In the spring after our son was born, I ordered some
supplies from a mail-order catalog, including a set of diaper clips – learning to
diaper a happy, squirmy baby made me fear poking him with the traditional
diaper pin, and this seemed to be a nice solution to that anxiety. Weeks passed
without the order arriving, and after contacting the company, I received an
irate letter accusing me of being a thief, accompanied with a copy of a UPS
receipt purportedly signed by yours truly. It wasn’t my signature, and the
address was on the opposite side of town.
I managed to track down this other “John Stanton” and met
with him at his house. We both dropped a few names, and it turned out that we
weren’t related. When the package was delivered, he was in the process of
moving to his new home, and he had the box addressed to me on a table by his
front door, still unopened. I had ordered the shipment sent to my P.O. Box, but
it had been shipped by UPS, which simply had delivered it to the first John
Stanton they could find.
My documentation of the miss-delivery earned me a profuse
apology from the author of the above-mentioned irate letter.
Fourteen years later, I purchased a used gray Nissan Stanza
from a dealership not far from home. A few weeks later, I contacted the dealer
regarding some minor issue, and when the salesman read my address from his
computer screen, it wasn’t mine, but it seemed familiar. Not far from the address
where I had picked up the “Happy Family Products” package with the diaper clips
all those years before. It seems that the other John Stanton had purchased the
same make, model and color car, from the same dealership, just the day before I
had bought mine. The only difference was, he had an automatic transmission
while I had purchased one with a stick.
