According to an article that appeared in British tabloid “The Sun” yesterday, a romantic proposal plan by a British guy vanished into thin air, after a balloon containing an expensive diamond ring was blown away.
The guy, Lefkos Hajji, asked his florist to put his $12,000 engagement-ring inside a balloon. His plan was to give her girlfriend a pin to “pop” the ring out. Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. After he left the florist shop, a gust pulled his balloon from his hand…
Lefkos said: “I couldn’t believe it… I just watched as it went further and further into the air. I felt like such a plonker. It cost a fortune and I knew my girlfriend would kill me.”
According to him, his girlfriend isn’t talking to him ever since.
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I was wondering, though, what if this happened to us, or any florist in America for that matter? I think there’s a good chance that we would end up in a court. Are we supposed to refuse a potentially risky request from a customer? What if he insists? Do we have to ask the customer to sign a paper saying that we aren’t responsible for the consequence? Food for thoughts…
According to BBC News, an Iranian court ordered a guy to give his wife the 124,000 roses that he promised in her dowry.
(Excerpt from the BBC site)
The woman said she was claiming the dowry because her “very stingy husband” would not even pay for a cup of coffee, according to the E’temad newspaper.
The court has seized the man’s flat until he produces all of the roses.
Under Iranian law, a woman can claim her dowry, or mahr, at any time during a marriage or when getting divorced. [snip]
According to E’temad, the woman, identified as Hengameh, decided to claim her entire dowry of 124,000 red roses after 10 years of marriage to “punish her very stingy husband”.
“Shortly after marriage, I realised that Shahin was very cheap,” she told the newspaper. “He even refused to pay for my coffee if we went to a cafe or restaurant.”
Shahin told the court he could only afford to give her five roses a day and complained that it was his wife’s “billionaire friends who had put such ideas in her head”.
But the judge rejected Shahin’s pleas and ordered his $64,000 (£33,000) flat to be confiscated until he has bought them all.
A long-stemmed rose costs about $2 (£1.09) in the Iranian capital, Tehran.
It is common in Iran to offer gold coins or property as mahr. An Iranian man can end up in jail for dowry debts.
124,000 roses!!! With the pace of 5 roses a day (~1,825 roses a year), it takes about 68 years to pay off this debt. Good luck Mr Shahin!
If you’ve ever read our article on “Internet florist”, you already know that these guys are not florists. They just take your order and electronically transmit the order to a local florist for fulfillment and delivery. We real florists call them “Order Gatherers” or simply OG.
Some of them are called dOG, meaning deceptive OG. They usually masquerade as a local florist in a town that you are trying to send flowers to. Our town, Huntington, has many of those dOGs lurking in the search results of Google/Yahoo/Yellow Pages, some of whom are enshrined in our “Hall of Shame” list. We don’t fill for them. We do fill for other OGs (called hOGs or honest OGs), like FTD.com, FromYouFlowers.com (ProFlowers), etc. In many cases, however, distinction between hOG and dOG is not very clear.
The other day, our manager (Lori) got a call from one of those OGs. He had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. He wanted us to make “a flower arrangement.” – “… well, OK, what kind of flower arrangement do you want us to make”, she asked. He said, “um… I dunno… there’s some purple thing in it.” “Purple thing?” “yeah… looks like purple to me.”
What are we supposed to do when an OG want us to deliver “a flower arrangement” with what looks like “some purple thing in it”? Obviously, we declined the order.
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