A funny story about receipts
We all have our things, and one of my things is that I want 100% receipt matching to my credit card statement. I may look at these transactions and know they are where we shop, consistent with what we would spend, blah blah blah, but I just want to have a receipt to match to the monthly statement for our Disney Visa.
At some point in my marriage I surrendered to the fact that my wife just wasn't going to print receipts emailed to her. I honestly can't remember her ever printing one, so I gave up and just started printing them myself at months-end. We both have access to each other's email, no surprises there for either of us.
I had one particular transaction for $45.00 that neither of us recognized and was nowhere to be found in anybody's email account, and LONG story short it was because some of it was paid using a PayPal credit and the rest on the Visa card, which put me on a wild goose chase for about a half an hour before I figured out what happened. During this goose chase, I was looking though both of our Gmail trash folders around the date of the transaction trying to figure out what was going on. Because my wife gets an insane number of emails (mostly never read), I was just going though and opening the emails on the transaction date of my mystery transaction, giving it the once-over and moving on to the next one. There were probably about 40 on this particular date, and right near the end one came up that struck me as very odd since it was a personal email from my wife to my Sister-In-Law. This is odd because my wife NEVER emails anyone but me, since I am apparently the only person on the planet who doesn't use Facebook. The first sentence is "My trip thus far..." and just like the average Joe passing a wreck on the highway, I couldn't look away. In particular, I couldn't look away because just 5 days earlier I received a survey email from Disney that said their records indicated that I made a website price quote in May that I didn't follow though with, and Disney wanted to know why I did not make the reservation. I thought that this was strange since I was at Disney in May on vacation, and there was no way I was looking online to price out another one that month! I even jokingly discussed with my wife how I thought Mickey was trying to trick us into coming back by sending that email.
The email, two in the same day and two days away from expiring forever from the Gmail trash folder, is where my wife and my sister-in-law (who is a Disney travel agent) exchange pricing for a 4-night stay at POR, Pop, AoA, and All Stars. It didn't give any dates, just prices for the four resorts, with tickets and dining plan included. Looking back it seems dumb of me, but my first thought was "who is my wife pricing Disney trips for, and why don't they just email my SIL directly?" Then I read a few more details including a mention of a dining reservation at Fulton's with a note that "we ate there on our Honeymoon" to which I think, "that's odd, my wife and I ate there too, I wonder who else this could be?"
So all of this happens in about 45 seconds, with my wife in the next room and actually talking to me at one point about how she just can't figure out what the credit card charge is for (the mystery $45.00 one). Finally I take a cell phone picture of the screen and then close the window and walk into our bedroom where she actually asks me "what's wrong", no doubt because I had turned as pale as a ghost. I really felt like I had just seen a ghost, and it was too much for me to process at once, and so I gave up looking for the receipt and headed to bed. Days go by, I just can't wrap my head around it all, has my wife actually booked a secret trip? Is she taking me? Why would we take our kids to Fulton's? What are the dates of these prices (I spent an awful lot of time trying to reverse-engineer these prices). I am a glass-half-empty kind of person, who when I see a half-empty glass I quietly wonder to myself if in fact the glass has a crack in it and is leaking. I am just a worrier, just as my mother and my mother's mother before me. I can't help it.
As the days turn into weeks, I piece together enough data to determine that my wife appears to have secretly booked a Disney vacation, sans the kiddos, at POR (our honeymoon resort) and booked a meal at Fulton's Crabhouse (a honeymoon ADR). Despite my best efforts, I cannot ascertain the dates of this trip, which alarms me greatly being the previously-mentioned worrier that I am. I strongly suspected that it would be in January since it's on my wife's bucket list, plus she mentioned an interest in the marathon in 2017. But that was too far out to have prices on, so I was still mostly stumped.
Then I go through a phase where I think about having some fun with my SIL who guards the secret. I think about coming to her to book a secret trip for my wife at about the same time I suspect my wife has already done the same, just to get a little kick out of watching her try to juggle two big secrets like that! I decide against doing any shenanigans against the SIL, as I was afraid she would have a stroke trying to figure out what to do. At the same time I am going through a daily cycle of excitement, regret, and deep guilt. Have I destroyed a surprise of epic proportions? If so, can I fake it? Should I fake it? There is no way I could fake it, I just can't! I won't! Also, if only it was three days later, the email would have been purged from the trash folder!
Finally the days tick away to where I simply can't hold it in any longer, I am flooded with emotions and still very much confused about it all. I pick a night in mid-October where I am going to spill the beans, and then when the moment arrives I simply hand my phone to my wife, she looks at the picture of her email, looks and me with a grin and says..... well, I'll leave those words out, but she said them with a smile!
After she has a minute to gather her thoughts, she grabs her phone, logs into a separate MDE account she created using her work email, and showed me her loot. I sat there with my jaw on the bed. In addition to what I knew, she had booked opening night at the Villains diner show at DHS, and also booked a Keys to the Kingdom Tour for us. She told me she already had the kids arranged to stay with her parents, and that about 4/5ths of it all was already paid for, including food. She had been using her work email to communicate with my SIL, and she really had no idea why on that one day she used her Gmail account instead, but she did. My wife had been slowly squirreling some of her side-job income at her Mom's house, and making payments on the reservation though her Mom's credit card. The Magic Bands were set to ship to her Mom's house, and I was supposed to find out Christmas Eve night when I opened the Magic Band box (away from the kids of course).
My wife took it all very well, and said she couldn't believe it went on as long as it did under my radar (from early-June to mid-October) and she was at peace with me finding out. I was still very disappointed that I blew it for her and that she didn't make it until Christmas. But she also knew that if I had found out about this trip 20 days before departure that, being the worrier I am, I probably would have exploded in hysteria!
So that's my version of a pre-trip trip report. If you just dedicated yourself to read my 1,500 word ramblings, I hope you at least got a kick out of it all, goodness knows I did!
And in case you are wondering, she still doesn't print out her receipts!
