Baud Attitude

Edit: This post has been getting a lot of hits and I figure you are all probably very busy and don’t want to read a boring story before getting to the answer.  Check the “Tracking” screen for your package in the Amazon app on your phone, or “Message Center” under Your Account.  If you still want to read the boring story of how I got in trouble with my company’s mail room, keep reading. 🙂

Boring post title, I know. This is another one of those cases where I had a minor annoyance and thought I’d do my best to spare others of the same.

I work an odd shift, and I’m a bit of a shut-in anyway, so I get a lot of stuff delivered from Amazon. I’m not a huge fan of having packages left at the front door, though, so I usually get them sent to work. It adds peace of mind.

I am currently not in the good graces of our mail room, however, due to a tiny lapse in judgement that absolutely anyone could have made.

If you must know, I had a chainsaw shipped to work. It turns out that some people consider that a “dangerous item” that violates our security policies. For the record, our building’s security manager is a very nice chap and I wouldn’t have had the chance to meet him otherwise, so it’s not like it was all bad.

So… I don’t want to have anything sent to work until they’ve had a chance to forget that. A year sounds about right.

I’m relaxing my standards on what I’ll ship home, but for anything more than 20 bucks or so I’m still probably going to want it delivered somewhere secure.

Enter the Amazon Locker. I’ve used these once before, when I was traveling and wanted something sent to me, but it’s been several years since – fortunately, long enough for one to finally exist in my fairly small home town.

So I placed a small order to be delivered to the local locker, and I checked the Amazon app today and noticed that it had been delivered.

There was only one problem: I didn’t get the delivery notification email that would have included the pickup code to actually open the locker. I checked my spam folder, even, with no luck. It does turn out that my email provider has been a little over aggressive with the spam filtering, so I need to figure out how to tell it to tone that down, but that wasn’t helpful in actually getting to the package.

There’s also no “resend code” on the Amazon web site, or at least not one I could find.

It turns out that, should you find yourself in similar straits, the pickup code is available on the TRACKING screen for the package. This may seem obvious, and in retrospect it IS kind of obvious, but I had a few panicked moments before I thought to look there.

Also, chainsaws are not appropriate objects to be sent to the office mail room. That’s probably more obvious still, but sometimes I am not the brightest bulb on the strand.

I was probably exposed to the Internet too early – both in that I was in my teens and that it was the mid 1980s, before the advent of the world wide web, before anyone but the government and colleges really had access, before anyone was really paying attention to what a bunch of weird nerds were up to in the machine room late at night.

I’ve seen a lot of things that I would probably have been better off never seeing, is what I’m getting at.  Not just in the way your mind just went – get it out of the gutter, already – but just decades worth of people doing their level best to disprove the adage that there is no such thing as a stupid question.

You would think that I had long ago reached the nadir of this particular bell curve.

I thought so too.

It’s time to just shut it down.  It was a bad idea in the first place and I think we will all be much better off if we go back to the days of having a phone book, an encyclopedia, and a seedy corner video store to take care of all of our needs.

I’m ready to be kind and rewind.

Warning: Random social commentary post follows, which is quite out of the ordinary for this blog.  I apologize in advance, and invite you to come back again tomorrow for such riveting topics as “which Dragon Age character I would most like to sleep with.”

When I visited China a couple of years ago, one of the must-see sights on my trip was the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre, which is a little museum run entirely by one enthusiast – one enthusiast, I might add, who is either the bravest dude I have ever met, or the dumbest.  As an example, one of the exhibits on display is a poster of Mao, surrounded by his cabinet, addressing a crowd in Beijing.  It’s a fairly famous poster because it was frequently edited and reprinted as members of his cabinet fell out of favor and needed to be taken out, and the exhibit has multiple versions of it with handy annotations talking about who was removed.

China is pretty liberal these days, but that’s still a particularly ballsy move.

It may explain why the museum doesn’t have any sign visible from the street – literally, the way you get to this place is that you go to its address, walk back and forth a few times looking confused, and a security guard comes out, asks you if you’re looking for the museum, and then hands you a business card with a map on it to lead you to the front door.

I’m not kidding about any of that, by the way.

Anyway, while a lot of the museum’s posters can be looked at as art objects as much as political objects, there’s one small section that’s legitimately frightening to browse, and that’s the Big Character Poster section.  These aren’t printed posters, but rather hand-written, in huge characters (hence the name), to convey a single message.  During the Cultural Revolution, they were often used to attack specific people for not being proper revolutionaries, so you might show up at your work one day and be greeted with a huge poster out front calling you out, by name, with a list of your sins for all of your colleagues and any passers-by to see.

The Cultural Revolution, in general, is a fascinating period for me because it shows how originally good intentions can spiral completely out of control.  It’s also almost completely absent in popular culture, even though it would make a great setting for games or movies – the only time I’ve ever seen a mention of it was in The Red Violin, where the titular instrument is being hidden from zealots out to destroy all western instruments.

Anyway, internet culture has been reminding me a lot of these Big Character Posters recently, because it seems to be locked in a cycle where someone becomes internet-famous, followed by people scouring their posting history for signs of Wrong Thought, followed by an outcry once evidence of such is found.

It’s rather famously summed up by the Milkshake Duck tweet, reproduced below on the off chance you’ve never run across it.

To take it back a LITTLE bit from the Cultural Revolution comparison, the whole thing also reminds me of middle-and-high school, where there would be that One Weird Kid, who everyone mocked because, well, if you were all mocking the One Weird Kid, then nobody would be looking at you – and if anyone was looking at you, then you made sure to be twice as awful to the One Weird Kid, just to prove that you were cool.

The most recent example, of course, is The Last Night, a pixel art game that takes, shall we say, rather heavy inspiration from Blade Runner, and which made quite a splash during the Microsoft E3 presentation… enough of a splash to start the whole cycle of people raving about the game, digging up some old tweets by one of the developers, and then an internet mob coming for his job and to try to get his game dropped by his publisher and/or Microsoft.

It’s the sort of ridiculous momentary outrage that – well, I try to avoid referencing Orwell whenever possible, because “1984” is really the bath salts of literary reference, something you give as a gift when you can’t be bothered to find anything better, but what the heck – that really IS the Two Minutes Hate of our time, the focused tearing down of a person until the next Great Villain can be found, at which time the internet mob moves on leaving wreckage in its wake…

…and I kind of wonder how many of the participants are doing it just because they haven’t left the fear of being the next One Weird Kid behind.