It Says Delivered Hats

There is a very specific sequence, and almost everyone has been through it. The notification arrives. The photograph shows your door, or a door, or a corner of something that might be a door. You go outside. There is nothing there. And then you stand on your own porch for a moment doing the arithmetic — how long ago, how visible from the street, whether it is worth the phone call. What makes this good material is that the grievance is completely safe. The target is an anonymous stranger who took a box, or a delivery system that photographed a door and called it done. Nobody in your life is implicated. You can wear this to the school pickup, the office and the neighbourhood barbecue without anyone taking it personally, which is more than can be said for most complaints worth making. The register is flat and procedural on purpose, because that is how the loss actually gets reported: not with rage, but with the weary precision of somebody reading a tracking page for the fourth time.