Spam

One of the first decisions I made about my wedding after the location and bridal party were the bridesmaid dresses.  According to the knot.com I did things way out of order but  I felt like picking a color for the bridesmaid dresses would help guide my overall color scheme because I was thinking anything from blue and purple to purple and pink to blue and white to blue and champagne to blue and pink. I took my maid of honor with me to David's Bridal to try on a few dresses just to see if I wanted to continue to look there or if I thought that all of the dresses were kinda cheesy looking. I have to admit I was very skeptical because when I was in High School we do this fundraiser when you are a senior called Prom Fashion show - and each girl gets assigned a local store and you borrow a dress for the night and put on a fashion show.  When I was a senior I was assigned to David's Bridal and not only did I hate almost every dress in the store - they sent it to me in a size 4.  I think that it was supposed to be a size 10. However, when it came to bridesmaid dresses I was willing to give them another try because I wanted the dresses to be reasonably priced and it was convenient that they are a national chain since I have bridesmaids in Pittsburgh, NYC, DC and Northern Virginia. I know that the chances of my bridesmaids wearing the dress again are pretty slim to none but I still wanted them to feel comfortable on the wedding day.  Turns out that we found 3 dresses that we really liked and I was able to settle on a color - Marine, which is like a navy blue.  It was a pretty easy decision, just like my wedding dress was!
After we picked the dresses I gave the bridal consultant my information so that my bridesmaids can just go into any David's Bridal and give them my name and the 3 style will be in the system.  Bad idea.  I think that I got about 5 e-mails a day from David's bridal about sales that they were having.  Like sorry, if you have a $99.00 gown sale every weekend, its not really a special occasion.  My Blackberry was buzzing like every 3 minutes with another e-mail from David's Bridal....and NONE of them were for things that I would actually want, of course the sales were never on the bridesmaid dresses....and they were only the wedding gowns that looked like they belonged in a Prom magazine or in My Big Fat Country Wedding or whatever that show is. Like no wonder they are $99.00.  Finally I realized that I could unsubscibe to all of these e-mails and then I got smart.  I made a spam gmail account that I use anytime I have to register an e-mail address for anything (which in th wedding world is EVERYTHING).  I felt so proud of myself...its definitely something I would recommend to anyone who is recently engaged.  I currently have about 250 e-mails in there that are all junk mail.

Well, apparently I wasn't too too smart, because even though I give my decoy e-mail address out I did entered my phone number in to some of these places and I swear - they sell your information.  Like on Friday last week I got a phone call from a number that I didn't know...and when I answered it was a woman named Tanya who was calling to tell me that I won an all inclusive vacation, free wedding bands and $1,000 worth of grocery coupons.  Oh and that I was entered into a drawing to win the grand prize of a Harley Davidson. All of those things seem like reasonable prizes for a bride-to-be but a Harley Davidson?!  Umm no thanks, I'm not really a leather pant and helmet type of girl.  The "all inclusive vacation" was to the Bahamas for 3 days but didn't include air fare.... and the "all inclusive" resort doesn't even have a website... sketchy.  The wedding bands were sterling silver, plain wedding bands- sorry, I have an affection to anything that sparkles I just cant help it....so that plain sterling silver wedding band is not exactly my cup of tea.  And I guarantee the $1,000 worth of coupons would be for all food that I don't eat. 

So I guess, I out smarted the spam e-mails but I didn't out smart the telemarketers.....my new phone number is now (123)456-7890.