caring for someone with a passion for flying means a lot of this catches on: i can now name a more aircraft, flights, procedures and setbacks to being a flight attendant than i’ve ever planned to. i’m complaining, daily, but the upside is that it granted me an insight to the getting the best christmas gift. i think.

because of the extensive planning efforts, all the people i got the chance to relate to and all the difficulties we overcame together, i might as well consider these concorde cufflinks to be a hand crafted present.

a while ago, i’ve learned about how awesome caty thinks the concorde is: first supersonic passenger airliner, only supersonic passenger airliner, a testament to the 80′s luxury spending and the way to fly for a privileged few. backed up by some documentaries, i know now that it has been discontinued because of manufacturing and overwhelming costs. and, at some point, british airways (one of the two companies that had this aircraft in their fleed, the other one being air france) started cashing in on nostalgia. they started to sell memorabilia, novelty items were made available on board. i found this out when searching for something concorde for christmas for caty and saw everything with more clarity. music sounded better that moment: i had found the cufflinks. i also found a bookmark, but you couldn’t wear that with the uniform, could you?

decided i would bid on them, i created an ebay account and won an instant bid. the seller had 3 at the time. but he wouldn’t ship them here. we exchanged emails over the course of 2-3 days, just enough for me to get nowhere and for him to sell them all. in order to pay the man, i linked kev’s paypal account to my account. this should have bought us some time, because i thought that creating a paypal account, verifying it with the bank, feeding it money is a headache during the holiday season. that should also be true now, but having learned it the hard way, i’ll try to keep my ebay orders as simple as possible.

i tried again with another seller. from her email i gathered that she was a flight attendant with british airways. i played the sympathy card, got nowhere, because she was to spooked by the different billing addresses that she refunded us the money. also over the course of 2-3 days. in the meantime, the bank froze kev’s account, because of suspicious activity – just what i needed in order to explain to someone that we’re not up to no good, that not every order from romania is a scam and that i really really had set my mind on this christmas gift. and she wouldn’t ship the cufflinks overseas either. tough.

so i went through my list of contacts. found claudia, asked her about if she knew anyone who would help (claudia has an incredible network of people from all over the world; and not just facebook friends, people she actually interacts with). i told her the story again, and got her really excited about the idea. she put a request for someone in great britain that would act as a middle man person. and because we needed to keep it a surprise, she cut caty from her list of friends. that was odd.

but someone answered right away, cristiana, who had the opportunity to spend christmas in london and could even meet with the seller if that meant getting the cufflinks to romania. i trusted her immediately, guess i figured that nothing else would go wrong. it did: we exchanged messages as i got no news from the BA flight attendant, and finally she refused to go through with a new order, probably not needing the hassle. sorry, cristiana! for all the trouble and not thanking you enough times before.

out of nowhere, i talked to crisp (after a while) and told her the story so far. she thought it was cute, and having something in ireland some years ago, we figured she could ask around for someone new to help. we didn’t have any luck until 2010, i guess people were too busy with their own happy holidays. by that time, the shipping would take too much and not get here in time for christmas anyway.

robbie was kind enough to place the order after listening to the story as i told it for a fifth time (getting better and better). he lost the bid on some cufflinks, the last ones that were featured on ebay – auction only. but just as i was getting the bad news, someone else posted a new pair of cufflinks, describing them as an unwanted gift, robbie jumped at the chance and bought them instantly. i was pointing them out at the same time, in a different facebook message. bid won, cufflinks booked, on their way to robbie as soon as the seller got confirmation of the payment being made.

i only had to pay back robbie. as kev managed to get the money back, i arranged with iulia to make the paypal transfer. not that iulia, a different one. he also got confused. it took a while, i was getting more and more frustrated with the fact that nothing works right and that i am letting a good man down. eventually he got the money, my mind was set at ease and the cufflinks reached me through my mom. package was partially open, but the postman was really cool about everything and assured mom that nothing happened. nothing did, i gave caty the present yesterday.