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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
Now I know how fugitives feel. Skittish. Restless. Constantly looking over their shoulders, as though the next moment could be The One. Or not. Was that a car door? A tap on the window? Or just the wind?
I know this feeling, because I’m at home today, waiting for a package.
“Because Santa doesn’t limit to three delivery attempts on weekdays between 8am and 8pm, or require the signature of an adult in person.”
Package delivery is the most nerve-wracking thing in the world. It shouldn’t be. You’re getting a package — a box full of possible goodies that you may or may not know the contents of, and might possibly contain cookies or new toys or at least those fancy packing peanuts that dissolve in water. Waiting for a package should be like freaking Christmas, but it’s not. Because Santa doesn’t limit to three delivery attempts on weekdays between 8am and 8pm, or require the signature of an adult in person.
(On the other hand, maybe he should. That overtime and weekend pay for the elves has to be killing him.)
The problem with waiting for a package is that you’re stuck. You’ve got a twelve-hour window in which the doorbell could ring, which means an entire half a day when the doorbell probably won’t. But you can’t take that chance. Any short absence, or errand, or bout of unavailability will be met with the ultimate punishment. For fugitives, it’s a pair of cuffs and a trip back to the clink. For package waiters, it’s the note.
“So sorry,” it says. “We tried our best — our really, for-true level best! — to deliver your package, but goshdarnit if you weren’t around. And we just couldn’t leave it here, what with all the ruffians and scoundrels prowling about in your ghetto of a neighborhood. We’re not having that on our conscience, no sir.”
The actual note probably doesn’t say that, exactly. Nobody knows, because no one’s ever actually read one. What we do know is that — like fugitives, if they also happen to be felons — it’s three strikes, and you’re out. That delivery monkey will try three times, leaving up to three notes, and then you’re out of luck. Your package has to be picked up, or they ship it back.
Or it gets the death penalty, maybe. I really should read one of those notes some time.
(This is assuming you’re waiting for FedEx or the postal service, or maybe DHL, who actually deliver packages that are addressed to your house. If you’re waiting on UPS, it’s a whole different ballgame.
Waiting on UPS is not like being a fugitive, waiting for the law. It’s more like being a nerdy teenager waiting for the hot cheerleader girl to spontaneously show up on prom night with a limo, a rented tux and panties that have ‘Be Mine’ stitched across the crotch.
You can get your hopes up all you like. But that shit ain’t happening.)
Yesterday, I got my first note. From FedEx. So I’m at home today — watching, waiting, mostly worrying — to prevent this package madness from progressing any further. Meanwhile, my own madness explodes in a haze of paranoid anxiety.
Because the delivery guy is coming. Oh yes, he will come. And if I’m unable, for the tiniest sliver of time, to come to the door, that’s when he’ll be here. And then he’ll be gone, and I’ll only have my two tear-stained notes and a warm pile of self-loathing to keep me company. It is thus imperative that I remain ever vigilant, like a Minuteman, for the delivery guy’s arrival. This makes life in the meantime somewhat… tricky.
Take pooping, for example. Everybody poops, apparently. That’s what all the books say. But most people probably take a fairly leisurely trip to the loo. I’m not saying they pack a sports drink and a stack of books for the trip — though I’m not saying you shouldn’t try it at least once, either. But I’m guessing the average offload takes a few minutes, say five, to accomplish, what with all the steps and the hand washing and zipping up and such.
Well, not when you’re waiting for a package. The “package poop” is a whole different animal. That involves rushing to the front door or window to scan for any sign of a delivery truck. Seeing none, there’s the mad dash to the bathroom, pants undone and flung around the ankles along the way. Then you hit the seat, clamp your hands under the bowl and push like you’re trying to get the Suleman octuplets out of you.
And I don’t mean when they were born. I mean at their current age.
Then it’s fifteen seconds of screaming “YAAAAAAHH!!!“, wiping something — toilet paper, Kleenex, Q-tips, whatever you can find — somewhere in the vicinity of your butt, and scurrying like a madman back to the window to see if there’s a delivery guy walking away with your package.
Maybe you manage to get your pants back up first. Or maybe old Mrs. Willoughby next door has another fainting spell. These are the perils of package waitingship.
Of course, that’s nothing compared to the shower. I’m not a long showerer, myself. I can get in and out in maybe three minutes, in a pinch. But receiving a package isn’t just about “not being in the shower”. It also means being “presentable”. Marginally presentable, sure, but there are certain social norms when it comes to clothing and grooming that have to be met. If you could trip on your doormat and accidentally get the delivery guy pregnant, then there’s something wrong.
Actually, that would mean an awful lot of somethings are wrong, all at the same time. Not least of which being you should really get yourself an anti-slip doormat. Safety first, bucko.
