![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/trashcompactor.jpg\")
Toys used to rely a lot more on one’s imagination.<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\n
I’ve got one of those around here somewhere, too; but I’m a grownup.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, when I’ve got nothing better to do than go lament that the Nautilus only goes up to a hundred kilogrammes, one of the nothingbetter things I could do is to unfold it and set it all up to resist at two hundred and twenty pounds. Because, again: I’m a grownup; I’m six and a half feet tall and can probably lift slightly less than I’d try to lift just before hurting myself by lifting it, making it somewhat ideal to limit myself to two hundred and twenty pounds.<\/p>\n
Other times, what I’ve got better to do is to actually lift something without subjecting myself to the bothersome chore of unfolding something and bending BowFlexy rod things into place until they all add up to a hundred kilogrammes. Like, probably. Hard to test for, since the Nautilus is what I’ve got to work with. But it might be good to have something I can walk into the room and pick up, and then set down because it’s become disinteresting again.<\/p>\n
To that end, I got a neat idea about a month ago: I could probably just get some freeweights that, if I wanted to go lift something, would just be there waiting to be lifted. How hard could that<\/I> be to arrange for….<\/p>\n
This<\/I> hard….<\/p>\n
The Easy Part<\/H1><\/p>\n
I hit amazon.com, and looked for barbells. Which, it turned out, was a stupid term to search with. Most barbells, evidently, are dumbbells. I actually already have dumbbells; but they’re only fifteen or twenty kilogrammes each, so they’re kinda meh.<\/p>\n
But, eventually, I tracked down what I’d call a barbell<\/A>: a big rod thing, six feet long; and then heavyish discs you slide onto the bar to make it weigh more.<\/p>\n So. That’s cool. A hundred and twenty-five bucks; free shipping; then it shows up here and we’re done.<\/p>\n I gave it to Hunter<\/A> because I just tend to do that: as a disabled vet, she gets more thanksforyourservice discounts than I get, so she tends to order anything pricier than coffee at Starbucks.<\/p>\n Because the whole thing is now happening in her account, it’s out of my control. I can’t even confirm for certain when she ordered it\u2014though I think it was on March the First, four weeks ago now. It was certainly that, or sometime late in February. As you’ll soon see….<\/p>\n And, because the whole thing is happening in her account, it’s out of my control if anything just happens to go a smidgey bit wrong over the rest of the damned month.<\/p>\n So let’s watch for that<\/I> happening….<\/p>\n It’s March the First. Spring’s only three weeks away. Life is soon to be skittles and beer; pigeons will be poisoned in the park. And I have a tracking number for the barbell. Followed shortly by another. Because they’re in two different wrappers.<\/p>\n The one is four pounds and, I’ll learn one day, six feet long. So that’s the bar half of the barbell. It’s in the world:<\/p>\n I could mention that, alongside that, there was a tracking number for a separate clump of stuff, weighing a hundred<\/I> and four pounds, which looked exactly like that: label created; origin scan; departed from facility; arrived at facility. Not unlike if UPS weren’t hilarious criminals. So far.<\/p>\n The next day, the app I use to track these things updated with new information:<\/p>\n Now the bar and the bells of the barbell are departing from Mattoon, Ilinois, for\u2014as you’d expect\u2014Hodgkins, Illinois…where everything ever mailed anywhere will end up for a minute or a hundred and twenty-three; and then it left Hodgkins, and that was the day.<\/p>\n It’s a brand new day. And there’s an update to be updated about:<\/p>\n The awkward thing now is that March the Third is a Friday. Whether UPS would deliver this the next day, on Saturday, now that it’s in town, is anyone’s guess.<\/p>\n I’ll save you a bit of the suspense:<\/p>\n So, that’s all over with. They’ve delivered the thing they contracted to deliver. A little. By sauntering up and leaving it out front, as evidenced [probably] by the Doorbell Camera.<\/p>\n Except….<\/p>\n The delivery was for the bar part of the barbell. The bells have updated with an alert that they’ll deliver them tomorrow. Probably.<\/p>\n They didn’t deliver the bells on the Fifth. And there was no update about it.<\/p>\n No updates. It’s just sitting there, somewhere down the street from me.<\/p>\n Not a lot of news. It’s sitting down the street from me.<\/p>\n Guess what: nothing; no updates; it’s down the damned street.<\/p>\n It’s just sitting there, down the str\u2014OH WHAT THE ENTIRE HELL….<\/I><\/p>\n Is that even possible<\/I>? Like, physically<\/I>?<\/p>\n For those who aren’t familiar with DenverMetro, this is what just reportedly happened:<\/p>\n Reportedly, in under an hour, a hundred and four pounds of stuff no one wants to bring me teleported from Aurora, where I am, to Commerce City, twenty miles north of me, and then to Englewood, fifteen miles from Commerce City and ten miles from me. Like, instead of remaining in Aurora, where I am, where the bar part of the barbell was, that got delivered a week ago because it was only four pounds and even the laziest of hilarious criminals can handle that. Note that, on the Fourth, when the bar part of the barbell was delivered, it and the bells were both Out for Delivery until they weren’t…for different reasons.<\/p>\n So, now, the bells have moved away from me. And they’re gonna stay there for a while.