A close friend of ours got married recently, but the wife and I couldn’t attend his wedding. So when we decided to catch up for dinner with them the first time after the wedding, we thought a nice, sweet little wedding gift would be appropriate. The wife was quite excited about buying them a gift, so, off we went to this store “@Home” to buy them a wedding present. We had about an hour before we have to meet them for dinner, plenty of time to shop for a simple gift.

Vases are lame…

But this store is nuts! They have 4 floors of random stuff that you can buy for your house. Most houses are 3, maybe 4 bedrooms at max, and I can’t imagine why you would want a 4-story 10,000 sq-feet shop dedicated to filling up your 1,500 sq-feet house. It doesn’t make any sense. There are rows after rows of vases, and I could have sworn that half of them looked like they were shipped straight from 5th century BC Indus valley – All broken and with worn off paint. But apparently all that is very fashionable these days.

Anyway, so we’re browsing the vast collection of crap in the store, and the wife is having trouble deciding what an appropriate gift should be.

Me: “How about this vase?”
Wife: “Too tacky.”
Me: “How about this steel-rod-thingy?”
Wife: “Too loud!”
Me: “How about this painting then?”
Wife: “Too wannabe”
… and so on …

After about half and hour of this, it was clear that the wife was not making any progress, in any direction. She was getting visibly agitated, and in a moment of weakness, she made a fatal mistake:

Wife: “What do you think we should get them?”

Aahaaa!!! She needs my opinion! Now is my chance to shine and prove my worth as an able gift-getter. All I needed was to come up with an idea that was thoughtful, useful, unique and would be fondly remembered.

Me: “I think we should get them a dustbin.”

History is witness to the many occasions where great, inspired ideas have been scoffed at and have been lost in the mists of time, simply because the elite intellectuals could not bring themselves to admit that an outsider had broken their code and had come up with an original idea that triumphed everything they knew. Here was an ordinary mortal, who, in a moment of divine inspiration, had come up with a deep insight, but the rest of the world was, unfortunately, not ready for his brilliance.

There was a stunned silence. The wife was giving me The Look^©. A few shoppers around us also overheard and gave me some dirty looks.

Me: “What? Its a great idea!”
Wife: “You want to get a newly married couple a dustbin?”
Me: “Yes! It’s a brilliant idea. Think about it. They have a new house, so they can always use more dustbins. No one else would have given them such a useful gift, so they’ll remember it. Plus, it shows that we really thoughtful in selecting a gift for them”
Wife: “You’re crazy. What does a gift like a dustbin say?”
Me: “It says: ‘Look, Life is full of crap. Marriage, even more so. You’ll need a place to dump all your crushed dreams and forgotten ambitions. So, the next time you’re throwing away crap, use this dust bin and think of us and how we’ve helped bring order to your otherwise chaotic life!’. I think its very original!”

…Dustbins are cool!

Even after making such a powerful and convincing argument for my original gift idea, the wife was not convinced. But since she couldn’t think of anything else to buy, and since we were almost out of time, she HAD to give in and we finally bought the dustbin.

I carried the dustbin over to the checkout counter, but the wife was walking 5 steps behind me. I wonder why. Anyway, I paid for it, and took it over to the gift-wrapping counter. “Gift wrap this, please. Use a fancy gift-paper”, I said, and collected my gift-wrapped dustbin from a sales girl who had a puzzled look on her face. She clearly didn’t see this as the defining moment in mankind’s gift-giving history that it was.

As we drove down to the restaurant where we were supposed to meet the newly-weds, I was very confident they would like it. After all, it was such a thoughtful, useful, unique and memorable gift. Who wouldn’t like it?

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