Annoyance of the Day

A friend of mine lost her father recently -- and he had been living with her and her husband for a number of years, and his passing wasn't unexpected. But she was the go-to sibling arranging all the funeral stuff; she's the executor of the will, the hostess for out of town relatives, etc. This happened about two weeks ago, and I didn't acknowledge it at the time. Today I decided now that everyone has gone home and her life is getting back on track to send her flowers.

What I do is find a local florist and then call them -- so I found a florist, went to its website to make sure it was local -- and when I was looking at the web site, I saw you could order straight from the site, and frankly I get so weary sometimes talking to people, placing an order, repeating the same info, spelling my name five times.... ("L-E-U??" No, L-U-E.. "L-U-E_K?" No, there are six letters; I'm gonna start over...) So this is what I ordered:

She has an old-fashioned antiquey house so I thought this would fit well. The basket appealed to me more than a vase.

So I do the whole thing, delivery address, my address, credit card, etc. When I got to the gift card, you could click on what kind of card (birthday, get well, etc) so I clicked on "Thinking of You" -- so then you had 60 characters -- which is not much -- to write the card. I did that, and I'm all set. Click, click, submit, then thank you for your order.

Ok, so here's the annoyance... in the order confirmation, in big letters, that my eyes went to first, it states that I have agreed that if the flowers pictured aren't available that the florist can substitute. I have to say I don't really care if the roses are pink or peach or yellow. But I do resent that there was some fine print somewhere that I missed... I didn't even check a box... but I am sure somewhere at the bottom of one of the pages in 6-point type it said something like "By submitting your credit card number, you are agreeing to substitutions... etc."

I just felt tricked. The order was already submitted -- it was a gotcha -- and if I did care, and I thought it would be exactly like the photo, it would have been a big hassle to change.