An order placed from overseas within an hour of hearing bad news, asking for something to be sent to a house in Henveiru that afternoon.
We did not send it that afternoon. We rang the family first, which is what we do with every sympathy order, and the answer was that the house was full and the evening would be better. So it went at six, when there was somebody to receive it properly and room to put it down.
The arrangement itself was plain. White and green, no ribbon, no card of ours, and the sender's words written out simply.
The customer wrote to us afterwards to say that the timing was the part that mattered. That is why the phone call is a rule here rather than a courtesy, and why we will not deliver a sympathy order to an address we cannot ring first.