When the road no longer goes anywhere close by
I was keen. Pumped even. My latest acquisition from someone on eBay had shipped. I mean, there hadn’t been much communication on the seller’s part, but I’d received a telephone number from the control center, and my Skype skills had me in real, two-way chit chat within minutes of getting home from work. The parcel was “on the road”.
I have an imagination for logistics. Canada Post would leave a slip in the Superbox, and I’d head up the hill to our local pharmacy cum post office. Total time, measured in minutes. Except.
When I got home today, I spotted a sticky doortag from another courier firm. This, too, I could handle; I’d been to visit most of the “names” over the last few years. Each one in its proverbial corner of some industrial wasteland. Except.
This was another name. Well-known, but only because I’d seen their trucks and planes along the way. This time, I had to phone for directions. The clerk was helpful: some construction in the area, best to plan my attack before strapping up my loins and heading out. Google Maps knew the where, and the how to get there. From before the summer of bulldozers.
I’m glad that I have a sense of relative geography, because this was, bar none, the most difficult trek in a quarter century. Forget taking a straight line. Forget taking anything that made sense. The only boon was that the sun hadn’t set, and it left me blind for a good third of the trip. You know the drill; squinting through fingers while aiming away from the bigger vehicles.
Even the depot yard was torn up, and I had to use their gate intercom to get a human to sally forth from the bunker. But, I did it. I recovered my parcel, and if I ever design a video game, I have a theme.
