Damien Galeone

I am waiting for a bus. And I am not happy. Buses are the saddest public transport. They bring people to the in-between, the places deemed not important enough to be on a metro or a tram line. Therefore, nobody waiting for a bus is ever happy, unless that bus is taking them to a brothel or a hotdog festival. Today, I am not happy.

The package had arrived the day before. But that’s not the interesting part. Also not the terribly interesting part is that the package had come with no warning phone call, no email giving us a time range of its expected arrival. What’s important is that the package had 23.5 hours it could have been delivered and would have been accepted with open arms. That’s twenty-three-and-a-half hours out of a possible (that’s right) twenty-four hours that the package could have been accepted upon its arrival.

But no. It arrives halfway through the one 30-minute period where Burke is teaching and unable to come get the package. I am on my way back from a daytrip and receive not a phone call from a delivery driver, who I can plead with to give us fifteen minutes in my charmingly bad Czech. No. I receive an email. A cold, simple email. We tried to deliver. You weren’t there. Upon my arrival home I find to my horror that the delivery service was UPS.

I’ve decided recently to roll with the punches. This, by the way, is a general life attitude I have always admired from afar. I have always wished to be someone unfrazzled by last minute disruptions or plans upended in the eleventh hour. But I am not, nor have I ever been this person. I set plans, I lay out my day, week, class, whatever, and I stay the course. A change that intervenes in that is viewed as an interloper of the worst kind. And in my house, they are met with mini-tantrums and implorations to a deity I don’t really believe in, but to whom I give occasional nods, just in case.

But in my rapidly advancing years, I am trying to take it as it comes. As long as ‘it comes’ exactly as I have planned. The night of our missed delivery, I looked up the pickup point for our package. Now, most every company who delivers things drops off your package at a relatively convenient location to the customer. These pickup points are almost always within walking distance from the delivery location and though some get dropped at a shop where you are forced to engage with another human, some are simply left in a box to be opened by a code you get and therefore involve no human interaction. These are the best. This is what I was hoping for.

But as I search the location I am nagged by one point: I can’t remember ever – in all my package deliveries – having seen a UPS pickup box. I find the place on the map. It’s in Letnany, which is at the very least two metro stops away. But it’s not a shop, it’s a printshop in a business-industrial park. And it’s not at the metro, it’s a few bus stops away from the metro.   

And so, I am waiting for a bus. I am rolling with the punches. Well, the second punch. The third punch comes a short while later, when the bus I am waiting for does not arrive. The 166 is a bus that terminates at a local senior center which hopefully houses older folks with a sense of ironic macabre. This bus is mythical. I see it roughly four times a morning while I am waiting for either of the two other buses that will bring me to work. But today, alas, the 166 is the unicorn of buses – I would love to see one almost as much as I would love to ride one.

I settle for another, lesser, bus, one that will bring me a ten-minute walk to the pickup point. I get off the bus and begin my walk. About 30-seconds into my ten-minute walk, the 166 zooms by and mocks me with its peculiar brand of unscheduled convenience. The rain starts soon after. I arrive wet and sweaty at an industrial park – an interconnected series of roads and driveways just off the road and teeming with random shops and warehouses. Trucks and 18-wheelers inch up or sit on the roads with men and women hauling bundles from them.

I begin my search. I have an hour. I am rolling with the punches. What occurs next is 20 minutes of me very much not rolling with the punches and filling the air around me with enough cursing to puncture the ozone layer. Finally, defeated into the use of technology, I take out my phone and type in the name of the place. I avoid tech to help me find things, because I think there’s a residual caveman in all of us and he or she becomes disappointed when we rely on tech and not our wits to find things. But time is ticking down and I need to get home.

According to the map it’s right there, a printshop next to a hotel. I too am at the hotel. After ten more minutes of walking and becoming more exasperated, I disappoint my inner caveman again by asking the receptionist.

“Oh yes. You go out there and make a right.”

Victory! “Thank you!”

She is wrong. Or at least she hasn’t told me the whole story. I go out and to the right. I walk up and down, there is nothing nearby. Perhaps I misunderstood. I go back and ask the same woman.

“No, go out, make a right, and then a left.”

“Oh. OK. Well, that’s a whole direction you left out before. The ‘left’ part would have been helpful…just saying.”   

Again. Nothing. I find another woman. I ask her.

“Yes.” She points to a woman walking in our direction. “You see the alley that woman came from? It’s there.”

There is an alley. There is a warehouse completely concealed by other buildings. At the door, an A4 paper with the name of the printshop written on it in ballpoint pen tells me this is the place.

I know that in our uber-convenient world, we should be more willing to handle an inconvenience. Maybe we’re getting spoiled by doorstep delivery and an information system that can tell us the weather on Neptune. But this experience has been so inconvenient, I actually wonder if it’s a joke. When all of their competitors are going the extra mile to make things convenient for the customer, UPS can’t think this is reasonable. Can they?  

I ask a woman about my package. She asks for my ID. I wonder if I am going to get a party or win an award for finding the place, for beating what had to be a joke task set up by some TV producers. Have I, in fact, been punked? This possibility forces me to not strangle everyone in the building. I roll with the punches. I even smile at the woman. I show her my ID and hold it up to my face and mug for it.

In English, she says “You’re handsome.”

In English, I say “Oh, thank you.”

In Czech, she says, “Hold on.” And then in English, she says “You’re pretty.”

In Czech, I say “Thank you” and then in English, I say “Thank you.”

In Czech, she says “Hold on” and then in Czech she says, “Jste vtipný.”

In English, I say “Oh, funny.”

In Czech, she says “yeah,” then in English, “You’re funny!”

I have gone from handsome to funny in one 10-second conversation. If my life can be better summed up in an interaction, I don’t know what it is.

I go home. My package tucked under my arm. My left eye twitches from all the punch rolling. I await the bus. It does not arrive. I walk to the metro. The 166 passes on my way.