The one that got away

Yesterday I sat in front of finepipes.com looking for a birth year Dunhill, just for fun.
Then I saw it - the 1962 Cavalier, and Samuel had even named it a "computer pipe".
I don't know if I told you , but I make my living out of IT and computers and this pipe had that name and was from '62 and...

I sat for five minutes in agony looking at the pipe and the price tag, to and fro.
I decided to just add the pipe to my order basket, only to see how that felt.

That felt mighty good I can tell you, brethren and sisthren of the briar, so I decided to go to the checkout just to see how THAT felt! This gave me a few alternative payment methods and before I knew it I was at my PayPal account and suddenly the $225 price tag didn't look that bad.

It didn't take too long 'til I had convinced myself that I really had earned a birthyear Dunhill - and a Computer Pipe at that! I pressed the Buy button with pounding heart.
I got a rush of adrenalin and at the same time a terribly guilty conscience - you may be familiar with the feeling - guilty pleasure. After having ordered the pipe I just had to shut down the computer and go to bed - the strain was too much.

Woke up with a gnawing feeling from spending all that money on that weird/beautiful pipe, maybe I shouldn't have ... But of course I deserved it! Went to work and couldn't help but take a peek at finepipes.com to see if it had changed its status to "Sold" like all the other nice pipes there, but no? It was still for sale?

I hurried to hotmail to send a mail asking Sam to update the page, only to be met by this email from him:

"Unfortunately, you have fallen victim to a problem I had with my site that required me to back all the pipes up from an archive. In the process, some of the pipes that were already sold were listed as unsold, of which the Cavalier was one."

I'm going through some mixed emotions right now, for sure...