Quote:
Originally Posted by Miss Understood
Worldwalker, please read the above quote from unicorn1.
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Please don't assume that I'm posting without having read any of the previous posts. That's unnecessarily insulting, and doesn't lead to a more productive discussion.
As for where it said that her mother was dissatisfied with not being given two gift cards:
First of all, as you pointed out, her father called her to ask why this had happened.
Her father called her. So the spurious card had become a subject of discussion between the two parents, and apparently a sufficiently contentious point that the mother couldn't just email her daughter and ask "hey, what's with the gift cards?" -- a phone call from her husband became necessary.
Second, the amount that the OP was planning to spend was an issue. I've still not entirely understood this. If someone gives me a $50 book, I might not know exactly how much they spent -- they might have bought it at a premium at a rare book store or cheaply at Costco -- but if they give me a $50 gift card, there's really no room for ambiguity about
exactly how much they paid for that card. She says later that she bought another $50 gift card for her mother. Remember that she had only intended to spend $50, not $100. There was a problem, an accidental duplicate was sent and then canceled. With my mother, that would have ended it (except for the obligatory "oh, that's too much, you shouldn't have" that attends any gift worth more than a dollar). With every mother I know, that would have ended it. People who like their mothers -- and there's no reason to believe the OP doesn't -- generally spend as much as they can afford, or as much as their gift-giving budget will allow, on special-occasion gifts for said mothers. Therefore, it's reasonable to assume the original $50 is at or close to the limit of available funding for birthday gifts for her mother. It's as much as the OP was planning to spend. Yet she ended up spending
twice that. If spending $100 on a birthday gift for her mother was trivial, she'd have done it the first time (who gives their mother only half what they can afford to give her?). As a result of the interaction with her parents regarding the spurious gift card,
and the fact that "it was a glitch, they accidentally sent it twice, just delete the second one" wasn't sufficient, she spent twice what she intended. Why wouldn't the original $50 be sufficient? Why wasn't it the thought that counted? Why did she have to spend twice what she had budgeted on gift cards? Her basic personality was demonstrated by her initial demands for a free gift card from Kobo, her selection of the most expensive book she could find to "stick it to them", and her coming here to try to recruit an online army to complain to Kobo and demand her free gift card. That doesn't impress me as someone motivated by pure generosity (and why would a generous person have only bought her mother half what she could have afforded to give her anyway?). Therefore, between the giver and the recipient, since it isn't from the giver, the motivation must come from the recipient. That is, the original $50 wasn't sufficient for her mother, making the purchase of the second card necessary.
Hence my assumption that it was her mother who wanted two gift cards for her birthday, rather than being satisfied with one, or none, or just a nice card.
For the tl;dr crowd: if she could have afforded $100 in the first place, she would have. Because she didn't, it stands to reason that someone other than her induced her to do so. That would seem to be her mother.