Paradigm Farms Horse Retirement: November 2018

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

The Misfit Deer Family

You will recall that Jason broke down and purchased the deer family from Costco in October. I outlined in this blog post how Jason skillfully avoided owning the deer family for two years before breaking down. He had valid reasons for not wanting the deer family in his life despite his child’s desperation for us to have the deer family. He knew he would get stuck building the deer family, then dealing with all of the things that went wrong with the deer family.

A few weeks ago Jason broke down and built the deer family. It was the usual level of annoyance and uncooperative, tiny screws that one would expect from such a project, but Jason got the deer family built with minimal fuss. I should add a reminder that Carter remains convinced that the deer family was meant for us because it is a replica of our family with a mom, a dad and a kid. When Jason had his triumphant moment and plugged in the deer family, it was his own representative in the family that didn’t work correctly. Jason’s head and antlers didn’t light up, with the exception of a couple of random lights. On the other hand, my doe and Carter’s fawn lit up beautifully. Jason halfheartedly attempted to repair his deer to no avail. He’d had enough and called it a day with the deer family.

Each night we plugged in our deer family and Jason’s head remained dim. His bum lit up spectacularly, but his head not so much. After a couple of days I searched the internet in the hopes of ordering a replacement Jason. As it turns out it wasn’t all that easy to find a light up deer of the correct size, with antlers. I found an eight foot buck that could tower over the other two deer in our family and I found tiny little fawns that were much too small to be the Jason deer. Finally I had success and found a buck in the correct color and size to serve as a replacement Jason.

I placed my order and began receiving updates on the progress of replacement Jason’s journey to our farm. When delivery day arrived I told Jason and Carter that replacement Jason was scheduled for delivery that afternoon. Then, a couple of hours later, my FedEx app sent me a notice that my package was now undeliverable and was being returned to the sender.

I immediately got on the phone with customer service and asked what the heck was going on with replacement Jason. I was informed that the box had sustained significant damage and thus would not be delivered to me. I immediately asked if another deer would be shipped to me. Tragically, I was informed that the damaged Jason was the last Jason they had in stock.

I did not take this well. I informed the customer service rep that this deer represented my husband in our light up deer family, and that his original deer didn’t work, now this deer was damaged, and that I needed another deer sent to me. I needed fully functional, undamaged version of my husband in the form of a light up deer. I go back to scouring the internet with no success and the lovely customer service rep scoured their warehouse. I get an email with a thumbnail picture the next day of a light up deer with antlers. The description stated it was five feet tall. I asked Jason if five feet sounded right for his deer and he said yes.

I now had Jason number three on the way. Jason number three is dutifully delivered a few days later. Jason proceeds to assemble Jason number three and quickly alerts me to a problem. This deer was covered in gold glitter and not silver glitter. I told him to build it anyway. Almost immediately, after he had all of the parts unwrapped, Jason informed me of problem number two. This deer was not five feet tall, and in fact was almost the same size as the Carter deer in our family. I threw up my hands in frustration at that point. I had gone through three Jason’s trying to get a proper Jason and nothing had worked out.

Jason decided to carry on and he assembled replacement Jason number three and placed him about fifteen feet away from the rest of the deer family. For a couple of nights we had misfit Jason lit up and looking sadly at the rest of our deer family from a distance. Apparently this bothered the real Jason because after a couple of days he announced he had integrated replacement Jason number three into the herd. Our deer family now has both dim Jason and misfit Jason. I think this may be where the saga of the deer family ends, at least for this season.

The angle of this picture makes misfit Jason on the end appear larger than he is. You can also kind of tell that misfit Jason is gold instead of silver. I tried, I really did.