Sometimes a story comes along that's just too ripe not to tell. Hopefully everybody involved in this one can see the funny side…
During my packing up to move to the UK, I decided that bringing a suit would be a good idea. The one I wanted to bring turned out to need a dry clean, as I'd worn it to a friend's wedding and gotten a couple of marks on it. I was planning on getting it drycleaned in London (for ease), however Mum insisted it go to the one at Mitcham (cheaper to get it done in Australia, and all).
The suit went down on the Thursday before I left… when I rang up Friday to find out what time it would be ready to pick up, they said it wouldn't be ready until 10:30am Saturday. As I had to be at the airport at 10am that Saturday to fly to London, and my parents refused to send one car to the airport with me and another to pick up my suit, I ended up packing my OTHER suit, which is a bit shit and doesn't fit that well.
Naturally, I had assumed that one of them would go get it a couple of days later, and all would be hunky dory.
Fast forward to March 2005, and Tim's approaching wedding. Tim asked me for my measurements so he could get suits organised through December, and I sent them to him at the end of December. At the end of January he said he'd decided that he'd seen some fairly cheap black suits at ManToMan, and decided it'd be more cost effective for us to buy suits than hire them.
When I spoke to him last week, he said that he'd organised a groovy suit, but had been totally flat out at work hadn't had time to look at stuff for the rest of the groomsmen.
Speaking with Mum, she was asking about whether I had a suit I could bring – looks like this wedding's gonna be BYO. I thought to myself “Well, as now suit style doesn't matter, because everyone's bringing their own, I'll just wear the one I left in Australia!”. But no, that's not going to be happening, is it ?
Nobody went to pick my suit up from the dry cleaners' shop, did they ?
Now typically I wouldn't expect a dry cleaner to hold onto a left item for all that long, however any question of that is academic, as in mid August 2004 half of Mitcham Shopping Centre (including said drycleaners) burned down in what is believed to be a botched safebreaking attempt.
I'm guessing it's time to buy a new suit.