Quite some time ago, when it was still notable to see a Tesla S sedan in the wild even here in Silicon Valley, fair promises were being made about their producing an affordable electric car for the masses soon.

We were suckers, but willing suckers, we said to each other as we put our thousand dollars down: we wanted to help keep the fledgling company in business long enough for that model 3 to come out. We wanted to make a statement. We wanted the car companies to know that we the buying public wanted the industry to turn electric enough that we were willing to risk a chunk of change to make that statement on behalf of our grandchildren’s future.

We were #134,000-something on the waiting list. We wanted that car.

Assuming, of course, that the resident 6’8″er could get into it. This is the man who over time cracked the dashboard of our first-year Prius (2001, the ones that looked like a pregnant mouse) with his crammed-in knees so we traded it in when they came out with a bigger model. The 2007 we’re still driving.

Fast forward.

We just got an envelope in the mail, and my first thought was, How did Tesla get marketing info on us?

Go ahead and open it, he said when I tried to offer it to him, because after all, like sexist businessmen everywhere do, the company had addressed it only to him.

Inside was a check.

Elon Musk isn’t letting us divorce his business tactics from our household, he did it first. With no letter nor communication (only because I’d long since lost that paperwork supposedly so carefully filed), nothing other than the passing of time that it took for them to do it, we got our thousand dollars back.

And there are plenty of other companies making electric cars now. We got the future we put in that reservation for.