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I was resting up yesterday, recovering from a long and drawn out cold that finally caught up with me and sapped all my energy. Couldn’t face work, so just took it easy and wandered around in my dressing gown, largely sipping orange juice and watching old saved programmes on our almost-full PVR.

The door-bell rings, and I wander downstairs to see who it is. Even through the misted glass door I can tell it’s a delivery guy from the brown box shape I can see on the ground next to him. I know I’m not expecting anything, but Frances’ new employer have been sending her increasingly large letters, maybe this is the next step?

Turns out he was actually trying to delivery to a neighbour, and wanted to drop the parcel off with me. I’m afraid, dear reader, that I refused. Don’t exactly know the neighbour very well. We say hello to them, and have commented on their new extension (it’s very nice), but I’m afraid I didn’t want to take in their parcel.

“It’d save them a trip to collect it“, said the delivery guy (from Ryman or such?). I must have looked quizzically, as he added “I’d put a note through their door“. I gathered my thoughts. “Sorry“, I said, “but I know I’d feel rather uncomfortable if my delivery was left with a neighbour I didn’t know“.

This is where the delivery guy struck me as perturbed. This had clearly not been in The Plan. Nobody does this. You’re in a nice quiet street. Surely you have street parties, know everybody else, and take in parcels like this. I’d clearly caught him out. I could see him recalculating. But quite why he’d knocked on our door (we’re across the road and along a bit), I don’t know. Perhaps the car in the drive, or a light on. But it still struck me as a bit random. I suspect, rather cynically, a return trip to base was on the cards so a few neighbours were worth trying.

But it’s deeply unprofessional in my view. I would have had to have signed for it, and taken responsibility for whatever it was. I may have saved the neighbour a trip to a depot somewhere, but maybe they were planning for that, or didn’t care. Perhaps it was the wrong item. Perhaps these neighbours were my sworn enemies? Delivery guy didn’t know that. He must have just presumed “It’s a quiet street and they’re all nice people”, or something.

I do take parcels for our immediate neighbour. We get on well, and they do us favours on occasion, and us likewise (although it’s mainly of the “have some apples from our tree”, given they rarely go away leaving the house empty for us to lock up and move their post aside).

I’ve noticed some parcels have the pigeon english “No leave with neighbour” scrawled on them. Not sure if that was the case here (wouldn’t have surprised me), but I suppose there must have been cases of neighbour confusion/fall-outs over “lost” deliveries with their signature on it, and the amazing coincidence of the neighbours just happening to get the same 32″ plasma TV….

So it’s more a case of my being uncomfortable with not really knowing the neighbours well enough. To be honest, I do regret it slightly, as I suspect the simplest explanation is best, and she may have just nipped out for a bit, and the delivery came at the wrong moment.

But I do know I’d feel a bit put out if a parcel I’d been expecting was dumped with a random neighbour, so I’m kinda hopeful the delivery guy understood that. At least, I hope he didn’t scrawl on the “collect from depot” note that he’d “tried your neighbour in number blah. The man is an ass and refused to take your box of kittens. Blame him if they die”.

As it is though, he probably just scrawled the usual illegible details on the card. I suspect he just thought I was an introverted and unshaven computer geek who walked around in his dressing gown all day being rude, at least indirectly, to his neighbours. That’s my reading of the perturbed face he seemed to pull.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 10:51 am and is filed under Personal, Ramblings, UK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.