Working from home
By Ted Bruning Next Door’s Parcels I
t’s a hangover from the days when most households had one spouse who went out
to work while the other – the one who did the really hard labour – was at home most of the time that parcels are generally delivered during the day. It follows that nowadays, when most couples both have to work to pay the mortgage, deliveries are generally made when no-one is in. Logically, Parcelforce and
DHL and FedEx and whoever ought to do their rounds in the evening, when there’s likely to be somebody at home to sign for whatever it is they’re delivering. But they don’t seem to have got their heads round this obvious truth yet; so the duties of every worker- from-home include acting as neighbourhood delivery depot. This never used to be
a big deal – in fact, it was a positive pleasure to be able to do a little favour for a neighbour, especially one that involves so little time and effort. Answer door, sign docket, leave package in hallway until neighbour comes to collect. In return, huge moral leverage. So when the neighbour storms round to complain apoplectically about the son and heir’s electric guitar, a hurt look and a wounded tone are all it takes
to defuse the situation. But lately, what with
that there interweb shopping and all, the volume of home traffic has soared. The net has turned into a global shopping mall, and vans laden with everything from smoked eels to flatpack furniture clog up our little street throughout the day. It seems to be a case of “Recession? What recession?” for my neighbours, whose houses must be absolutely stuffed with brand-new consumer goods of all shapes, sizes, and descriptions. They all work hard to pay for it all, mind, because they’re never at home; and I seem to spend half my day standing at the front door trying to scribble something that looks vaguely like my signature on one of those electronic notepads while the van driver stands there fretting impatiently as if I was wasting his time! Some days my hallway
looks like a warehouse, and I have to fight hard to resist the temptation to tease loose a corner of each parcel to see what’s inside. Especially the ones in plain wrappers. Whatever has that homely- looking woman from just down the street ordered this time? And why does she always look so shifty when she comes round in the
evening to collect? Unbidden and unwanted mental pictures form... Mind you, they’re all
so thickly bound in parcel tape that there’s no chance of copping a surreptitious peek. The volume of waste generated by all this home shopping is enough to make an ecologist weep. I suppose that in order to protect all these fragile goodies in transit, they have to be swaddled in enough bubblewrap and cardboard to make them virtually bomb-proof. But given that most of the electrical goods you buy these days are so shoddily constructed that they break within days anyway, going to such lengths to stop them getting scratched seems a bit of a forlorn effort to me. Anyway, I’m so fed up with
acting as the street’s unpaid storeman that from now on I’m going to start charging a small fee. It might not make me popular, but hey – every street needs at least one cranky old curmudgeon, and from this day forth it’s going to be me.
THE CHANDLERS FORD DIRECTORY | 023 8027 6396 |
kevin@cfdirectory.co.uk 47
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