Amphigouri: varnished nonsense

We’ve had difficulties with Husband’s wedding band.

The bands we chose are fairly simple - heavy platinum bands. The unique detail on them is the sapphire that’s embedded on the *inside* of the band, which is supposed to symbolize something-or-other (insert sappy emotion thing here that is used to sell the stone), but we just thought it was significant because my engagement ring is a sapphire and, well, the idea’s just cool. About a month or so prior to the wedding, Husband realized that his ring was a little too small. We went to the jewelry shop to have it resized. Come to find out, they don’t resize that ring because of the sapphire on the inside (something we thought we were initially told they *would* do), so we needed to re-order from the manufacturer. We did so, with the understanding that we may not get the ring in time for our wedding and would have to use the smaller one until the larger one arrived.

Much to our delight, we were notified four days prior to the wedding (and one day prior to Husband driving to Maine for pre-wedding tasks) that the ring was in. Unfortunately, when Husband picked it up he noticed that it was sans sapphire. Sigh. He put in the second order to have a ring with sapphire shipped, and we used the one without for our ceremony.

This weekend we finally went to pick up the new ring. We arrived at the store to find some sort of event under way - a tribute to the designer of a particular line of jewelry, with the designer himself in attendance all the way from Italy. We felt woefully underdressed in our jeans and scrubby weekend clothes. :-> The woman at the counter finally found Husband’s ring and handed it to him for inspection. While he was doing this, I inquired about having my ring buffed and polished. After a moment Husband just shook his head and started chuckling.

“Uh, the inscription’s wrong. it says ‘Yesterday! Love, Joe’”

*blink* What?? Indeed, the inscription was entirely wrong. We had requested our initials be placed on either side of the sapphire, nothing at all like what was written. The woman assisting us looked embarrassed, laughed an uncomfortable laugh, then took the ring back to have the inscription buffed out. She also took my ring back to have the polishing done for free (yay). While she was gone, we looked at the work order to see what had happened. There was a box on the left of the form that indicated the “Date Promised” - the information in this box had been crossed out, and one of the people who had worked with us when we were re-ordering had written in large, penciled letters, “Yesterday! Love, Joe.” Why he actually signed the thing “love” is a question I’m not sure I care to have answered, and quite how the engraver interpreted that as the text for the inscription is beyond me, as it wasn’t labeled as the inscription information.

At any rate - we had it buffed out, and then decided to have them go ahead and do the inscription we had originally wanted. The saleswoman wrote down the proper information : “EAM * PHR” and we wandered around the store for 15 minutes while this was done. Husband did quick inspection of the ring and we left for lunch.

Mid-way through our bagel sandwiches, Husband took a closer look at his ring.

“Lemme see your ring a second…. *looks at inscription on mine* … Man, I think they screwed us again.”

Sigh. Not only were the spaces between each initial far larger than the ones on my ring, the engraver got it wrong again. “EAM” had become “E   A   N”.

Not wanting to deal with the crowd at the store any further, we decided we’d take it to a different shop to have it done properly. I need to head up to Maine to have my engagement ring resized to fit my right hand (I like wearing the band by itself on my ring finger), so maybe while we’re at Cross Jewelers we’ll see about having them fix Husband’s ring once and for all.

Comments RSS