Dress Mess

My dress is cursed. There can be no other explanation. I bought the dress for my birthday and it sat in my closet for 2 months, smoldering because I wouldn’t take it out to play. By the third month, it had plotted revenge.

The first time I wore it, Joe and I got in our first big ugly fight. And considering it was he who pushed me to try on the dress in the first place, that was a little too rich for my taste.

The second time I wore the dress, it was Joe’s 40th birthday bash and I considered it a do-over. The night went fine until that bottle of wine fell out of the fridge and soaked into the hem of my dress as I tried to mop up the floor.

The third time I wore the dress was over new year. I figured it was exactly the type of dress to be worn for a fancy proper New Years Bash in New York. So I took it with me, excited to give it a proper night out.

After a week in Long Island with my sister-in-law’s family, I failed to anticipate the weight gain inevitable with a family whose motto is: If you aren’t physically sick, you haven’t eaten enough. It took two of us 10 minutes to zip me into the dress. And considering it was after the shops closed and just before we had to leave for the party, I was worried. I’d brought no back up outfits, so I had to fit into the damn thing. The good news is, once into the dress I discovered I had cleavage, actual décolletage for the first time in my life.

The dress must have forgiven me, no?

I finished dressing, by which I mean staring at my own breasts, and off we sped to our posh, fancy, Michelin star, Gordon Ramsey restaurant for our 5 course meal.

Great idea/bad idea.

The meal was fantastic. The food was exquisite and made me realize how much I miss eating for sport. The company was fantastic and the conversation was lively. The wine menu was tough. Average price for a bottle of white was $100, do-able for a dinner party of 8 people. Average price for a bottle of red was $250, not so do-able for a dinner party of 8 people.

We should have stuck with the white.

Not only was the red not great, I managed to launch a glass at (wait for it, you know it’s coming) myself! And stain the holy hell out of the cursed dress.

I wasn’t even drunk. It wasn’t even 11:00. And what did I say to my sister-in-law just that afternoon?

Sister-in-law: So what are you drinking tonight?
Me: Champagne, of course.
S-I-L: Niiiice…
Me: Nothing of color will come near this dress. That would only end in heartbreak.

If only I’d known how true that would be.

New Years Day, over disco fries (French fries smothered in gravy and topped with melted cheese… it’s a wonder that should never be indulged in twice) Ron and I rationalized that it was better to get the stains while they were fresh, so I gave him the dress to take to his usual dry cleaners.

They promptly lost the dress somewhere in New Jersey where their plant is located. I did the only thing I could.

I ordered another margarita and gave Ron $40 for postage and dry cleaning.

So I came home and got back into the usual swing of things, because that’s what you do when vacation is over. Ron emailed me to let me know the dress was 1- on the way and 2- miraculously, stain free.

Clearly, the dress had forgiven me. Nothing short of that could explain it.

The dress may well have forgiven me but it would appear I have offended the Irish postal system.

The dress arrived at my office late one Tuesday afternoon, in the hands of the surliest postal worker on earth. He shook me down for cash and then explained that the customs office had levied an import fee on the dress that I needed to hand over to him, in cash, at that particular moment. $80 in taxes for a dress I already owned. 50 fuuuuuucking Euro for my oooooo-wn dress!!! A dress, it might be noted, I’d already paid taxes for upon purchasing.

But it doesn’t end there. The fun never stops with the cursed dress it would seem.

The Surly Postal Worker pointed to a customs number and said that was all I needed to collect the package since I didn’t happen to have the cash on me at that particular moment. I’m paraphrasing here mostly because I don’t know how to spell his grunting. He was far from eloquent.

Knowing how post offices work, and more importantly, knowing how my brain transposes numbers when they are imperative, I took the package and told him I’d just copy the information down quickly.

He wasn’t happy about that.

He wasn’t happy about that in spite of the fact that I was in full view of him the entire time. I sat down at my desk and started copying everything on the envelope.

Long story short, in the next 4 minutes he barked at one co-worker, shoved another aside, stormed in the office and ripped the dress out of my hands, saying, as he stormed back out the door, that I had ‘no right to any of the information’.

And off he went, leaving me nothing with which to track the package, including where I could collect the package.

It was not a nice exchange and it stopped my entire office.

2 days later I spoke to the customs office about the fee levied on my own dress. That almost stopped the office. After speaking to two individuals, the first of which told me I should have noted on the customs slip that I already owned the dress and should not have insured the dress, I ascertained the following:

1- Customs is greedy as hell and will slap a 21% fee on any package with a monetary value associated with it, regardless of what is actually in the package.

2- Any package coming into Ireland from a non-EU country is counted as an ‘import’ regardless of the contents of the package and therefore subject to a 21% tax.

3- You can lie your ass off on the customs form on the airplane and bring in voluminous amounts of stuff to sell off later at a profit but forget your personal belongings and they are subject to a 21% import tax.

4- Proof of ownership of personal belongings means squat to customs because it cancels any taxes that could otherwise be collected from the belongings.

5- Customs and An Post between them can’t get a story straight let alone track a package. Even one with a 21% fee awaiting collection.

6- I hate both Customs and An Post.

7- No one believes Surly Postal Worker actually works for the post office, despite his An Post uniform and van. Clearly I was mistaken there.

This afternoon was dedicated to tracking the cursed dress, without a tracking number or knowing which office was actually holding the dress. It took me one trip to the post office where the guy at the collections window spent 15 minutes rooting thru all the packages that had arrived in the past week, one call to the main post office where they told me I had to collect the dress in Deepest Suburban Dublin but couldn’t tell me the actual address of the postal centre but could assure me it was beside a hotel, and two phone calls to the hotel adjacent postal centre to ascertain that the delivery guy should have given me a slip with the tracking number on it.

Wow, thanks. I’d have never thought to get a tracking number. Next time I’ll know better. I’ll also not register value of the package and let you just simply lose my mail, as you’ve done on two previous occasions.

I JUST WANT MY DAMN CURSED DRESS BACK!!!!

So tomorrow morning I have to call the postal office again to see if 1- Port Authority actually, physically has my dress in its possession and 2- if they will send it back to Dublin so I can go thru the whole thing again.

If not, they send it back to Ron in New York (either tomorrow or in another 3 weeks, no one is really sure). I can only assume that it will end up in the closet of some customs official and I’ll spot her on the LUAS one afternoon wearing it and reading the book Ron threw in the box for me.

If the dress weren’t worth more than the 50 Euro, I’d write I off, take the damn money and go buy a new dress. One that isn’t cursed.

If I should actually manage to get the dress back, does anyone know how to cleanse the aura of a cursed dress?