turned out, not as nice as the one I saw in her car the next day. That’s probably something I should have noticed a month ago. Minus two points for being unobservant. And minus another two points for yelling an obscenity when I saw it.
Now I have to think of some more shopping ideas that have the single virtue of taking a long time. I hear that those Xbox 360s are hard to get. Maybe I could spend a week looking for one of those.