a colleague of mine came in this morning with some flowers for me; from him and his wife as a thank you for some advice I'd given them with their new cat. It's a service he said they'd never used before but the flowers are boxed and each flower is individually wrapped and has a little vial thing at the end with water and then posted to the recipient. So of course I said thank you etc and tootled off to get a vase. When it came to 'unwrapping' the flowers however, only some had the vial thing and not a single vial had water in it. The roses were the only ones that had and 2 of the 5 were completely mouldy and rotten on the bud. The rest of the flowers are in a rather dire state, but I salvaged what I can and put them on my desk (on the furtherest corner so you can't look too closely). The colleague who gave me the flowers walked by the office door not too long after, saw the flowers and smiled and commented / asked: nice flowers !? to which both I and the girl I sit next to smiled and said yes - a blatant lie obviously.
But what else can one do - I don't know when the flowers were bought and how long they've been in the box and wouldn't want to embarrass the colleague that gave them to me; but on the other hand I'd also rather he never buys flowers from them again if that's the norm of what they send.
Oh well, I now have these 1/2 dead flowers on my desk. It's Friday tomorrow so they can be binned then