Member-only story
This morning a man came to my house to deliver a package. Until today, having a package delivered had seemed like an entirely unremarkable thing. The kind of thing that you didn’t have to give any thought to the inner workings of, just one of those things you could depend on.
I don’t mean to sound complacent by saying this, or like I take the logistical miracle of deliveries for granted. After all, it’s easy to imagine all kinds of doomsday scenarios where packages are no longer being delivered at all. The point I’m trying to make is just that until today, I thought of package delivery was an immutable thing. A person comes to your door with something you ordered, they give you the thing, and they leave. Simple. Like a law of nature.
But as it turns out, even in something so simple, there are a lot of tiny details. Things you never pay much attention to, but which you notice immediately if they aren’t right. Like if somebody came into your house while you were out and moved all of the pictures in your house an inch to the left. The feeling I got the moment I opened the door was something like that.
The first strange thing that I noticed was the way the delivery man looked at me. In my experience, delivery drivers never maintain eye contact when you open the door to them. There’s usually a…
