Part 1:

Observations from a repatriating American and what it means to be back after being gone for twenty-five years.

. .  . living in an age where instant gratification is not fast enough.

When I order online, I don’t need it delivered immediately, although now, the expectation seems to be, by the time you get off the pot, no matter the time of day, or where you live, your order will arrive.

 

Maybe it’s just me, in retirement, living a slowed down existence. As much as I hate to admit it, I do appreciate not having to go out for ever last thing I need. In fact, I hate to go shopping, period. Of course, this is a relatively new thing, since the pandemic. The package locker at our apartment is a well-designed convenience for tenants, but who would ever have expected that one day it would need to be big enough to hold half of Macy’s? So, what I now see is:

 

1. Texts at 5am telling me, guess who’s here—even on a Sunday morning.
2. Or gosh gee whizz, we left it with a neighbor—which one I ask, because there are forty in this building and I don’t know a single name or where they live. But then again, I never got a chance to ask the driver, because this is all so high tech, no need to speak to anyone.
3. Or gosh gee whizz, we left it outside, for some street person to see if one of Susan’s bras fit.
4. Or when the delivery guy shows up on a tracking map on my cell, I go down to get the package, but he doesn’t believe I am Susan, and guess what—he doesn’t speak English and he will not give me the package no matter how I try to prove who I am. If it hadn’t been for another tenant who spoke Spanish, the package would have gone back on the truck.
5. Repeated texts telling me to tap a special URL to get my special Amazon ODP, then copy and paste it back to the driver. Unfortunately, I am not fast enough, so not wanting to waste any more time, he leaves it behind with—who knows, or on the apartment’s front door step, out in the open.
6. I can’t help thinking how many more trucks are now on the road, how many more jumbo, gigantic warehouses demanding tax breaks continue to be built, to expedite our relentless need for more stuff, and how many more injuries Amazon workers will sustain to fill over the top quotas to get us our shit.
7. Not to mention how much more traffic and fuel consumption to get us our shit.
8. And then I can’t help ponder how convenient it is for us to return anything, anytime. And how many mountains of returned shit are reduced to thousands and thousands of bundles that go to auction because the stuff is not even worth putting back on the shelves or to the dump. And how enterprising people are having a ball turning masses of unwanted shit into businesses and bucks. Onward, America.

Bundles and bundles o’shyte

We have always been a consumer society but now we have transcended, well on our way to wallowing in so much shit that one day for sure, it will consume us.