The CareBox website has been live for 6 months now and I’ve had some time to reflect back and wanted to share a little story about how the 1^st order via the website was received and delivered.  Not sure what it was that I expected to happen on Monday, 1^st July – the website was now live!  So in between pottering around I madly checked the order status on the website probably every 5 minutes.  Okay, nothing happened on Monday but that’s okay everyone says as it’s really just about starting to create awareness about CareBox.  I keep telling myself this but oh wouldn’t it be lovely to get that 1^st order.  Tuesday comes and goes pretty much in the same way as Monday did.  Hmmm, a few little intrusive thoughts start entering my mind as Wednesday is pretty much the same again.  It was very much that feeling of hurry up and wait, but for how long I wondered?

Friends had invited us away for the half term weekend and I had hummed and haa’ed about it because of going live but by Thursday morning I thought I was safe to go away…I’m not a very good risk taker in general but this felt safe enough.  I couldn’t continue staring at my computer screen.  In preparation for that ‘just in case’ moment of someone placing an order I packed one of each kind of box that was on the website.  I did run out of steam a little towards the end and a few of the boxes didn’t have a ribbon added.  The ribbon is what humbles me every time I put a box together, not one bow has ever looked the same as hard as I try.  On Thursday morning we set off to Dullstroom and very limited WIFI signal.  By the end of Thursday, no more orders so when I woke up on Friday morning, I didn’t check my computer.  Faux pas!!

So, blow me down with a feather if I don’t decide to login at 4pm on Friday afternoon and there it is in all its glory, my 1^st ever order from the website.  (& it’s been sitting there since 9am). Oh, crumbs and I hadn’t put a delivery time on the website either.  The elation was quickly followed by complete panic!  It was very much one of those ‘phone a friend’ moments.  This was SO not how I pictured it would all happen!  I remember my friend we were staying with saying ‘Nic, this is your 1^st order – you have to make it happen, no matter what!’  The trick was that the box that needed to be delivered was in the office that I share with Angus’ company, Agatha Code Architects.  Angus, my business partner was in Vietnam so I sent out an SOS sms to everyone at the office at 5pm on Friday afternoon to see if anyone was still in the office.  Something I’ve learnt about myself during moments like these is that I don’t like asking for help. Denton, my amazing hubby even offered to drive back to Jo’burg for me to go and deliver it.  Tempting…

Understandably everyone had left the office already…I went back to the lady who ordered the box and explained that her CareBox would be delivered to her on Saturday (I just still had to figure out the how…)

And then there it was….Luis responded…he said he would happily go into the office for me on Saturday morning and find the box and deliver it.  Oh wow, I could breathe again.  Luis called me once he got into the office and found THE box, although I hadn’t given it a ribbon.  I explained to him that I also needed a little handwritten note done…he said he’d call me back once that was done.  What felt like hours on my side (I’ve also learnt how I like to be in control of things and right now this was all feeling very out of my control!) thoughts were flying around furiously in my mind…was this the right box; could he tie a bow; what would his handwriting look like; had I labelled it properly, was everything in the box that should’ve been as I’d already closed up the tissue paper with a sticker so I had to just trust that it was as it should be….aaaaahhhhhhh… but that was SO hard!  And then Luis sent through pics of his final creation and it looked beautiful!

He delivered it timeously and sent me a message saying…’So wonderful, yay!  Nothing like making someone smile’.  We did it!  It still makes me smile when I think about how it all went down and how different I thought it would all be.  I did learn a lot about myself in those 24 hours but the main thing was that it’s okay to ask for help and that it’s not about what happens to me and my circumstances but how I choose to handle it.  I can say that things have gone a lot smoother since then, although there was also the order I received while driving around on the open-air bus in Cape Town, my head still spinning from just hopping off the cable car but I’ll leave that one for another time…little surprises everyday!

‘Do the best you can until you know better.  Then when you know better, do better.’  Maya Angelou