I placed my order on line with AT & T last Thursday and was told that delivery would be completed in two business days, which meant I would have the hot little number in my sweaty little hands on Monday (an aside: isn't the concept of defining Monday through Friday as "business days" just about the last quaint notion to exist in modern society?). That would work out well, because I was scheduled to work from 5pm until 1am ("What an odd and uncomfortable shift to work, especially when sandwiched between shifts from 2pm until 10pm and 6am until 2pm, which surely must play havoc with your sleep patterns and diet, Clark. Hopefully, your supervisors recognize that, and being concerned with your health and welfare as a human being, they try to minimize those occurrences and not require you to be the only one who has that kind of schedule, since you already don't get weekends off and have worked 21 consecutive federal holidays since you started.", you might say, to which I'd rather not comment) and would therefor be home all day to receive it.From my apartment window, I saw the mail truck arrive around 1:30 to start filling the mailboxes of all the good little residents in the complex. I waited patiently upstairs for a knock on my door but never heard one. I looked out the window again and saw the truck had left. I called the manager's office and asked if an oversized package had been left there for me and they said no. "That's odd," I thought. I checked the tracking number online and re-confirmed it was still set for delivery that day. I mentioned it to someone who said, "maybe it's a special delivery and will arrive separate from the regular mail." "That would be off as well", I thought, considering you would think 'special delivery' would get priority over regular mail, which was already delivered. I waited some more and finally had to start getting ready for work, nervous I would miss a knock at the door while I was in the shower. Nervous, because I didn't know if they would take it back to the post office if they couldn't deliver it in person and I would have to go there the next day and pick it up. That was a scenario I wanted to avoid for obvious reasons...
I waited until the last possible minute (4:30) before leaving for work, checked the tracking on line again which still said "scheduled for delivery" and left home aggravated and empty handed. I got to work and called the apartment office one more time and they still hadn't received anything for me. I was at work and it was now 5:00. I checked the tracking on line one more time and found an update: "Delivered at 4:28PM". What the...? This meant either somebody's clock was wrong or that the delivery person had been hiding in bushes and waited for me to leave or was a filthy liar. It also meant my new phone was sitting on the doorstep outside of my apartment, waiting for the first person to come by and pick it up. If that person wasn't me, I'd have to call AT & T and plead a case. The result of which would probably be having to pay a $50 insurance deductible for a replacement, which is exactly $50 more than I had budgeted for this transaction, or wait two years for the upgrade window to re-open. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, it was also raining. I called a neighbor who confirmed that there was indeed a box sitting there and I asked her to retrieve it until I got home. Not wanting to knock on her door at 1:30 in the morning (and not willing to wait until a decent hour the next day), I took an extended break within 15 minutes of getting to work, drove home and got it. Major anxiety and a huge pain in the ass, but the new phone was now safely in my possession. Nothing could possibly go wrong now.
Tomorrow: Chapter 3: Something Goes Wrong
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