GAH. Beauty Care

Last week, I decided to order the limited edition graphic print pictured above from a crowd called village in New York. I think I'd espied it somewhere like an issue of Living Etc once upon a time and fallen madly in love with it - the juxtaposition of a no-nonsense font with the froth and frill of the colourway and the sentiment really appealed to me. It captured something of the zeitgeist of my yoof, when teenagers across the globe couldn't string a single sentance together without including the "like" filler. The Irish were no exception, and to this day it's a habit that is, like, nearly impossible for us to break. One of Joe O'Connor's recent radio diary entries dealt with this very issue.

So when a bit of birthday money came my way I said sure feck it anyway, I might as well get the thing, and decided to bite the bullet, placing my order last Wednesday.

I arrived into work this morning to see a cardboard shipping tube standing upright on my desk and was overcome with giddy excitement... until I opened it and noticed two wee holes in the outer wrapping paper. Eek. Carefully unrolling the print, nearly turning my head away and squinting out under the corner of my specs for fear that I might be about to see the unthinkable, my fears were realised. There were two corresponding holes in my print.

When I looked again at the outer cardboard tube, I spotted a dirty great big staple looking quietly out of place between the red "FRAGILE! HANDLE WITH CARE!" stickers dotted across the package, and then it hit me: the post room guys here have these in-house delivery dockets that they staple to goods received until they can get a signature for the items. Including $100 limited edition prints obviously marked "BE F*CKING CAREFUL WITH THIS!", apparantly.

FFS.

Ever heard of a little thing called Sellotape, lads?!

Well, the print is ruined as far as I'm concerned. The holes are really, really obvious, in the plain light pink, and no, there is no disguising them. I will see them every single time I look at the stupid thing, regardless of how it's framed or where it's hung.

So. Like. Cross.