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Saturday, October 27, 2007

The Mystery of the Missing Package

I won an eBay auction for The Children of Willow Farm back in December 2006. The book never showed up. I waited a week without thinking about it, then another week before realizing that the book should have arrived by now. I asked the seller when she'd sent it, and she assured me she'd sent it a day or so after payment. We agreed to wait a bit longer. Another couple of weeks passed. In the end she refunded my money and that was the end of that.

A month or so later I bought another copy of the same book. At the time there seemed to be a number of copies of this book coming up on eBay, all in varying conditions. So I ended up with a copy after all.

Well, a couple of days ago the missing book showed up in the mail... almost exactly ten months after it was sent! The envelope was yellowed with age, practically brown rather than its original yellow. It had been sealed up with clear tape and a post office stamp indicated that the package had come apart in transit... but there was no evidence to suggest the envelope had torn open at all, because I could see it through the tape and it looked fine. It wasn't even a new envelope supplied by the post office, because it had the eBay seller's return address as well as postage.

So what happened to this package? Where has it been all this time? I can't for the life of me fathom a reason for the ten month delay. Okay, suppose a package is badly damaged in transit and its contents spill out, and somehow the envelope and contents are so completely separated that there's no way they can be reunited. Then it's understandable that the package cannot ever be delivered. But for the package to sit around for ten months and then be delivered... that just doesn't make sense to me. What kind of problem can take ten months to "fix" before sending on?

Perhaps the seller hadn't put enough postage on, and the delay is the post office's way of punishing us. Or, perhaps the package had come apart and the post office was annoyed that they had to take the time to fix it, so did so "when they got around to it."

Or perhaps the package slipped out of the mail bag and under the driver's seat, where it remained hidden for ten months until the driver decided he'd better clean up the van good and proper for the Annual Post Office Van Inspection. The driver no doubt whistled when he found the package, and sat there for a moment pondering and cogitating about what to tell his superiors...

   "I found this package in the van, sir," the driver mumbled, wringing his hands together and shuffling his feet. "It's postmarked December 2006."
   "WHAT?" thundered his boss. "It's been there for ten months? That's completely unacceptable! You're fired!"

So instead of owning up, the driver looked about shiftily, got out his "not sealed properly" stamp, marked the package with said stamp, and vowed to slide the package into the next mail bag he picked up. Nothing more to be done, the driver thought to himself as he went on cleaning the van. Hey, the recipient should be grateful it arrived at all!

This is true... but in resolving The Mystery of the Missing Package, it only brings up a bigger issue: What exactly is The Secret of the Inexplicable Delay?

By the way, I contacted the eBay seller yesterday and let her know, and paid her half the amount originally owed (by mutual agreement). Now, since I don't need this book anymore, does anyone want a 1954 impression of The Children of Willow Farm, with dust jacket?

This post has 6 comments

POSTED BY MING ON SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2007...

Heh, that's well funny!

POSTED BY MARYAM ON SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2007...

Well I think it was lost in the post office of ten months and then someone found it there and opened the package and saw it was a book called The Children of Willow Farm and brought it a new one and sealed up in a package and posted it to the address where the "lost" letter said.

POSTED BY KEITH ROBINSON ON SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2007...

Hey, Maryam, that's an interesting thought. It could be that the driver found the package under his seat, opened it, and read the book... and got so wrapped up in it that he read it over and over until one day his conscience got the better of him and he sent it on its way. :-)

POSTED BY NITYA ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2007...

That's funny! The package must have got lost somewhere and someone, a not-so-good person, must have found it, opened it, discovered that it was a book and must have sat down to read it. He must have found it interesting. All EB books are interesting, so the person who took the package must have got hooked to it and read it a couple of times before he finally realised that he should return it to the rightful owner and mailed it to you.

POSTED BY ILSA CHEESEMAN ON SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2007...

As your package was sent in the run up to Christmas it is likely it was somehow stuck at the bottom of a mail sack which was put away after the Christmas rush and only came to light when these sacks were brought into general use again in anticipation of the added mail which Christmas causes. This actually happened to a letter my father received 11 months late, but back in those days (around the 1950s) the Post Office had the courtesy to put it in a covering letter explaining what had happened.

POSTED BY KEITH ROBINSON ON MONDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2007...

For some reason I forgot all about the Christmas rush, although I remember thinking about that at the time the book went missing. Still, 10 or 11 months?? That movie, Castaway, with Tom Hanks springs to mind... all those Fedex parcels that he opened and used to survive. And then, years later, he returns home to deliver that final unopened package to its owner. Perhaps, just perhaps, whenever a letter goes missing from the Royal Mail or USPS, it's because the mailman got shipwrecked on a remote island. You just never know.



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