Surprise

My sister has always liked playing softball. She used to play in high school, and she still likes to go to the batting cages every now and again. Given that, her husband decided that it'd be a really nice gift to give her a batting cage of her own. Better yet, he wanted to surprise her with a batting cage. Oh, the hilarity that that decision led to.

First off, she has access to all of the credit card and bank account information that he does. So if he had just ordered it all on the credit card, she would have noticed. The gift wasn't a ridiculous price or anything like that, but she would have noticed if there was a charge that she didn't talk to him about. That meant that the first order of business was to find someone who could purchase the gift on his behalf. He would pay that person back, of course, but it just couldn't be his credit card or his bank account.

My brother and I both volunteered to fulfill this role, figuring that we'd be useful in the process. Better yet, my brother found that Amazon had these items for an even cheaper price AND he had an Amazon Prime account. He could put in the order, and we'd be in business. Well, except for one small problem: my sister also had access to his Amazon account. There have occasionally been times where one of the two has ordered something for the order, or they've had to look up orders for each other. The simplest solution to this problem was that they both had access to the account. Most of the time, that worked out brilliantly. At this point, though, that'd be problematic.

So, it fell to me to order some of this stuff. I also had an Amazon account that I could lend to the cause, after all. I was all set to put in the order, when my brother pointed out that his credit card would provide much better rewards for this purchase. Well, okay. Since we weren't really going to be paying for these items, it didn't much matter to me whose credit card we used. So, my brother put in his credit card information for this order on my Amazon account.

Just to make this slightly more fun, we couldn't ship this stuff directly to my sister and her husband's house. For one, a batting cage is fairly large, and she'd immediately notice if that many parts were sitting around somewhere. Secondly, she tends to work from home more often than my brother-in-law, so she was much more likely to sign for the delivery. Even if we could stash the batting cage stuff somewhere, we had no way to guarantee that she wouldn't see the packages. Instead, my brother-in-law talked to his neighbor and asked him if we could ship the delivery to the neighbor instead. He was agreeable to this plan, so we shipped things there instead.

Just to recap, at this point, there were four people, three email addresses, and a neighbor involved in this scheme. Also, my parents, my brother, and I all decided that we would help chip in for this gift, so we then had the added fun of trying to divvy up the costs after the fact. Getting this gift wasn't quite top secret spy stuff, but it was starting to feel like it just a little bit.

Despite all of the moving pieces, though, we did manage to execute on our plan. We ordered the gift, we shipped it all to the right address, we figured out who owed whom money, and we managed to do all of this without my sister realizing this was happening.

Then we slipped up.

My brother-in-law wanted to be good about paying people back, so he sent some money our way. Of particular importance, one of the things he did was to send me some money via PayPal. The charge on his bank account said something like, "PayPal web transfer ." Now, that wasn't quite a smoking gun, but it was enough to raise suspicions. My sister called my brother-in-law shortly after seeing this, and she immediately wanted to know what that was all about. After all, she didn't know anything about this, and she didn't understand why there was money being sent my way.

The best part, in my mind, was that almost immediately after my sister called my brother-in-law, she also texted me. It said, roughly, "you know! Tell me!" Remember, I didn't know about the phone call, so to me, this text message showed up out of the blue. I could hazard a guess as to what she was talking about, but I was guessing. I didn't actually know what she was talking about. She told me that she wanted to know what her gift was, and that she had PROOF that I knew what it was. Well, hell, the jig was up.

I didn't divulge my secrets (I answered every question she asked with "42" or some variation of that number), but I couldn't help but laugh. After all the trouble we'd gone through to keep this gift a secret, we'd almost gotten all the way to the finish line. Alas, it was not meant to be. We'd managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and the surprise was somewhat ruined. She still didn't know what her gift actually was, but still. We almost surprised her. Maybe next year.