I've long said to anyone who'll listen, though it falls on deaf ears: Please don't buy me anything, ever. If I don't already have it, then I really don't need it.
After helping out a former colleague a few times, I received a call yesterday about a delivery of an "edible arrangement" as a thank-you. It was lucky that I got the call at work because it would've been a nightmare had they delivered it there because there was no way I could get it home by bike. And, we get free fruit and healthy snacks at work so it was no sense in accepting it there and sharing with colleagues.
So it was delivered to the condo today; DH works from home and had to break from a call at work to accept the delivery.
The thing was a huge bucket of pre-cut fruit, all artfully arranged on 60 plastic skewers, stuffed into foam covered in kale in a tin pail, and swathed in cellophane. It was accompanied by a box of chocolate-dipped strawberries.
It didn't fit in the fridge, so DH took out a shelf to make it fit. I got home at 6:30 and had to deal with it as the first order of business to get our fridge space back. After removing it from the fridge with the intent of stripping it all down into a pyrex container, we tried to replace the shelf, which (being a two-piece deal that had a rolling component) promptly broke off some of the trim at the back when it fell on the kitchen floor, and also the top of that shelf came apart from the frame. Then, we spent a fun 20 minutes trying to figure out how to put the shelf back together, minus the broken trim, and getting it back into the fridge at the right height.
The next half hour was spent stripping the skewers of fruit into the pyrex container, washing the skewers prior to recycling, washing the kale and putting it into another container, and cleaning up.
We're kinda picky about our fruits and veg ... buying organic, washing everything (even fruits with peels prior to cutting into them), buying only what we need for consumption in the next day or so.
To recap the impact of the gift:
- a huge bowlful of non-organic fruit that needs to be consumed within the next few days
- a pile of cellophane and foam in the garbage, nearly doubling our twice-monthly output
- 60 large plastic skewers in the recycling
- a tin pail that's painted blue that I guess will have to go in the garbage as well, since I can't see a use for it
- broken trim on fridge shelf
- loss of an hour of a day post-work (not to mention the time spent in "therapy" via this rant)
(We are also none too thrilled when people bring cut flowers when they come for dinner: stop everything, cut the stems, deal with the wrapping, find a vase, cart the green waste to work when they die because we don't have green waste pickup at the condo.)
Asking a serious question here: Should I have refused the delivery when I got the call? Is there ever a way to say thanks, but no thanks to gifts like this without offending the giver?