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Something for the weekend, sir? Underneath the note is a disturbing threat scrawled: “We know where you live.
Instinctively, I look up and down the street in case I can spot who just stuffed the word halfway into my mailbox. Does anyone hurry away, covering their face suspiciously? An unmarked van parked in front with dark windows?
Nope. I reread the handwritten message. “We know where you live.”
Good, thank goodness for that! It would be a disastrous and embarrassing faux pas in conventional logic etiquette for someone to walk to my door and slip a card into my mailbox. without know where I live. It’s as well as they wrote it or who knows what the consequences might have been? Once you’ve created a tear in the fabric of reality, all kinds of bad guys can crawl through.
At the top of the note is printed: “Sorry, you were away when we called.”
At least the courier has a sense of humor. I allow myself an exhale of relief.
Unfortunately, my vocal cords are still strained and my sigh is anything but silent; it is not only audible but abnormally high pitched. A dog walker walks by at this point and glances in surprise in my direction. I cough and say “um” several times in the hope that he reinterprets my sigh as a prelude to a throat clearing. The ruse works perfectly: the dog walker has stopped in front of my house and is waiting to hear what I have to say to him, now that I have cleared my throat.
I have nothing to say. Yeah, I know. As usual.
It’s a good sign that the couriers finally know where I live. I’d rather have them leave ‘Sorry we missed you’ notes rather than throwing the package over the gate of a house 2.7 km away and marking the order in my online account as DELIVERED, accompanied. of a photo of it sitting on a lawn that I don’t have. We’re making headway from those bad old days when the lockdown cleared the public roads of ordinary people and filled them in place of bewildered novice parcel delivery couriers inexplicably armed with street maps from the 1950s.
The reason this matters is that once we cross the Halloween start line, there will be a roller coaster rush of online orders leading up to the traditional Santa Claus Night Heist. It’s not so much Christmas gifts that worry me as it is the greater seasonal craze of consumer commercialism that interferes with my occasional – but essential – personal need to replace dying devices and peripherals for work.
If the courier delivers my replacement webcam, cables, SSDs or whatever to the wrong address, as they have repeatedly done last year, it will turn out to be a dark and Dickensian Christmas season. at Dabbs. My usual goodwill towards all men will be frightened by the visit of the ghost of Christmas panic. And if he interrupts my work, it will be followed by a visit from the New Year’s Poverty Spirit.
For this reason, I tested delivery waters early on by ordering irrelevant products that I did not need immediately. If they show up, I can always offer them to my colleagues and family as potential gifts.
Portable battery chargers? Case? No, my new favorite perennial Christmas gift is a digital breathalyzer. I see that Alcosense has anticipated my thoughts by announcing its Lite 2 on time. “Just turn it on, wait for it to count down to zero, then blow until it beeps,†the instructions say – which only shows that even ex-pornstars can get it a job in writing.
A good reason to hang on to the digital breathalyzer might be that I can use it in conjunction with one of those 200-mile limited EVs all car dealerships want me to buy, just two years later. sold me a conventional one that runs for 1,000 km on a single tank of diesel. Is this Christmas a good time to buy, however?
It comes down to spending. Sure, EV prices have come down, but only for ugly crapalongs who spend more time parked in a remote industrial area waiting for a component replacement after a manufacturer recall than being driven anywhere. . Me, if I go electric, I will have the electric Aston Martin DB6, please.
The Lunaz group, which specializes in retrofitting old cars to run on batteries, estimates that the electric DB6 could cost a little more than a Renault Zoë. Still, I bet you would feel millions of dollars driving this beast having spent exactly that amount (plus tax) to acquire it.
Maybe next Christmas.
More affordable could be the Electric Moke. It has a modest range of 144 km, but I would only need it to circle the village and occasionally chase escapees along the beach until Rover crushes them.
The perfect Christmas present when I was a kid was a remote control car. So the perfect upgrade now that I’m a little taller could be the Tamiya Wild One MAX. Yes, it’s a human-sized version of the famous stunt car. You sit in it and drive it behind the wheel, rather than spinning small, breaking joysticks.
I can’t wait to lead it up gigantic steps or to the edge of a pond by mistake.
But enough of my wish list. I wonder how the previously confused courier suddenly knows where I live. Until a week ago, my packages were regularly distributed to various puzzled landlords who weren’t me, all over the neighborhood as charity packages for the needy – assuming they needed essentials. such as cable stripping tools and half a kilo of Sugru. What changed?
It might have something to do with Amazon’s latest wheezing: being able to deliver gifts to people whose addresses you don’t know.
There is logic to this: Delivering known packages to unknown addresses (at least they are unknown to delivery drivers) is what Amazon does best, in my experience. So it could be that Amazon is now magically able to deal with all these known unknown unknowns, otherwise known as “making a Rumsfeld”.
Actually no. It works like this: you order something and enter the intended recipient’s cell phone number – whom you know. An SMS is then sent to this number, asking for their delivery address. The recipient reads the text and thinks, “Hmm, yes, that sounds totally honest and faultless. I’ll give them my address right away.
What could go wrong?
I feel like I might soon find out for myself. Be see you!
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Alistair Dabbs is a freelance tech enthusiast, juggling tech journalism, training and digital publishing. He apologizes for talking about Christmas earlier and earlier each year. Next week’s column will look at supply chain issues for Easter eggs. More at Autosave is for wimps and @alidabbs.
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