The 11-Hour Odyssey

A case for in-store pickup

Dec 10, 2024

There I was snug as a bug, drifting off to dreamland at 7:45pm last Saturday night. Earlier that day I hosted my annual Bye Party. The Bye Party is where I invite everyone over to say bye to me before I go down South for the winter so I don’t have to schedule individual byes and also so people don’t get miffed if I didn’t specifically reach out to say bye to them. This strategy works about 70% of the time. This year there was a bloody mary bar, one of my best.

Here I am serenely enjoying some post-event egg nog, bra off in front of the fire a few hours before all hell broke loose.

Anyway, I gently wake up around midnight. Now you should know that my bedroom is on the second floor of my house. Looking out of the bedroom door, you view the “open concept” ceiling of the living / dining room below. Half-asleep, I notice it was uncharacteristically bright out there in the main house. I chalk this up to maybe a full moon shining through my new large luxurious skylight and roll over.

Well, as happens when you wake up in the middle of the night, my brain fires up and I remember that it is in fact not the full moon. It is the first quarter moon. The full moon is next weekend. It’s around that moment that I open my eyes again and see what I think to be flashlights shining into my windows.

At this point I could have been terrified. But for some reason instead felt like Kevin McCallister, tip-toeing halfway down the stairs in my underwear, peering around to see two high beams shining directly into my front windows.

I race back up the stairs, pull on sweatpants. Now I’m thinking it must be a drunk person who got mixed up. But my house is down a long, mostly treacherous driveway, so to get all the way to the bottom then maneuver your car horizontal so it is blasting its brights into my dining room, well, that’s nuanced a few cocktails in.

Here’s a visual I snapped the other morning before dawn after I shot out of bed remembering I hadn’t moved the truck to the top of the drive for the plow. Mel calls this being “down in the hole.”

I live alone in the country, so we don’t love an unannounced visitor in the dead of night. I opened the front door and shouted out. I could hardly make out what kind of car it was (it was a Honda Odyssey van with no 4WD), but I did see a man’s reflective vest scurrying around which I almost immediately identified as a delivery guy from Fast Ship.

He tells me he’s delivering a package and got stuck. The package was a single 3-pack of lululemon high-waisted underwear.

This but it’s pitch black, there’s a wintry mix, and you’re wearing your glasses.

In attempting to right his vehicle, he had pulled into my garden, luckily not going fully over the ledge into my porch. We salted the drive. I stuck some pieces of 2x4 behind his wheels but they spun further and further into the once-garden, now mud pit. I get the sense he’s not particularly comfortable driving in the day or night time.

“Let me call my wife,” he says.

I tell him he doesn’t need to call his wife, he needs to call a tow truck. They say they’ll be out in an hour. I go back inside, pretty agitated at my ruined sleep and ruined yard. I make some tea and wait for the tow. 2am and no one’s showed. I go back outside where the delivery guy reports he’s called three other tow companies, who all claim they are on the way. This back-and-forth goes on for a while longer and finally he tells me his car insurance has sent roadside assistance and he’s called his boss.

I figure I’ll hear the tow truck barreling down the driveway, so I go upstairs and doze off around 3:30, leaving him out there in the van.

7am rolls around and I shuffle downstairs, sure that he must be gone. He’s not!

The poor guy is curled up asleep in the Honda Odyssey in my garden. I knock on his window. He says the van “stopped working” and he can’t feel his feet he is so cold.

Now the bleeding heart in me wanted to invite this man inside. He didn’t have a winter jacket and he didn’t have gloves. I’m not a monster, but he was pretty stinky and everyone knows that’s how single women get killed. So I made him tea instead.

8:45am. At this point I’m getting a bit pissed. This man has been in my yard for almost ten hours with no signs of leaving. I attempt to contact his company which is run by bots.

Finally the case is escalated, and “Jessica” calls to basically tell me to call the cops as if I hadn’t already decided not to do that for reasons you can deduce yourself.

I deliver the second mug of tea. He gets some splenda out of his glove compartment and asks me if the tea is organic. No tow.

Obviously I have now alerted the group chat. JD, Man of the Year, arrives with supplies from Lowes and his Silverado. At the same time the delivery guy’s cousin also pulls up in another 2WD minivan. The delivery van gets some gas, JD pulls them out of my garden, and everyone is on their way in under an hour.

11am grande finale, no sign of any tow trucks.

“Jessica” calls back to “check in,” saying that she heard the “tow company” came out and everything was “cleared up”. I took that opportunity to tell her it was dangerous that they had people delivering packages at midnight out in the middle of nowhere. Even more dangerous that they weren’t resourcing them with winter emergency preparedness supplies. And how come they couldn’t get their act together to support their staff when they were in trouble. And also this guy better not get fired. And this is what is wrong with America.

She tells me I can file a claim for the damaged garden. If you have been within five feet of me in the past six months you will know the last thing you want to suggest to me (or anyone, apparently) is to file a MF-ing insurance claim.

Regardless, I hope that my delivery friend got a hot shower, a nap and to talk to his wife. He told me he was going to quit, so I hope that happened, too. Fast Ship can burn to the ground.