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delivery evidence
Thursday, November 29 2001
Yesterday, a package mailed from near Milwaukee, Wisconsin arrived for me via Federal Express. I hadn't ordered anything and wasn't at home when it came, so a message had been pasted to the front door of the brownstone. Today, since I was extremely curious, I stayed home most of the day in anticipation of the package's arrival, but it never came. So I went to track the package on the FedEx website and found that attempts to deliver it had allegedly happened three times today! I called FedEx and asked about the situation, discovering in the process that the package's address didn't include my apartment number. Evidently whoever had "attempted" to deliver the package hadn't even bothered to buzz the four buttons beside the door, and hadn't left any physical evidence of any of the attempts. Yet they'd claimed to have stopped by three times in the course of the day, being equally unsuccessful every time. Now, to my way Occam's Razor-informed method of thinking, if someone claims to make a delivery attempt and yet leaves no evidence and rings no bells, that's not an attempt at all. Chances are the person making such a claim never even passed through my neighborhood. Yet the guy on the phone at FedEx said that the maximum number of delivery attempts had been made and now I had to pick up the package my own damn self. I'm used to the way things are done in small towns, where people actually seem to take a measure of pride in their work. In big cities, people work rather differently. They go through the motions when people are looking, but otherwise they just kick back, talk on the phone, steal office supplies, and collect their pay.
Gretchen heard about this situation and was indignant. This is how savvy city-based consumers have learned to respond to the slackerly ways of city-based workers. She called FedEx and made those fuckers promise to deliver my package tomorrow. "Three delivery attempts in one day doesn't count," she insisted, since, "If you're gone that day, you're just gone."
Later in the evening, our neighbor Anna, the sister of Rabbi David, spontaneously came over to visit. I've been cultivating my fingernails lately and I showed them to her with pride. They're long and immaculately sanded into ovals. She was horrified, asking didn't I have to work with other people? When I explained that these days I often work at home, she said, "Oh that explains it. But if you ever interview for a job..."
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