UPS gave me a delivery window last week.
12:30 to 1:30.
Perfect.
Not because I had some desperate need to receive a package at precisely 12:47, but because a delivery window is useful information.
I can work with a window.
Do the morning things. Be home from 12:30 to 1:30. Get the package. Move on with my life.
Easy.
Then UPS extended the window to 2:30.
Okay.
They opened it a crack.
Things happen. Traffic exists. Deliveries take longer than expected. Somewhere, somebody has probably ordered a sectional sofa that requires seventeen separate boxes.
Fine.
I rearranged a couple of things and went on with my day.
Then, at approximately 2:20, ten minutes before that newly extended delivery window closed, I checked again.
Sometime before 9:30 p.m.
Excuse me?
They had given me a delivery window, then opened it a crack, but suddenly I found the damn thing flung wide open, letting all the AC out.
And that’s when I got pissed.
Not because my package was late.
The package being late was never really the problem.
Had UPS told me that morning, “Hey, your package will be there sometime before 9:30 tonight,” I wouldn’t have particularly liked it, but I could have worked with it.
Instead, they’d given me information I could reasonably use to make decisions.
So I made decisions.
Then they changed the information.
So I changed the decisions.
Then they changed it again.
And days don’t work like delivery windows. You can’t just stretch one end six hours to the right and expect everything else to politely make room.
Things have a place.
I don’t necessarily mean a place on a calendar. I’m not walking around with my day scheduled in fifteen-minute increments. Quite the opposite.
But in my head, things have an order.
This happens, then I do that. Once that’s done, I can leave and do this other thing. Tomorrow I’ll take care of those things because today’s things will already be finished.
It’s not a schedule so much as a line of dominoes.
And UPS put its finger on the first one.
Because I was waiting, I didn’t do the thing I would have done if I’d known I had several hours.
Then that thing had to move.
It couldn’t disappear. It still needed to be done. So it got shoved into the next available space, where something else was already living.
That thing moved.
Which moved another thing.
Something got pushed into tomorrow.
Tomorrow, rather rudely, already had plans.
And suddenly a package that was a few hours late had managed to fuck with approximately 48 hours of my life.
That’s the part that’s hard to explain.
People hear late delivery and measure the inconvenience in minutes.
Twenty minutes late.
An hour late.
Four hours late.
But sometimes an hour doesn’t cost you an hour.
Sometimes it knocks over the next thing, which knocks over the next thing, which knocks over the next thing until you’re standing in the middle of tomorrow wondering how the hell Wednesday got screwed up by something that was supposed to happen Tuesday afternoon.
And yes, theoretically, I could simply adjust.
I did adjust.
For 48 fucking hours.
That’s what all the rearranging was.
Every time the plan changed, I had to pick everything back up and build the order again.
Okay. We’re not doing that now. We’re doing this now. That moves there. This can happen afterward. No, wait, now that won’t work because—
New plan.
Again.
And I think that’s the part I hadn’t really understood before.
Uncertainty takes up space.
It occupies time you technically still have because you can’t confidently give that time to anything else.
A definite inconvenience can be surprisingly easy to accommodate.
Tell me you’re coming at 8:00 tonight? Fine.
Tell me you’re coming tomorrow? Annoying, but fine.
Give me a one-hour window, extend it by an hour, and then ten minutes before that expires fling the damn thing open until 9:30 at night?
Now you’ve made yourself an all-day possibility.
And possibilities take up space.
The package eventually arrived.
Of course it did.
From UPS’s perspective, that was probably the end of the story.
Delivered.
Case closed.
Meanwhile, I was still putting the dominoes back up.
So no, I wasn’t pissed because my package was late.
I was pissed because Tuesday reached over and fucked with Wednesday.
And Wednesday hadn’t done anything to anybody.
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