Special Gifts and Special People

Story Sent in by Trudi:

As I waited outside of a restaurant, I received a call less then 10 minutes before my date with Jeremy. "Bad news," he said, "I lost my cell phone."

I replied, "You're calling me from your cell phone."

A pause, then, "Crap." He hung up. Assuming that the date was canceled, I went home, and that would have been that.

However, a couple of hours later, he called. "Sorry about before. What I meant to say was that I lost my mother's cell phone."

"Uh-huh. Better luck next time, Jeremy."

"No! Wait! I'm serious. I only just found it. Let me make it up to you."

"No, thanks."

He said, "It's too late, anyway. I already got you something awesome. You'll have to meet up with me to find out what it is."

"I appreciate it, but I don't really want anything from you. I'm going. Good night."

"Don't hang up!" he yelled. I hung up. He called me right back and left a voicemail: "If you ever hang up on me again, I swear to God you'll be sorry. Now I bought something nice for you and you're going to get it and that's all there is to it! Now tell me where to drop it off. I don't care if it's your house, your work, or under a rock in the woods. Just tell me where to put it and I swear you'll never hear from me again."

I ignored the message. He called about 30 more times and left variants of those statements. He also wrote me several messages about it. Eventually, the calls and messages stopped, and I guessed that finally, that would be the last I heard from him.

Nope. A year later, he found me on another dating site and deluged my inbox with messages about this "special gift" that he felt "awful" about not giving me. I wrote back a time and place where he could give it to me in person: a public park on a Saturday at noon.

Saturday at noon, I didn't show up. He called and called and called, but I didn't pick up. He wrote me a message, and I replied, "I don't know what happened. Must have been a miscommunication. How about this: I'll meet you in front of the Walmart tomorrow…"

The next day came and went. Phone calls and a message later, I wrote him back. "Yeah, I couldn't make it. Meet me at the fountain at the mall this Wednesday."

Wednesday came and went. He left me a voicemail that said, "Clearly you don't want this special present. I'm not going to contact you anymore about it, no matter how much you try to get in touch with me. If it was worth that much to you, you definitely would've picked it up from me by now."

It took him a while, but he finally got the point. Haven't heard from him since.