We finally received a check from your insurance company for the damage to my car. The cats and I decide not to repair the car and instead to use the money to buy something that we want. I want a new pair of back country skis, and the cats want a play structure. I go online and order the structure that the cats have selected. We decide to pay extra for delivery and assembly of the play structure. Two weeks later, you arrive in a delivery van and realize that you have been sent by your employer to make a delivery to my house. You go home and then return wearing a face shield, welder’s gloves and full length coveralls.
Over the next four hours the cats and I watch from our living room window as you unpack and assemble a 12-foot tall play structure in our back yard. Just as you finish and are about to leave, I let the cats out. They race over to the play structure and then stop and stare at it. This is not what they ordered. There is no slide, and there is only one swing.
I ask you to disassemble the structure and to take it back.
“What?” you exclaim. “You and your cats watched me put this together, and now you want me to take it apart and to take it back. That’s not right!”
“Yes, it is,” I say. “We discovered, within a commercially reasonable time, that the play structure does not conform to the specifications ordered, and we have not accepted it by using and retaining it. We have the right of rescission.”
“This seems unfair to me,” you say.
“It’s in the Uniform Commercial Code,” I say, as the cats scowl at you and walk away from the newly assembled structure, with their tails held high in the air.
Allen Drescher has practiced law in Ashland and Southern Oregon since 1973. His practice areas include real estate and business law, estate planning and elder law.
© Allen Drescher
