O package, where art thou?

There is indeed a first time for everything.

Like most of you, I’ve been shopping with Amazon for the longest time. I’m old enough to remember when Amazon did not charge sales tax in California. Anyways, throughout this long relationship, the couriers contracted by Amazon have not once lost a package of mine. (Or stolen before I got to it, I guess.) Sadly, that streak ended this past Monday.

I got the standard notification email saying the package was delivered. However, it was nowhere to be found - and I was out the front door almost immediately. I live in a nice neighborhood, so package thievery doesn’t really occur (knock on wood). Couriers typically take a picture to confirm the delivery, but for this instance there was no picture! The only explanation is… well, bottom line is the package is missing.

In such situations, Amazon asks customers to check with neighbors to see if the package got delivered to them by mistake. Hope you’re on friendly terms with your next doors! If that returns unfruitful, the customer is then to wait 48 hours. Because apparently. couriers sometimes will mark a package as delivered, but will actually make the delivery on a different day (USPS has knack for this, according to Reddit). Only after 48 hours should the customer contact Amazon support.

If the courier is third-party (UPS, Fed-ex, DHL, etc), customers can and should contact them about the missing package that was marked delivered. In my case, the courier was Amazon (affiliate, probably), so nothing to do but wait the two days.

To Amazon’s credit, I was able to get a refund after a quick word with support chat. I was surprised at how easy it was, given it was about $160 worth of stuff. The fact that I’ve not once before this contested a missing package probably helped to grease things. I’m obviously not trying to scam Amazon here.

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Legends.

The missing submersible

The focus of the entire world is on the missing submersible that was on a mission to the wreck of Titanic. Okay, perhaps not the entire world. But it was all my friends and coworkers talked about all day yesterday. For those living under a rock: the submersible has gone missing since Sunday. It is estimated that the emergency air supply will run out sometime tomorrow. First responders are racing against the clock to locate and rescue. It’s morbidly riveting stuff.

The discussion turned morbid quickly, too. If you were stuck in that submersible, at what point would you start killing yourself? Obviously, you’d want to hold out as long as possible for the slight possibility of rescue. However, perhaps you wouldn’t want to wait until the very end: die from asphyxiation. Take back some semblance of control, and go out on your own terms. Me personally, I would considering ending it with about six hours of estimated air supply left.

Then the question turned to: how would you kill yourself? You are stuck in a tiny metal tube - sitting room only - with nothing but an LCD screen and a remote controller. (Heck, are there even emergency water and rations?) With what would you commit suicide with? My solution: find something sharp - or something that can be turned sharp - and cut my wrist. I rather bleed to a slow death than await the pain of running out of air.

A coworker mentioned that if he were to go on such a mission, he would for sure bring along some form of poison (cyanide, perhaps) for such purpose. Going out on our own terms is important to people!

All the morbid hypotheticals aside, it must be incredibly scary to be stuck in that situation. You’re trapped, waiting to die, clinging on the slim hope that you’d be rescued. By design, the passengers can’t even open the hatch from the inside! I don’t know about you, but doors that cannot be opened from the inside is frightening as heck! These folks paid $250,000 just for the privilege of visiting the Titanic wreck? That cannot be us: my friend group prefer to stay on terra firma, thank you very much. Our amoeba ancestors climbed out of the ocean for a reason.

Obviously, we are hoping for a miracle that the submersible does get found in time. More realistically, I hope the hull got breached down in those depths, and the passengers died a quick and painless death. Otherwise, to be essentially buried alive is something too horrific to contemplate.

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Chernobyl.