Box

I was off work last week on vacation. Whenever I'm off for that amount of time I worry that something is going to go wrong at work in my absence. I wrote a post not too long ago about the nightmares that I have during those times of useless fear and worry. I had one of those last week, and when I returned to work Monday, I couldn't shake the feeling that SOMETHING was going to have been forgotten last week.

But that wasn't the case...at least not until Tuesday. I was working Tuesday morning when I got a phone call from an employee of one of the vendors that the Kentucky Department of Education uses for technology services (KDE has a rack of servers in our basement that are used to connect our district to the state network and to the Internet). Let's call the guy Andrew. After a moment of chit chatting with the guy (whose voice inflections were eerily like Napoleon Dynamite's, by the way), I asked him why he was calling.

"Uh," he said with a pause afterward that made it sound like the word was a complete sentence. "I'm calling to schedule a date and time to install your UPS."

"What UPS?" I asked him.

"Uh. The UPS that was delivered to you some time last week and that's for the [latest KDE] initiative."

I looked quickly around my office. Several boxes HAD been delivered to my office (all pieces of technology I'd ordered before going on vacation), but I'd accounted for all of them. There weren't any errant boxes. "Andrew, I don't know of any boxes delivered last week. I was on vacation, though, and maybe they're out in the outer office somewhere, or maybe my system admin picked them up and stored them for me somewhere. Let me find them and get back with you." He agreed, so we hung up. But after checking with everyone in the office that day, NO ONE remembered any piece of electronics being delivered that hadn't already been accounted for. There were plenty of other packages delivered (we typically get three to four deliveries a day to the Board of Education building), but nothing with my name on it. I sent Andrew an email letting him know that we hadn't found the box, that we didn't think it'd been delivered. And I thought that was that.

Until yesterday.

I got an almost simultaneous email and phone call from Andrew. I read the email as I was talking to him. "Uh. Hey, Bryan. Did you find that UPS? I checked the tracking number, and it WAS delivered to the board office on June 21st. It was signed for by a P. Daugherty. The tracking number is in the email that I sent."

"I'm looking at the email right now," I told him. "It sure sounds like it WAS delivered here to this address. Peggy Daugherty is our receptionist. I guess it must be here somewhere."

"Uh," he said. "Okay. Uh. Can we come install it tomorrow?"

"I don't know," I told him (His "uh"s were starting to get on my nerves.). "I have to find it first. I've already looked once and couldn't find it, and I've had my eye out for it ever since, so I don't know if I'll even be able to do that. Can you tell me what it looks like?"

"Uh," he said, "It's a box."

"I KNOW it's a box," I told him slowly, "but what does it look like? Is it brown like every other box? Does it have your company's name on it? Is it addressed to me?"

"Uh, I've installed a bunch of these. Let me think what it looks like." Long pause. "It's just a regular box. I don't remember what color it is. I don't know what company's name is listed on it. I know it's not our company's name, but I can't remember whose it is." Another long pause. "I don't know who it's addressed to."

"Okay," I said. "What size is it, then? Am I looking for a bread box? A computer monitor? A case of paper?"

"Uh, it's pretty much just a standard box," he said. "I'm not very good with sizes of stuff. I'd say it's about one to four feet wide, and about one to four feet deep, and about one to three feet tall. Maybe."

I was really frustrated at this point, so I snapped back at him, "So let me get this straight? I'm looking for a box that doesn't have your company's name on it, that's 1-4 feet wide and deep and 1-3 feet tall. It might have been addressed to anyone, and it could be any color. Is that right?"

"Uh, yup. That sounds like the box."

I paused for a moment, drumming my fingers on my desk before saying, "You do realize that you have described 99.9% of all boxes that exist in the world, don't you!"

"I guess I wasn't much help," he said plainly.

The situation was so ridiculous, though, that I couldn't stay angry but for a few seconds. I laughed at his reply. "It's better than nothing," I said. "We've eliminated a tenth of a percent of the boxes here in the district. I'll just have to dig around all of the rest and see what I can find." So I did. I looked at every box at the Board of Education. I went to the maintenance garage behind the board office, where our deliveries are sometimes taken, and I looked through the storage room in the basement. I quizzed a dozen people before finally deciding that I wasn't going to look anymore that day.

I walked back up to the board office and walked in and sighed in exasperation. Linda, our finance officer, was walking by the entrance, saw me and said, "What's going on?"

"I am so FRUSTRATED!" I told her. "I've just spent the last hour doing my best Sherlock Holmes imitation trying to track down a missing box."

"What's in the box?" she asked me.

"It's a UPS, a big battery thing, and it's for the [latest KDE] project."

"Oh, THAT!" she said. "That's in a closet in my office!"

"WHAT?" I asked her. "Why would it be in your closet?"

"You weren't here last week, and I didn't want it to get misplaced, and I knew it was for the [latest KDE] thing, so I stuck it in there."

"How could that be?" I asked her. "I asked everyone Tuesday if they'd seen it, and you said you hadn't!"

"I wasn't HERE Tuesday," she reminded me. "I was on vacation."

Uh.

Guess what? It just occurred to me that I have no point to this story nor do I have an ending. I just wanted to share with you a frustrating event in my life. Oh well. This is just my second post after 2 months away from my blog. I guess I'm still a little rusty. I'll work on having a real ending on my next post.