in which things are stolen
To provide additional backup space for our ever-growing collection of digital photos, I recently ordered a 1.5TB drive from Amazon.com. (I'm something of a fanatic when it comes to backups and have an elaborate but automatic system that works really well.)
Amazon shipped out the drive quickly and the package was sitting in our mailbox last night. And I knew, the instant I picked it up, that it was an empty box.
"Well damn", I thought, "someone at Amazon messed up and shipped me an empty box."
No, no, that wasn't it at all. What became clear, after bringing the box inside the house (where I could see it, as opposed to on the street where it's dark), is that the box had already been opened. The packing sheet holder had been removed. The packing sheet had been opened and read, and then someone had cut open the bottom of the box, took the hard drive out of the packing material, put the packing material back in the box (why, I have no idea) and then re-taped the box with shipping label intact.
Thank you United States Postal Service.
I called Amazon.com right away and they agreed to ship me a new hard drive (set to arrive on Tuesday next week). That's really cool of them. But I am a bit worried that now there's a note in my account: "Claims hard drive was stolen." If something like this happens again, then they're probably going to stop being so nice.