I have a theory that the very fabric of modern community is being held together by the incompetence of delivery drivers. Allow me to elaborate, in days gone by communities tended to naturally form, people used to actively seek to get to know their neighbours, both out of a desire for comradeship and for security. However, as people have become more liable to move about several times over the course of their lives, and for myriad other reasons, it seems that many in Western societies have lost their desire to forge communities wherever they go. The urge to get to know one's neighbours has greatly diminished as people seem ever more content to simply either socialise with those they know, or remain isolated within the confines of their own home.
The only time whereby there is a break to this new norm is when you have to call to a neighbour's house to collect an Amazon package that arrived three hours prior to the agreed upon delivery time despite the fact that you frequently made it clear on the delivery request that you would not be home to receive the package before 5pm. It is the awkward and stilted conversations we have with our neighbours while we collect the box containing some vintage Kenan & Kel merchandise and a Nutri-Bullet that provide the few tenuous threads still holding society together.
As such, much as we might complain about the nuisance it is having to go out of our way to collect these deliveries that have arrived at inconvenient times, I contend that society as it stands would crumble without the neighbourly interactions and relations it forces us to uphold. Incompetent delivery drivers are the last bulwark preventing society's disintegration into the rubble of anarchy. However, delivery drivers that just leave packages on your doorstep rather than dropping them into a neighbour when it is evident that no-one's home are actively seeking the demise of all that is good in the world.
Aside from the fact that leaving a package, perhaps containing something valuable, renders it liable to be damaged by inclement weather/a small pack of roaming feral otters intent on eating your worldly possessions, it is also incredibly likely that it will simply be stolen.
To this end, an ex-NASA engineer turned YouTuber - a career change as damning a reflection on humanity's priorities as I can conceive of- who was tired of having deliveries stolen from his porch decided to take matters into his own hands. He designed a package to resemble an Apple HomePod but - as you may have guessed from both this article's headline and the fact that if the box simply contained an Apple HomePod this would simply be an utterly perfunctory article about somebody ordering an Apple HomePod - the box did not contain an Apple HomePod. (Contrary to what you might be thinking given how many times the phrase 'Apple HomePod' was used in the previous paragraph, this article is in no way sponsored by the Apple HomePod).
What the box did contain however was an ingeniously designed glitter cannon which instantly sprayed a pound of glitter in a wide circle as soon as the box's lid was removed. There was also a can of 'fart-spray' built into the contraption which issued five squirts of the rancid musk every thirty seconds once the lid had been removed. It also featured four wide-angled phone cameras that would automatically record the reaction of any thief that stole the box and removed the lid, as well as a GPS tracker so that the box could be retrieved. Truly, it is a level of hard-work and dedication toward an entirely petty and vindictive project so admirable as to have gone some way toward restoring my beleaguered faith in humanity.
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