The Water Bed and the UPS Man

A few years back, I noticed that I'd wake up in the morning and my shoulder was damp.  It occurred to me that our water-bed had a little tiny leak.  I tried to patch it with various things, fingernail polish, duct tape, vinyl patching product and then just resorted to a towel under my shoulder each night.  It was most annoying!  We have had our water bed for years, yep, you could say, "since they first came out".  Was that really back in the 70's?  We like the water-bed, it's always cozy warm to crawl into at night.  It has never bothered my back, but I will say that Richard didn't like sleeping in it after his rotator cuff surgery.  But, I am not sure he could be comfortable in a more conventional bed either.

OK, back to the leak.  So, my daughter, Emily says, "Mom, get online and order a new liner".  Well that is pretty easy.  I placed the order and it arrived by UPS when I was out of town.  My husband just moved it inside the house and when I came home we would dealt with it.  Now many of you know that water-beds hold lots of water and getting the water out is not an easy task.  The day we decided to replace the liner, Emily was there to help.  We had drained as much water as we could out of the bladder, but it was still squishy with liquid.  Lifting it out of the frame was difficult, water is heavy!  Plus, the liner was like picking up jello with your fingers tips.  It tends to squirm and fall every which way.  We decided to move it by trying to put it into the cardboard box that the new one came in, of course, it was bigger than the box.  So it kind of eked out the top. the cardboard started tearing so I proceeded to duct tape the box to keep the squishy liner inside.
We managed to drag, scoot and lift it to the front porch.  Richard said he'd use the bobcat to move it out the the curb on trash day.  Trash day was almost a week away and it rained sometime during the week, creating a more unstable box.

In the mean time, I'd had some gourds delivered by UPS and several had gotten broken.  So I was dealing with UPS to make a claim.  They told me to pack up the broken gourds and they'd send a UPS truck to pick them up.  So I waited for this to happen.

One day I was going to the mailbox and realized the water-bed in a cardboard box that was sitting at the front door was gone.  The thought crossed my mind that Richard didn't haul it to the curb, but where did it go?  Couldn't figure it out at all, even Richard was puzzled.  The next day my UPS man came to pick up my broken gourds.  Off hand I ask him if he'd come the day before and he said no, he was off yesterday.  For some reason I told him my puzzlement regarding the water-bed liner in a taped together cardboard box.  Then he said "Ohhhh, so that is why my boss ask me this morning about that broken box with a water-bed liner sitting on the office floor at UPS!"  My UPS guy knew nothing about it, he'd had a sub yesterday.   Then we both started laughing, trying to figure how this UPS sub managed to get my water-bed liner into his truck and then into UPS. 

The story doesn't end............  UPS sent this box back to the company I'd ordered the liner from and less than a week later a new water-bed liner arrived from the company!!!!   Of course, UPS then had to come out and get the new liner and ship it back to the company, we certainly didn't need another liner.

Today I ran into my UPS guy at another place of business in Yellow Springs.  He and I just look at each other and start laughing.   The people around us think we are loosing it!  I know UPS guys have a bunch of funny things happen, if a book was written, this story might make the pages.