I accidentally bought ten laptops.

The other morning, absurdly early, a strange number called my cell phone. Being the person that I am, living the life that I live, I absolutely never answer the phone when a strange number is calling. Absolutely never, that is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode in my face. Mainly, it could be one of the numerous seedy characters I encountered as a matter of course during the time that I convinced myself that commuting into Manhattan for a full-time class schedule while holding an internship and [a/the] [unsavory] job[s] that allowed me to afford that commute/food/shelter was an actual thing that could be done by anyone other than the quadruple amputee army veterans that speak at Democratic National Conventions. Perhaps my phantom phone caller was the quadriplegic army veteran who in fact did not speak at the Democratic National Convention, but offered me CA$$H MONY to clean his apartment topless. Worse yet, it could be a creditor.

My first course of action is to obsess over whether I recognize the number, or have ever seen that particular combination of numbers in a prophesy or recurring in my life at a suspicious rate lately. In this particular case, I definitely didn't recognize the number as a quick google search of the country code told me that this person was calling from India, and I do not know anyone in India. Nor do I care to, because I've heard there are very few public restrooms for women in that country, and I tend to base my judgements heavily on the availability of bathrooms in a country. Using this scale, I have discovered that Peru and Italy are awful places, and France should be the president of all the countries.

So this Indian person/Omen then proceeded to call me five additional times, leaving no messages, while I sat folded into a tight knot in the corner of my bed, pushing my phone away with my big toe and whimpering. Why? Who in India would want to speak to me about anything other than finances? Why can't it be the legless army vet? I will clean a hundred creepy nightmare apartments while being followed by a half-person on wheels! I will clean them WITH my breasts!

Finally, my phone stops singing and I am at peace enough to check my email, where I have sixteen unread messages from Amazon.com informing me that I have purchased ten shitty laptops. More specifically, that I have purchased ten shitty laptops and that the payment wouldn't go through for nine of them. My best guess was because I didn't purchase the nine shitty laptops or their shitty brother, but Amazon.com disagreed. 

After making a pointless phone call to Julien because I was sad that I had apparently bought ten mystery laptops, I pulled myself together to spend the good part of my morning crying on the phone to an Indian woman about the high cost of living in my particular part of the country, due in part to the wide availability of public restrooms for women, and the fact that one of these shitty laptops would equal about a month's rent for me, while she repeated banal corporate phrases into my ear using dulcet tones to calm my whiny, pathetic cry-y rage. We wondered together that this was in fact ten separate orders for the same laptop (instead of one order for ten laptops), and that they were all apparently being shipped to my family's address-- a house that no one currently lives in. 

A brief interlude: When I was younger, I was a hardcore sleepwalker. Mainly, I would just creep my mom out when she found me sitting upright in my closet, sleeping, or at the kitchen table with a random assortment of condiments before me, or when I'd get up and start talking with those spooky unseeing eyes that anyone familiar with sleepwalkers can attest is the thing nightmares are made of. In a similar vein, my brother used to sleep with his eyes open, and I only know this from when he would fall asleep in the car during long road trips and I felt the chill of the damned when his watery, unseeing eyes would roll towards me as I sat intently watching them to make sure they wouldn't begin to devour my very soul if I turned my back. 

The only reason that I was really able to sell the idea that I never purchased ten laptops and that the orders should be retroactively cancelled and Amazon.com should immediately send a representative to my place in Brooklyn with a hug and a moderately priced espresso machine to make up for this indignity was the fact that I hadn't noticed the ten Completed Order screens on my Kindle until I was toying with it while on hold, waiting for my representative to return with some good news about the cancelled shipment.

When she finally did return, breathless and relieved after having talked with several of her superiors, I sheepishly thanked her for her help and insisted that there was no need for a hug or an espresso machine, really. I was just glad that the mystery had been resolved, in one way or another.