eleventyone

Three of my postal packages were eaten by the system last year. This is an issue that continues to peeve me. One item, from a trusted online video store, was The Illustrated Family Doctor, an Australian movie staring Samuel Johnson as a book editor, which is a bit lame anyway. Another package was Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother from Amazon, which is actually available online for free, but I really wanted to read the physical copy. The other package was several Irvine Welsh books from eBay, which I did purchase rather cheaply. I know, how can I trust an eBay person? But I had in depth conversations with the eBay seller, who assured me they were in the mail. All of these packages just never arrived at my address.

It may be that I have such an unusual taste in books and films that they were destined to get lost in the mail. I tried to find my postal items by visiting the post offices and politely asking where they were, then week after week nagging for them. The postal workers said to me, quite bluntly, that because they weren’t registered post there’s no way they can track them and there was no guarantee that they would ever arrive. My only options were to pay for registered post in the future or pay for a post box at my local post office, which is far more secure. They suggested that someone had stolen the mail from my letter box and there’s nothing they can do about that. But I was home all week, when they should have arrived, whenever my mail came and I know that they did not arrive.

This never happened at my previous addresses in the eastern suburbs, in Mount Waverley, Ashwood, or Wheelers Hill. I have never had to pay for registered post before, not even when I lived out in country Gippsland. I had always trusted the postman to deliver my packages. The postal workers in Hawthorn had lost my trust. I decided to pay for a post box at the post office and safeguard any future mail anyway. Maybe I was giving up without a fight.

Where are they? Who has my dvd and books? Does my postman still have my mail? I have no evidence of that. But as the post office staff said, there’s no guarantee for a unregistered item to arrive, so then, why even bother deliver it. In my area, any package delivered is done so by an external Australia Post contractor. Maybe they have my mail and are currently reading my books.

Now I am trying to decide if I should track my mail. My idea was to use a mobile phone and post it in the mail, as an unregistered postal package. By using an ordinary GSM mobile phone, I pay the tracking company $90 for 200 credits. Each credit relates to when you ask the company to send its special command to your mobile phone, asking it to report back its strength of signal from each of the nearest cell phone towers, which is called roaming. This allows the tracking company to triangulate the location, although it’s accuracy can range from 50m to several kilometres depending on the amount of towers in the area. If I do this I might loose a mobile phone forever and waste my money entirely. If the phone stops in a certain location, I could ring the phone and see if anyone answers, then yell ‘Why did you steal my packages?!?’