So the shower becomes another ordeal, this one broken up into manageable, ever-vigilant gymnastic chunks. I’ve found I can poke my head into the shower and wash my hair with my pants still on. I can swap pants for a shirt, sit on the tub edge, and scrub my legs. Arms are no problem. If I get a good handstand going, I can rinse my back without removing my underwears There’s this modified “downward dog” pose that I won’t go into for the sake of decorum, but let’s just say that if you don’t believe it’s possible to wash your junk in the shower while wearing a perfectly dry pair of tube socks, then I could totally win ten bucks from you in a bar bet.
The cumulative effect of all these mental and physical gyrations is torture. The constant threat of that thing that’s totally going to happen weighs heavy on a psyche. I find that if the delivery guy doesn’t come in the first ninety minutes or so of the window, I can’t bear it any more. I wind up rocking in a fetal position under the kitchen table, whispering “when it absolutely, positively has to be there…” over and over. By the time the doorbell finally rings, I barely even hear it. And I’m in no shape to answer the door. I can’t even face the world until eight in the evening, when all the trucks and the packages and the crushing pressure have gone home.
And oh, look. Another delivery note. Says they’re going to try again tomorrow.
Shit.
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(The ‘Eek!Cards’ explan.)
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(The ‘Eek!Cards’ explan.)
Permalink | No CommentsI can’t have nice things. At a certain point you stop saying, “this is why we…” and just accept it. Your life is why. It’s not we. It’s you.
Or the Universe is just giving you a proverbial cosmic swirly for no good reason. Whichever answer is less likely to keep you up screaming at night.
Anyway, this new non-nice thing is actually an old non-nice thing — or at least, a new non-nice twist to an old familiar pickle. A while back, I mentioned our condo’s fancy in-wall speaker system. And how we never really wanted a fancy in-wall speaker system, but apparently the folks who had the place before us did, and so the fancy speakers were, as they say, already in-wall.
That just left us to buy the aggressively-priced piece of kit that had the only plug in existence, apparently, to fit the proprietary socket snaked at the end of these in-wall speaker cables. It was either that, or use the speakers as in-wall flower pots. So we saved up, and we bought the electro-music maker doohickey, so sounds that we like to listen to would come out-wall in our direction.
Of course, as with most overpriced doohickeys, this one’s not especially very good. It’s basically a two-generations-old Windows box with space for MP3s, It seizes up occasionally, the interface is a mess, when you turn it on in one room it sometimes magically activates in others, and worst of all, it has an unnatural predilection for Limp Bizkit.
“This is what we get for buying audio equipment from the Danes. You might as well get your bananas from Greenland.”
This is what we get for buying audio equipment from the Danes. You might as well get your bananas from Greenland.
Still, it works — sometimes — and I finally had the good sense to take that one Limp Bizkit disc off the hard drive, so we’ll never be bothered with it again.
(In case you were too enraptured with this narrative to go back and read the earlier piece, the software includes a finger-quotes feature end-finger-quotes that will compare the artist you’re playing to the other songs in your library, and when your selected band runs out of tunes, it’ll play the others it deems most similar. It’s like Pandora, or Google’s Instant Mix, or whatever quadruply-patented proprietary algorithm Apple is running with these days.
Only, it’s an idiot. And it plays favorites. Not my favorites, mind you. The thing has a half-addled mind of its own. And it decided, early on, that out of eight thousand-plus songs, my one Limp Bizkit CD [borrowed from a friend, in my defense] was the. Greatest. Thing. EVAR!! From that earlier post:
“Fire up a Beethoven piece — Limp Bizkit’s in the first dozen songs. Spin through an old Replacements set — next up, it’s Bizkit. Mike Doughty — Bizkit. Orbital — Bizkit. Harry Connick, Jr. covers classic songs from the annals of Broadway classics? BIZKIT, BIZKIT, BIZKIT.”
Clearly, the company that makes this software is run by a bunch of fifteen year old boys with their pants halfway down their ass, caught in a time warp from 2001. Or maybe the Danes just hate us. I could believe that, too.)
So what did I go and do, once I’d finally rid our in-walls of the endlessly-repeated Bizkit scourge?
I bought an audiobook. And, thinking I might like to listen through it in the living room one day, I put it on the music system.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Obviously, the machine picked up these spoken-word chapters, which sound like nothing else in our library, and decided they sound exactly like ALL THE THINGS in our library. So random bits of this book turn up out of the blue, all out of order and completely non-musically.
Meanwhile, I never actually got around to listening to the book — in the living room or elsewhere — so every time I want to listen to a nice tune or two in the shower or the kitchen, I’m at grave risk of spoilering myself when some late-chapter plot twist comes blaring out of the in-wall.
“You say the killer was the police detective, after all? That explains so much!”
So much for suspense. Meanwhile, I’m clawing at the wall control, desperately trying not to hear any more, and realizing too late that this is one of those times the godforsaken machine decided to turn on all the speakers in every room. So I’m being spoilered in surround sound, with every room in the place against me.
So once again, I can’t have nice things. Like audiobooks, or fancy in-wall speakers. Or at least, I can’t put two (supposedly) nice things together. Because who would ever want to do a thing like that. And the Universe swirlies on…
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‘Eek!Cards’ explan.