During the least two years, my friend Andrea and I have have played “anything you can do, I can do better,” with a couple of the blogposts. The topic for this “post-off” is Free Shipping, as reflected in the title. You can find Andera’s post on this title here
With apologies to The Rolling Stones, sometimes the universe gives you what you need, even if it isn’t what you want. When I received the topic “free shipping,” I wasn’t sure what I would do with it, and my ideas about shopping indirectly all seemed ground I had plowed before. However, last night I was given a gift that I would have written about even if I didn’t have an assigned topic.
I was going for my evening walk, one of my few daily excursions beyond the walls of my home. As I stepped outside, I saw a package at my door. I didn’t know what it was or look at it carefully. Not to be distracted, I headed out and planned to pick it up on my way back in about 15 minutes later.
But I didn’t bring it in, because when I returned IT WAS GONE.
This shouldn’t have surprised me. If one spends any time reading the news, “Porch Pirates” are so much of a thing that they even have a name. I’ve watched the scary videos of bold marauders making the rounds of the neighborhood going from door to door and enjoying the ultimate free shipping experience. I was stupid not to bring the package in, but I wasn’t going to be gone long, and I would have had to open the door again, for goodness sake!
The games the mind plays in such a moment are one of the most entertaining elements of this experience. I didn’t want to believe that something so simple as a theft that happens thousands of times a day happened to me. There must be another explanation.
First, I doubted myself. I have gone out to the porch three times this morning to look again, as if I could somehow miss a package in a 5×6 porch area. I have also searched my house, thinking that maybe I did bring it inside and just forgot (more likely than one would think). Finally, I also wondered whether I didn’t see a package at all or that I confused this package with another one at another time. As disturbing as it would be to have such mental lapses, I preferred them to the obvious explanation.
Next I started thinking up a way that the perceived reality could have a non-sinister explanation. I didn’t look at the package at all, so I didn’t see that it was addressed to me. Perhaps whoever delivered it discovered a mistake and picked it up to deliver to the rightful owner. My perceived loss was merely correction of an error and I didn’t really lose anything because the package didn’t belong to me.
My best mental leap, however, came after I accepted that the package had been taken. One of the challenges at a moment like this is to try and figure out what the package might have been. Thanks to free shipping, I order quite a few things from different vendors, some of whom have less dependable tracking methods. I have yet to discover definitively what (if anything) was delivered yesterday. And of course this assumes that the package was something I ordered and not something sent to me by someone else. In this uncertainty I thought to myself, “Maybe whoever will see that it’s something they can’t use and will bring it back.” This “honor among thieves” explanation was laughingly refuted by a friend! “That’s not how stealing works, Greg.”
Free shipping…bullshit.
Stay safe, stay strong.