<\/p>\n They’re just sitting there. Over in Englewood. Apart from just sitting there, the only information I can get from UPS is that they’re constantly begging me to drive over to Engelwood and pick the bells up myself. Because they’re lazy, hilarious criminals:<\/p>\n Thusly:<\/p>\n So. Now to go report it stolen….<\/p>\n Can’t. Because it’s not stolen until it remains stolen beyond the original delivery estimate.<\/p>\n I’m not sure which chatmeatbot that was. There were two. One of which chatmeatbotted after the first one just ran away from the chatroom. So here’s a couple of these hilarious criminals for you….<\/p>\n …bobella; bananafannafofella; fifiefofella: hilariouscriminals…ella.<\/p>\n Finally, the whole damned thing is officially stolen. That is to say that they investigated themselves, and found that they’d done something wrong. Uh…sorta.<\/p>\n The problem now is that there’s nothing to return, because it’s been stolen.<\/p>\n So, after a few more minutes of chatmeatbotting, of which I have no screenshots, they conceded that there was no known way to return a thing which got stolen before it was delivered. So, yeah: here’s you money; keep that; here’s also, like, an extra twenty bucks becuase damn<\/I> we’re bad at this; this may be remembered as an admission of guilt.<\/p>\n So that’s that. That’s the entire thing. The bells of the barbell are somewhere in DenverMetro, stolen, and it’s not my problem anymore. The end.<\/p>\n So, now, the bells from the barbell, which were stolen, which got us a refund, plus twenty bucks or whatever, just teleported back to Commerce City, and then back to Englewood, and then back to Commerce City again. All on the Twenty-first. For reasons bipeds will never grok.<\/p>\n Just…why<\/I>….<\/p>\n I suppose it’s just not my problem anym\u2014<\/p>\n Why the hell is…what’s this got to do with…why am I even hearing about…fine: I’ll be here all day.<\/p>\n So that<\/I> was a lie. Again.<\/p>\n Look. I’m not part of this anymore. You sucked; it was in the past. Beleaguering me with additional\u2014oh for the love of hell….<\/p>\n Oh.<\/p>\n So, UPS showed up. I’d call it unannounced, but they’ve kinda given themselves roughly a month to drop by whenever the hell they remember they’ve got a job to do.<\/p>\n So what happened was that, at 1.07PM, a lazy hilarious criminal blocked my driveway with a UPS Truck, rolled a hundred and four pounds of the bells from a barbell up through the snow, rolled it around the house to the front door, dumped it in the snow to get all soggy, ignored the doorbell recording him entirely, and wandered away without waiting for a signature or anything.<\/p>\n I went out and got this soggy loaf of misery, without a rolley thing, and brought it inside to get shots of as it pissed breadwater down onto the carpet.<\/p>\n And that’s all I’ve done, apart from marvelling at how much packing tape has been applied to this miserable heavy thing despite still allowing it to soak up molten snow in a matter of seconds until I could get outside to pick it soggily up. Now it’s just sitting there on the floor in the corridor, where I don’t really want it anymore, where I got the money back for it already, where I got an extra twenty bucks or whatever, where I don’t even know for sure what’s in it: Bells for a Barbell? Weapons Grade Plutonium? An Economic Plan Agreeable to All? Wouldn’t know: it stopped being my problem a while ago.<\/p>\n Except that it’s on my floor, slowly pissing bread, and being a thing someone might want me to pick up again and return to some hilarious criminal somewhere.<\/p>\n I’m not doing that.<\/p>\n Really, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to acknowledge that this soggy mess finally showed up here. I’m certainly not reboxing the damned thing; and I can’t imagine that UPS would pick it back up in the condition they molested it into.<\/p>\n I’m just gonna ignore it for a while. Say, at least for the next twenty-seven days. And then we can discuss what I charge for shipping.<\/p>\n I guess, at the least, I had a reason to lift a hundred pounds after all. The thrill’s kinda gone about that<\/I> now.<\/p>\n Minor update, of sorts:<\/p>\n You know what I know: I posted an image because I’m funny; something called UPS Customer Service replied to it. I don’t know why it replied to this post; I don’t know if it’s a scam account faking an actual UPS Account, or an actual UPS Account scamming because they’re hilarious criminals. But there it is.<\/p>\n Maybe it thought it was responding to something I’d posted on March the First.<\/p>\n But, wait: there’s more….<\/p>\n Somehow.<\/p>\n So, Hunter just got an EMail from amazon.com, accusing her of knowing that she had to return the clump of stuff that finally showed up on the Twenty-seventh, and that they’d charge her if she didn’t.<\/p>\n Let’s take a second to catch up on all this….<\/p>\n Back on the Twenty-seventh, a UPS Loaf finally wheeled this battered mess of a cardboard box up to the front door and tumbled it into a puddle of melting snow\u2014reducing the cardboard box to a cardboard sack. You saw the images, above.<\/p>\n I grabbed it without a wheely thing and carried it inside, because I’m too strong to work for UPS. And then I got the shots of it, above.<\/p>\n Then I ignored it for a while as it pissed snowwater into the carpet all night.<\/p>\n Eventually, I became curious enough to go ahead and open the thing.<\/p>\n Unshockingly, there were bits missing. Hang on: I’ll point that out on the image from the site….<\/p>\n Four of the little clippy things weren’t even in there. Nevermind that the two that were<\/I> are relatively functionless, since the bars they need to slide onto are a little too banged up to let them fit correctly.