the box - a detective story
I hadn’t left my apartment in about two days. Yesterday, to continue that trend, I ordered some dinner from a nearby Dominican restaurant. When the deliverywoman arrived at the door, I opened it to find a large, empty Amazon packaging box on my doormat.
I received my overpriced chicken and rice, the woman hurried away, and I dragged the hunk of cardboard back into my apartment.
The box was written on crudely with black marker and sporadic capitalization. It read: “DON’T LEAVE YOUR GARBAGE IN THE LOBBY. PUT IT OUTSIDE WHERE THE TRASH GOES!”
There were a few things alarming about this message.
This was, in fact, a box with my name and address marked on it by Amazon. However, I hadn’t received an Amazon package in several weeks. Any boxes I had received were either gathering dust in my apartment or discarded with the rest of the recycling at the front of the building weeks ago.
The flaps of the box were held down together by a single strip of black tape. This was either placed there to make sure the messenger’s words remained flat, or to make the box appear closed.
Unlike a lot of tenants in my building, I don’t leave random garbage in our lobby. I couldn’t help but feel a little offended being called out for a neighborly crime I did not commit.
According to the de facto leader of the unofficial tenants guild, that empty box with my name on it had been left at the bottom of the stairwell in the lobby for “a few days.” I had come through the lobby two nights prior and didn’t see it, which means it arrived there sometime between late Sunday night and Monday evening.
Though I haven’t ordered anything from Amazon in a few weeks, I have ordered quite a few holiday gifts from other websites. In particular, there’s been one delivery from Etsy that I’ve been waiting on for almost a month. The owner of the store assured me it would arrive by today, but there’s still no sign of it and the tracking number I was provided didn’t work. Is it feasible that a small business owner might reuse Amazon packaging as his own to ship his products? I mean, as long as the shipping information is correct, the logo on the box doesn’t matter.
Let’s say my Etsy order arrived Monday, but because my tracking information is incorrect, I wasn’t made privy to its delivery. That means it could have just sat in the lobby, unbothered until I walked down and noticed it. This would take a few days, as I hadn’t been leaving my apartment.
The final step to cracking this case lies in the infrastructure of the building: namely, our front door. The front door to our building is often left cracked open while tenants smoke on the patio or chat with neighbors outside. It’s completely realistic to believe that, while someone was smoking out front, some random package thief made their way into the building, emptied the contents of whatever parcels they found in the lobby into a backpack, and scurried out unnoticed. And because they’re a professional, they taped the flaps back down with a roll of black electrical tape they keep on hand to make the crime less obvious to the tenants.
This scenario would answer the questions of why I haven’t received my Etsy delivery. It would also explain why an empty box with my name on it was left in our building’s lobby.
However, it doesn’t explain one crucial detail: why didn’t someone just knock on my door? Why the box note? I swear I’m nice.