T -12 days: Mrs. Curmudgeon reports God himself couldn’t get a hotel in that area. She also reports she is not a kid anymore and only idiots sleep on the dirt at our age. Plus, there are no open campsites so don’t even try to talk her into it. I’d been daydreaming of sleeping in the truck bed under the stars. I keep this to myself. The trip is back to the air-conditioned box I reserved in the land of tumbleweed and coyote shit.
T -11 days: Change in plans, I have to be in [Redacted] on [Redacted]. Too far to get there from eastern Oregon in the allotted time time.
Mrs. Curmudgeon, “So the trip is cancelled?”
Me, “Hell no, it crosses the continent, let’s go to [Redacted] instead.”
Later, I wonder if there was hopefulness in her voice when she said ‘cancelled’. I’m dense about such things. I shuffle hotel reservations to a different but carefully “wife approved” hotel chain. Once again it depends on my “super Voltron powered, ultra, mega, snob level, membership” in whatever data harvesting loyalty program some faceless monopoly has instituted.
T-09 days: No sign of the glasses. Yet the tracking number reports they’re already at my house. USPS has hosed me again!
T -08 days: I drive to the post office during its secret rotating schedule of being open for a 2 hour window on even numbered weekdays during months that don’t have a prime number for their last day and the reverse for months with even numbered last days… except for February on leap years which end in a prime number but everybody knows it represents the even number 28 so shut up and beg for your mail loser!
There I meet “Gladys” once again. She is really good at not delivering packages. We engage in the ritualistic dance of me getting weird packages and her disliking my very existence.
We’ve done this before. Whenever Gladys sees a package that looks “foreign” or has warnings about hazardous materials or (God forbid) is FedEx Smart Post (work of the devil!) she takes the cautious route of throwing it in the back room and refusing to think about it. Then I show up with a bad attitude and an internet tracking number that says “your shit has already been delivered”. I seethe until Gladys “unexpectedly” finds it in the “fear pile” which is exactly where she put the package in the first place. Then we smile at each other in a passive aggressive way and I leave mumbling about FedEx.
This particular package has German language on it. She’s in a time warp and probably thinks it came from the Kaiser. The exchange follows our pattern:
“Where’s the package?” I say.
“There’s no package for Curmudgeon” she insists.
I hand over a printout with the tracking number; including the false information that it has already been delivered. She doesn’t type the number into a computer or anything. She simply takes the paper into the back room and retrieves my package from the shelf where she put it. It takes her 40 seconds. I wonder how many things I’ve lost to the deadly shelf? She only looks in the back room if I have a paper trail and show up in person with the printout. Maybe there are spiders back there? She does this all the time. If it weren’t for FedEx I’d have moved by now!
She eyes the German language packaging like it’ll bite her (the English address is as clear as a bell). She doesn’t like strange squiggles from weird places. You should have seen her face the day I got a Baeofeng HAM radio direct from China. Today’s package is doubly scary because it has tariff stamps that look impressive and someone wrote ISO 12312-2 on the back in blue marker. This led Gladys to store it in the back room where they lock up distant ideas and strange technologies.
“So, what did you get from Germany?” She asks.
“Not sure. Stuff. I guess.” Teenagers have trained me in this type of answer.
She’s curious, “You sure get a lot of stuff.” (Last week I got chemicals that were properly shipped from a commercial supplier but came with labels like “don’t drink this shit” and “spill this on your cat and it will grow an extra tail”. Nope, I didn’t explain that to her either.) I suppose nobody else in town orders cool things?
“What’s it all for?” She prompts. (She’s fishing for gossip. Something like “that freak Curmudgeon got product X in the mail… he’s probably in a cult”.)
I shrug. “I’m a spy.” Then I slip out the door.
[Stay tuned…]
“I’m a spy.” I need to remember that for future use.
Have fun with it.
Now if you were a muslim, you’d be safe, but as an american the nsa probably has the curmudgeon on their crap list.
Funny how that shit works huh?