Dear Ms Malone

I want to write and thank you for the extraordinary lengths and efforts you seem to have gone to in order to get the little gift from your warehouse to my wife. I really didn’t mean to be so much trouble.

What I set out to do was meant to be quite easy, really. Every second Christmas I buy her 100 ml of your Lime, Basil and Mandarin cologne. I know. Call me an incurable romantic. It generally lasts her around 18 months, so there is a period of quite heavy hint dropping that starts around the beginning of September.

It must be nice business for you, on the basis that, if I were to buy a pint of lager at the same rate, it would cost me around £600. But it makes her happy, which is the aim.

So on Day I, I ordered it, and you sent me a nice email saying that you had received my order, and not to worry about a thing. I felt good about this and, to celebrate, I ordered some speakers for Tom, and some smoked trout for general happiness.

On Day 2, you sent me another email, this time with a picture of a rather florid young man carrying a collection of branded parcels that went way beyond what I was buying, assuring me that your best team now were giving the matter their full attention. ‘Worry about nothing’ was the gist, so I used my new confidence to order 25kg of peanuts for our garden bird population.

On Day 3 (which is when Tom’s speakers arrived), you sent me a further email that talked about ‘working hard’ to fulfil my order. I liked that. Mine is a very small parcel, whatever the cost, and I can see that it must have taken some of your best people to unearth it. Cheered by this, I ordered a shirt from someone else for Alex, and a couple of books for my sister.

To my amazement, my sister’s books arrived on Day 4 even before you had sent me the next email, which brought the exciting news that you had found said perfume, and that it was now hovering in that no-mans land between storage and dispatch. No other supplier was keeping me this informed. We bought and decorated a Christmas tree, mainly so that we could put the mandarin and basil whatsitt underneath it.

I never heard from you on Day 5, but the peanuts arrived, as did the Christmas ham and a parcel that was supposed to be delivered to next door. We ordered some treats for the dogs.

Bless you, though, as you made up for it on Day 6 by emailing AND texting me the breathless news that my purchase was on its way to your distribution partners, who sounded almost as excited as I had become about receiving it. Nothing was too much trouble for either of you, and the great news that the young man was back on the email, as if he was mysteriously changing jobs and going to work for UPS. This was much more exciting than the trout arriving, which it did at about tea time, and Alex’s shirt, which knocked on the door while we were cooking supper.

Day 7 was a quiet one, as was Day 8, until you wrote to inform me that my parcel had arrived at the distribution depot, and was thus within touching distance of being in my own hands. Having received this- AND a tracking number- at about 10.30 pm, I was, of course, too excited to sleep.

On Day 9, you emailed just the once to inform me that I didn’t have long to wait, which knowledge I much appreciated. After all, every other one of our Christmas purchases had arrived by now, and the excitement had gone out of our lives like the air from a slow puncture, or the value in a pound coin during any day of a Truss premiership.

Day 10 was mysteriously quiet, apart from an email from UPS confirming that the tracking number was, indeed, the one that your people had told me it was. I was relieved about this as, in my experience, you can’t be too careful about tracking numbers. By now we had eaten the smoked trout, begun the ham and wrapped all the other presents.

Day 11 was almost unbearably tense, containing no less than 3 communications from you and your carrier, of which the last included the astonishing news that Viktor would be bearing the parcel to our door the very next day between 10.42 and 11.42 am. Again, I couldn’t sleep.

In the morning, one of Viktor’s colleagues emailed to ask us if we were really happy for him to leave the parcel in our porch, kind of insinuating that this was a major risk. At 10.42 sharp the doorbell range, and I burst through only to discover the dog treats had turned up, but not the scent. At 11.41, the bell went again, but it was my neighbour bringing round a Christmas card. Finally, at 2.00pm, I went out to run some errands and discovered that Viktor, or one of his colleagues, had left the parcel not in the porch but under a prickly rose bush nearby. He obviously knows a thing or two about security. For an instant, I thought that you had sent the wrong thing since it was so huge, but once we had finished the endless pass-the-parcel delayering process, it actually looked like the thing I’d ordered. My recycle bin was full, but that was a small price to pay.

So here we are. Customer happy. Wife happy. And hopefully you and Viktor happy. In thanking you, may I also ask that, if you do any cost reduction exercises in 2023, that you consider me as a consultant. You won’t be disappointed.

Happy Christmas

Regards