Santa Dan and the Story of the Bed Sheets

Back in November, Dan introduced his coworkers to the joys of Amazon. Knowing how expensive some items are over here, he offered to let people order Christmas gifts online and ship them to our families. We would then pick them up while we were visiting, and bring them back. To explain the reasoning: electronics are very expensive over here. For example, an iPhone can cost three to four times the cost in the US. Similar for iPads, laptop computers and other electronics.

Many people kept asking Dan how much (insert random item here) would cost in the States. Finally, Dan showed them the Amazon website and set them loose. He met me for lunch that day and joked that he had "completely destroyed office productivity for the next couple of days" by sharing Amazon's glory with the team. People would request items and Dan would order them on his account, shipping the items to either my parents in Florida or his parents in North Carolina. The purchaser paid him on the spot for them and understood that the items wouldn't arrive until after the holiday. He also explained to them that their items may be without their packaging for space-saving reasons in our luggage.

You may be asking why they didn't just order these items themselves. The answer is twofold: 1. While Amazon does ship internationally, they do not ship to Ghana. 2. Credit cards are not common over here, meaning very few people have one. The reason is because there are no addresses for billing purposes, leaving no recourse for the card company if you skirt your bill. Thus, Dan had to use his card to make the purchase and the person paid us back in cash. At the end of the day, we got a significant amount of Hilton points just from all the purchases on his card, so not a terrible deal.

When all was said and done, here is the list of the items that we brought home with us:

• 3 computers
• 3 iPads
• 2 iPhones
• a projector screen (for work presentations)
• 3 kids tablets with cases
• Nintendo Wii games
• clothes from Baby Gap
• an electric shaver with the cleaning base
• 32 SETS of sheets/duvet covers
• and a partridge in a pear tree

Now to be fair, Dan has a huge heart for offering to do this. It was quite the good deed. That is not up for debate. But the poor guy had no mental picture for how large a set of sheets for a king size bed actually is. We unpacked many of the items and rolled the sheets to try to save space. We quickly realized that it wasn't the size as much as the weight of the sheets that was causing the problem. One roll of king sheets weighs about 3.5lbs. Granted, some of the sheets are twin sized so not all of them weighed that much. But balancing those with the duvet covers, let's call it about 3lbs an item. Multiply that by 32 sets and we had almost 100lbs of extra luggage, not including the electronics. Long story short, we came to the US with 3 checked bags, and a duffel as a carry on. We returned with 6 checked bags and a duffel as a carry on. That's a lot of stuff for our friends :)

In case you are a visual learner, here's a quick photo of the entire mound after all items had been removed from our luggage:

While it was a stressful couple days trying to get everything in suitcases, and a bit of a hit in baggage fees for the extra bags, it was worth it to do this for them. Everyone was very appreciative and seems to love their items. That said, I think Dan's new motto is "sheets are big and heavy" and he won't be accepting orders for those if we choose to do this again next year. You live and you learn!