Chapter 3:
Eric Explores an Alternate Universe, Where You Move Away from Something in Order to Get Closer to it
I'm still hung up on the item being shipped from Bloomington Illinois that is struggling to find me. I had no idea where this particular Bloomington was, so I consulted Google Maps.
Here's how Google thinks my package should have travelled:
In this universe, Chicago or Minneapolis would be the hub for the courier company, and the parcel would go north to Winnipeg.
Maybe in the days when trains were the dominant form of transportation this would make sense, but we all know that Toronto is the centre of Canada, and packages going to Canada are much more likely to be destined for a thin strip of land adjacent to the U.S. border somewhere between London and Montreal.
So the courier company's view of the trip looks like this:
In this universe, items headed for Canada get sorted at a few central hubs and are distributed from there.
As a customer, this neither surprises me nor particularly disappoints me. If this thing absolutely had to be here for Christmas, I would have paid the 100% markup on shipping.
Previous posts: Christmas Present Takes a Genealogical Tour; If a Present Is Still in Truck, It's not Really Present, Is It?
OK, now I'm getting a little obsessed with this item as well. Where is it really? And more to the point, what is it? We're all dying to know, and since today is Christmas, can we find out now, huh, can we, can we???
I'm hanging on every post...
Oh, and by the way, I loved the part about your grandparents and their own journey through the country...kind of a cool way to integrate your own history into your current reality.
Posted by: Dave Traynor | December 25, 2006 at 11:30 AM