I received an exciting offer in the email hopper yesterday:

Hello Owner,

My name is David Wolf and I will like to know if you can get me furniture?? If yes kindly let me know and I will get back to you with what I need and will also want to know if you accept credit cards as form of payment. ??

Regards
Chris Lee.

Dear Mister Lee,

I am at a loss as to how I could get you furniture. I work all day, every day, in the furniture business, it’s true. I design furniture; make furniture; photograph furniture; package and ship furniture; I dig little bits of furniture from under my nails at nightfall; I discover modest piles of sawdust in my navel on Saturdays at bath time; but as you seem to have intuited, the method whereby a decent and honorable person, the kind of stalwart and inquisitive person that would email info@sippicancottagefurniture at two AM on Memorial Day, could acquire furniture is a dark and bloody mystery.

I applaud your open-minded nature about the type of furniture you might require. A person like myself rarely encounters prospective customers that are willing to wait to determine what they might do with the fruits of my labors until after they find out what they might purchase. Perhaps if I make humidors, you’ll use them as chamber pots if that’s what you need. Or, say, if you learn that I make dining room tables, but you are building a bowling alley, you’ll find a way to saw the legs off and stitch the tabletops together to effect a solution to the dilemma posed by my intransigence. You really strike me, if you’ll excuse the pun, as the most reasonable man on the Intertunnel at two AM on Memorial Day.

I tread lightly here, and I hope no offense is taken, for it is not my intention, but I can’t help but notice that you seem to have a different name at the beginning of your entreaty than you do at the close of it. A person — an intelligent and worldly person, I mean, as I trust you will allow I represent — can only come to the conclusion that I am being contacted by Siamese twins about a lucrative order of furniture. How exciting for me.

I regret to be a bother, but I will require further information before I bog down your inbox by sending you all sorts of sensitive information about my bank accounts. I need to know exactly how Divine Providence has seen fit to cleft your nether regions, for instance, so as to outfit a bench I might produce for you with the correct amount of latitude. I’ll need to know if you can pull out three or four drawers at a time on a dresser, which could precipitate a toppling effect that would leave you in a pile of broken and tangled limbs that would make a can full of frozen angleworms cut sideways seem a trifle. Your surgeon will thank me later.

And lastly, I need assurances that I’ll still be paid, if halfway through the production of your furniture treasures, one of your heads get bored, and the two of you decide to move to England to allow the other one to drive for a while.

Best regards,
Sippican Cottage
Sippican Cottage Furniture