Recently, while preparing to embark on a trip to another state, I encountered a snag in the form of evident fraud on my credit card. This was some next-level stuff, appearing as charges to a vendor that I sometimes use. There were four of these charges, and for a while I just wracked my brain. Had I ordered some doodads in my sleep? Further investigation indicated no record of these purchases on the vendor’s website, at which point I raised the alarm. Several conversations later with the nice credit card company folks, and our new cards were winging their way westward, with assurances that UPS would get them to us using their famous “next day air” service.

OK, so point of order. It would be so nice if large transit companies would introduce a policy of checking the map before making these extravagant promises. The first sign of trouble, which I chose to dismiss, was being reminded that, while a street address is required, my street address does not register on their system. Now, I have encountered this nonsense before, and we wily denizens of the wilderness have a useful hack: we give the nice kid on the phone the street address of our local post office and include our P.O. box number in a format that implies it to be an apartment or suite number. This satisfies the loons of corporate America, and we eventually get our stuff.

Next snag, or series of snags, came in the form of several delays. The first delay occurred due to a “sortation error” somewhere in Illinois; while the second came as the result of a “required security check.” The third and final delay occurred because the great grinding beast of a system had finally, dimly perceived that I live in a “remote area,” and therefore actual delivery of my package would occur willy-nilly.

Anyway, I had never really thought about the process of actually getting my UPS packages. I recalled that I had given the post office address as the point of delivery. I knew that Taquan Air is our UPS carrier for the island. I started wondering: are they going to try to give it to the post office? What if the post office is closed? Will they send it back? I called the local agent, who assured me that they would bring the package to my house, having the rare ability to simply use my name to look up my street address. Imagine if everybody in this community of 1,100 souls had their UPS packages delivered to the post office? There would be a reckoning of some kind, I have no doubt.

Anyway, two days before our scheduled departure, I learned that the package had arrived in our “hub” city of Ketchikan. As we would be leaving home to travel to Ketchikan, I became concerned that we would cross paths in the air, with our package arriving on our porch after we had left home.

Sometime, when you have nothing else whatever to do, try calling UPS to ask the exact location of your packages. After three or four iterations of well-intentioned individuals reading me back the same information that I could plainly see on my own email, and learning that there is no way to actually talk to someone in the Ketchikan UPS office without storming the gates, and accepting the fact that Taquan Air had too many UPS packages to sort through prior to delivery, I gave up and consigned myself to fate. The package arrived on my front porch the day before we were to leave.

Somewhere during all of this I heard myself say in a snippy voice, “I am about to leave on vacation, and it will be very difficult for me to travel without a credit card.” Karen much? Chagrinned, I thought to myself about how I have not been murdered by the Iranian morality police, or hauled off by the Burmese generals to spend my life’s evening in prison, or worked in a call center talking to people who don’t speak a word of my language but grumble when I mispronounce something in theirs. Gentle readers, know that I am grateful for all that I have received, and not received, in my life. I just feel more confident when I’m packin’ the plastic.