Larger Than Life

A few of my friends are enamored of oversized everyday objects – six foot tall pencils, or chairs in which you can swing your legs while seated. I, too, find such things amusing when I encounter them; I just never meant to buy any.

These days I shop online for just about everything – clothes, house wares, jewelry, even food that time I blew out my ankle and couldn’t walk without a cane. I’ve probably been to a mall fewer than ten times in the last ten years. (This, from a Jersey girl!) And much as I miss visiting Orange Julius and the Piercing Pagoda, online shopping suits my style. I get to browse in peace, and compare prices among stores obsessively.

The only drawback is my lack of attention to visual detail, by which I mean I am occasionally bewildered by what arrives at my doorstep. I am quite a capable reader, I assure you, yet crucial details of online item descriptions sometimes escape me. I ordered a wooden activity cube for my niece, who was nearing two at the time. I pictured her toddling around with it, distracting herself on car rides and such. When it arrived, though, it was roughly the same size as my niece and, thus, not so portable as I had imagined.

It took two attempts to purchase a suitable wooden vase. The first arrived as a standing urn large enough for that same niece to use to rout the competition at hide-and-seek.

The moment an unexpectedly oversized purchase arrives can be a puzzling one. The doormen roll their eyes and get out the luggage cart. “What the heck did I order?” I ask myself, dragging a wardrobe-sized box into the apartment. I renew my vow to check the dimensions of things before I buy them.

For a while I’m extra careful, but then things start to slip. One Christmas I thought to gift-wrap earrings in a candy cane-striped container I saw online. In reality it serves better as a hat box. I should have saved it for the ludicrously large pair of earrings I ordered the following season -- an African tribal thing, it turned out. We live, we learn. I ordered a few little tchotchke boxes for my dresser, in which I keep buttons and pins and stray coins. Admittedly, I have an abundance of loose change in a startling array of currencies. Still, I did not intend for one of the boxes to be 7 times the size of the others. The overgrown goon now resides in the living room.

The real mystery is how, in all this unmindful online ordering, the reverse has never happened. At this writing, there have been no miniature armchairs or undersized hand tools delivered here. I have instigated other foul-ups – booking a plane flight for PM instead of AM (which got fixed quite easily), or for the wrong day altogether (which was, in the end, an expensive sort of error). Generally, though, it seems I specialize in super-sizing.

My trusty orange colander was melted in a freakish oven pre-heating incident, so I went online to replace it. A woman living alone, I am the not-so-proud owner of a shiny, 16-quart colander, suitable for an institutional kitchen. Not my kitchen anyway, as it doesn’t fit into the sink, which puts a significant dent in its usability. It’s a good thing I don’t cook.

At work, the training team wrote a case study about Gucci, and the participant with the best solution to the case won a keychain – about the only Gucci thing our prize budget could afford. You might assume I’d be safe buying from luxury retailers; that, say, the G-shaped keychain on a cord I order won’t be larger than a hood ornament, strung on rope as thick as a Twizzler. Alas, even here I’m not immune. When I resigned from the executive search firm, I was still looking for the right gangsta/consultant to reward with The Big G.

In the days before Gus the Cat and I met at New York City Animal Control, I was browsing pictures of rescued animals on shelter websites. It occurred to me that I had better show up there, or risk adopting a mountain lion.

See? I can learn.