Year of the Prom Dress

For her seventeenth birthday, my younger daughter asked me for a prom gown. She’d had it picked out for a long time, this dress of her dreams. But no store in the Atlanta area had the dress in stock, so we were forced to order it online.

I know that ordering a dress online when she hasn’t even tried it on is, well, crazy. But about this time two years ago, a smallish package addressed to her big sister arrived on our doorstep. Big sister called home from work to ask if a package had come.

“Yes, what did you order?” I said.

“It’s my prom dress!” she happily shouted into the phone.

I looked at the box. It was exactly six inches square and two inches thick. Obviously, she wasn’t going to be wearing much to the prom.

But when she got home and opened the box and held that dress up, a long white Grecian style made of silky-sheer organza, it was so breathtakingly beautiful that I wanted to cry. That's her, above.

Ordering a prom dress online worked out in the past, so I confidently took younger sister’s measurements and compared them to the chart before placing the order. I paid for the dress with my American Express card, knowing full well that my pals at Amex really, really like me and that if the dress isn’t delivered to my satisfaction, they will take my word over thepromdress.com’s. Plus, we had just over two months until the prom. What could go wrong?

That was January 23. One month ago. We still haven’t received the dress. And now I’m nervous about canceling this order because what if it takes a month to get a replacement dress? I would have already filed a complaint with Amex and told thepromdress.com people what they can do with their dress, but my girl has her heart set on this dress. So I called the company last Friday and asked what the problem is.

The problem, it seems, is the Chinese New Year. I swear to God, they actually said that Chinese New Year has delayed the dress.

2010, it seems, is the Year of the Bad Customer Service.

Now, I haven’t thought about Chinese New Year in years, not since I decided that I like Thai food and sushi better than Chinese and stopped going to the restaurants with the Chinese calendars for placemats.

I remember looking at those placemats when I was a kid and thinking, Wow! 1993 is twenty years from now. I wonder where I’ll be in 1993, if the world hasn’t ended by then.

In 1993, I thought, Wow! The new millennium is almost here, and I wonder if Y2K is really something to worry about. Will the world as we know it end because of a computer glitch?

In 2002, I thought my world had actually ended. I was a sad, sad girl, having found out about my husband’s affair. I remember wondering if we would still be together ten years down the road, and I wondered if I would still hurt so badly in ten years.

I don’t wonder -- or even worry -- so much about the future any longer. I’ve learned that while details are highly unpredictable, I pretty much can set my clock (and calendar) by the fact that I’m in for a great ride. Or, as the Jimmy Buffett/Martina McBride song so poetically puts it:

I’m just hangin’ on while this old world keeps spinning
And it’s good to know it’s out of my control

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from all this livin’

Is that it wouldn’t change a thing if I let go

I do wonder, however, if I will live to see April if a prom dress doesn’t arrive in March. And 2010, incidentally, is the Year of the Tiger. Maybe he can figure out a way to use the Chinese New Year excuse.