<\/p>\n But that’s academic, because I don’t care. By the time this miserable mess showed up and proved incomplete, I didn’t even want the thing anymore. Like, at this point, if I want barbells, I’ll just drive a kilometre over to a sporting goods store, buy good ones, and throw them in the car. Even if that’s a level of effort I’d hoped to dodge by makebelieving that UPS could do some of that for me.<\/p>\n But then, to reiterate, Hunter got an EMail:<\/p>\n Okiedokie: I’m officially attentive now.<\/p>\n Here’s what I’m just about on the edge of willing to do for you idiots. I’ll stuff what I received of this multifraudulent clump of suck back into the cardboard sack I’ve retained; I’ll print out your label and set it somewhere on the cardboard sack’s surface; I’ll use whatever combination of packing tape and duct tape and thoughts and prayers to reseal the entire amorphous disease of a sack n\u00e9e box, and get it out the front door, and set it roughly where I found it…though there’s no puddle there anymore…I might be able to make<\/I> a puddle…and keep it watered over the coming days of sunshine.<\/p>\n My point is that I’ll get it back out where I should never have touched it in the first place; I’ll leave it there until or unless you can manufacture a UPS Loaf capable of coming and getting it; I’ll bill you a thousand dollars an hour for storage until you do.<\/p>\n What I won’t<\/I> do, under pain of death and\/or another Disney StarWars FanFic, is to get the cardboard sack to my car, and into it, and two<\/I> kilometres\u2014twice the distance from me as the sporting goods store\u2014to an Authorised UPS Loaf Factory to hand it off to whatever subhuman migratory sponge you imagine could ever drag it back to you.<\/p>\n That cool?<\/p>\n …is what I woulda<\/I> said, if Hunter hadn’t just jumped into a chatroom to get this instead:<\/p>\n That having been a PDF that she printed from the chatscreen a yoctosecond before it autoclosed, I can probably copypaste it for you:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/weights.jpg\")
You put it together once, and then it weighs a bit.<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\nMarch the First<\/H1><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/20230301bar.png\")
Busy day for the bar of the barbell.<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\n March the Second<\/H1><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/20230302bar.png\")
Day Two: it’s all on the move.<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\n March the Third<\/H1><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/20230303bar.png\")
This is relevant to my interests: I too am in Aurora.<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\nMarch the Fourth<\/H1><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/20230304bar.png\")
And…we’re done.<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\nMarch the Fifth<\/H1><\/p>\n
March the Sixth<\/H1><\/p>\n
March the Seventh<\/H1><\/p>\n
March the Eighth<\/H1><\/p>\n
March the Ninth<\/H1><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/20230309realtimeupdate.jpg\")
Just…all of the entire hell.<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/map.jpg\")
Oh, now<\/I> you’re fast….<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/outfordelivery.png\")
This is not a screen you should ever believe.<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\nMarch the Tenth<\/H1><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/comegetit.jpg\")
‘You don’t understand: we’re satirically terrible at our jobs!!!1’<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/fb.png\")
Seriously: go tell on me, you hilarious criminals.<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/chatmeatbot.jpg\")
Hunter sent me this to indicate that the hilarious criminals weren’t doing anything about it.<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/fiorella.png\")
Fiorella.<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/estella.jpg\")
Estella.<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\nMarch the Sixteenth<\/H1><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/refunded.jpg\")
‘Sorry we suck.’<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\nMarch the Twenty-first<\/H1><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/20230321bells.png\")
Why is this updating….<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\nMarch the Twenty-fifth<\/H1><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/20230325bells.png\")
This has now become a hatecrime.<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\nMarch the Twenty-sixth<\/H1><\/p>\n
March the Twenty-seventh\u2014Today<\/H1><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/stopit.png\")
STOP IT!!!1<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/itsbread.jpg\")
It’s bread!<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/itsabox.jpg\")
It’s a box.<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\nMarch the Twenty-eighth<\/H1><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/upscustomerservice.png\")
Wrong post, Dummy.<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\nApril the Sixth<\/H1><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/weights.png\")
Also, my handwriting is too educated for UPS: it’s unreadable.<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/threatyemail.png\")
‘Or Else!!!1’<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gremlin.net\/blogue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/pdf.png\")
Feeling myopic yet?<\/FONT><\/CENTER><\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.stickprimo.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/2023-03-27-oreometer.png\")
<\/A>