I am in Florida and had to “bug out” to my Mom and Daddy’s during Irma***. I am 38 and a half years old. In the event that our trailer was destroyed, I dang for sure was taking my Chippy with me. I have had him since I was three years old.
At the very LEAST you deserve an apology. I am sorry for all you have been through. HUGS
***Everything’s fine and we had no damage, but I didn’t know that at the time
I’m very sorry this happened. My daughter (a teenager) has a menagerie of stuffed animals and they all have names and specific personalities.
Oh God, thank you all so much for being so understanding and open with stories about your own treasured things! I can’t tell you what it means not to be judged for caring about these little animals for so long, and for mourning their loss. They represented tons of memories of the stories my sister and I created when we were kids that involved these animals (and dozens more) in their own land, rather originally called Poohcity.
(Although, now that I think of it, this was definitely a country, it had its own national anthem and language, and celebrated its own Olympics every four years… okay, clearly we didn’t think the name issue through!)
I do still have those memories, and even some keepsakes remain. The Poohcity charter and official national anthem scroll are in a scrapbook, and I know I’ve got at least one old recording of me and my sister at 8 and 10 presenting/commentating the Olympics games for Poohcity radio station WNBT. Still, in the end, what was dearest to me and most meaningful was hugging Pooh tight when I went to sleep.
As far as my addressing this situation with the company/ies involved: I wrote to my contact at the clutter-cleaning company, explaining what happened. I reminded her that I’d gone to her company because the staff understood the psychological attachments hoarders/clutters have to their belongings. I felt she should know that a third-party laundry (to whom this company probably sent a lot of business to) had been this careless and glib with one of their clients and her belongings.
Haven’t heard back, but I wrote it on Friday, and they’re Orthodox Jews, so she might not have gotten to it. Or maybe it’ll just be ignored. It’s all I can do as far as that company’s concerned.
I’ll have to get my nerve up to speak to the laundry again. Part of me is tired of having my hopes dashed. On Friday I got buzzed from my doorman, telling me that a package had arrived; I wasn’t expecting anything, and somehow a trace of stupid optimism–which I thought I’d stamped out of my soul long ago–burst out and let me think: OMG, maybe it’s a bag from the laundry with Pooh et al. in it!
That was a nice five minutes, but of course it turned out to be something I’d ordered from Amazon weeks ago and forgot all about. And then I got sad all over again. Hope sucks.
But I do need to talk to the laundry one more time, just because I should give them a chance to apologize or say anything appropriate before I hit 'em hard on Yelp. Though I’ll be honest in my review and say that the clothing was cleaned very well. (And honestly, the other animals were cleaned well too. I guess if you put stuffed animals in superhot water and suds and tumble them around for ages, they’ll get clean. They might also get destroyed and destuffed.*)
Anyway thank you all again for your suggestions and your kind, warm words. I wish I could’ve responded with a surprise happy ending, but obviously that wasn’t gonna happen. Still, while I have the same mild nausea when I think of having been so irresponsible with belongings I cared about, I’m trying not to think about it too much and move on. There’s nothing else to do, really.
I’m late to the party, as usual, but I just wanted to chime in. I’m a middle-aged man and I have a grand total of three stuffed animals, which I would be quite upset to lose. They were given to me by dear friends in (relatively) recent years, and as such they have tremendous sentimental value.
One is a replica of the Velveteen Rabbit. Years ago, my partner (now ex, but still best friend) was astonished that I had never read the book as a child. He gave me a gift set that included the book and the aforementioned stuffed bunny. I display it proudly and prominently.
Another is a stuffed frog that my friends bought for me when we went to see “The Book of Mormon” on stage. You’d have to see the show to understand.
The third is a teddy bear that the same friends sent to me (along with balloons) in the hospital after my heart attack earlier this year.
I would be furious if some callous stranger destroyed them/threw them away and then lied about it.
So, so sorry to hear that happened to you, choie. Stuffed animals and childhood toys can have surprisingly strong emotional power over us, even many years later. I remember getting a little puddled up when I unexpectedly found one of my stuffed animals, Randy the Raccoon, decades after I’d last seen him.
I feel so sad for you. I don’t have my childhood stuffed animals anymore, but I have pictures and other little items that would be heartbreaking to lose. (My father took one of my favorite photos out of its frame to scan it – without asking! – and I was thinking you are SO lucky nothing happened to it.)
More mundane but frustrating: I worked in facilities for a medical institution and we got a new company to do our lab coat laundering. Now, they were trying to get our business so you would think they would be careful. But they were used to supply the coats to their customers, not laundering coats turned in to them. But the rep knew this was what we were doing – handing in our coats with paper labels I had attached to each one. Some of them were coats that docs had had presented to them with personalizations, etc. They got picked up and laundered, the labels washed away, and some of the non-vendor coats were simply lost. I felt sick about it but also just angry at the incompetence of a company trying to get their foot in the door. :smack: