The holiday season means many different things to many people. For some the holidays are about gifts, for others it is about family joining together, others celebrate their religious faith, for others it is gorging upon an endless buffet of carbohydrate filled delights. To me, the holidays are (or should be) a time to think of others. I love the holidays and Christmas for the opportunity to shop for gifts for others. This is not to say that I don't very much enjoy getting gifts, but I truly do enjoy bringing some level of happiness to someone else through a thoughtful gift. It is not about what the particular gift is so much as the thought behind it. Taking enough time and paying enough attention to someone else in the world to think about them and their needs or wants for a bit. And perhaps more importantly taking some time to wrap the gift. I will not go into a detailed rant about wrapping gifts for now, except to say that giving an unwrapped or poorly wrapped gift is tantamount to "Here I bought you this thing" presenting a nicely wrapped gift is "I thought of you and I wanted to share this thing with you as a small token of appreciation" This may well be the topic for a rant in the future but my topic for the day is something different.
I did most of my gift shopping this year online. And most of that at amazon. Amazon and it's network of merchants, gift and wish list management and amazingly easy checkout process is just truly inspiring. To be able to sit down at the computer and go to one website where I can pull up everyone's wish lists and my gift idea lists, drop everything in a shopping cart and then divy up the shopping cart to have everything wrapped, gift cards attached and sent to all the various destinations all at once is an absolute lifesaver.
Each year Amazon has continued to improve their online shopping experience. In fact I think I got about 90% of my Christmas shopping done in a single evening sitting on my couch sipping hot chocolate and clicking away on amazon. Over the past couple of weeks I've been getting packages almost daily with the various items from my shopping list. Some items I did send directly to the gift recipient, but many of the gifts I wanted to get and wrap before sending out.
My many items ended up being broken out as several different orders coming from several different amazon vendors and were destined for assorted addresses. All of this is horribly horribly complicated on the back end of things, but is made exquisitely simple during checkout.
Of course there are no free rides in life, and with all things easy, simple and good there needs to be some balance to keep the karma folks happy. So there must be difficulty, complexity, and grief of some sort to balance out the ease of online shopping. This balancing was meted out this year in the form of one of the shipments disappearing.
Amazon's tracking information indicated that the item had been delivered but I had no package. Now of course the missing package wasn't a discount six-pack of tube socks or some small stocking stuffer paperback book for a random cousin or something along those lines. No, the one package that went missing contained the gifts for my parents. I had gotten an National Geographic coffee table book for my dad and and iPod nano for my mom. Somehow these two items ended up in the same shipment and this one shipment disappeared. The most exasperating thing was that the package arrived a couple days earlier than they had projected on a day when I happened to have been home less than two hours after the delivery.
After several days of fuming and worrying, contacting amazon etc I happened to be taking the trash out and noticed some discarded packaging in my open garage. It was an amazon box. It had been opened and pilfered but oddly enough there was something small still in the corner of the box. The iPod. Some stupid crackhead had stolen the package off of my porch, taken back into the alley and in the relative safety of the garage opened the amazon box and taken the coffee table book and left the iPod. I'm pretty sure they just overlooked it as the package the nano comes in is just a small non-descript white cube of plastic that may be confused with packaging material.
I laughed out loud when I found the iPod. I had finally figured out what the appropriate punishment was for the stupid crackhead who had stolen my parent's Christmas gifts. Their punishment was to leave behind the expensive electronics and take the book. I guess Baltimore is the city the reads after all.