Misdelivery
I came up to our residence level of the Hillel house this evening to find my roommate Emmanuel incredulously looking over two boxes of groceries on the kitchen table that had obviously been delivered sometime in the evening. There was something wrong here: we had already received our groceries earlier that day from the people Hillel charges with the task (the restaurant-owners); they had never been delivered like that before; and on inspection, not everything was kosher. But some of the contents needed refrigerating so we knew we had to do something quickly. And one of the boxes was leaving a dark liquid on our kitchen table.
Looking at the box, it read “3460 Peel St, apt 9**” which explained the problem: we reside at 3460 of the next street along. The delivery-person had obviously been a little confused. Thankfully there was also a phone number on the side of the box. I took Emmanuel downstairs to the phone, where, if the person answered “hello” I would speak, and if “Allô”, Emmanuel would take the handset.
A girl answered with English, and I explained that we’d received her groceries. She asked which apartment we were in, but I told her we were on another street. She—a little worried—said she didn’t have a car, took my number and proceeded to call the supermarket (ir)responsible.
We found out that Jon had let the delivery guy in. He figured that the delivery must, for some reason, be for us, and had led the boxes to the kitchen table. Only once the guy was gone did he see the wrong address, but decided not to do anything about it.
Soon enough the delivery guy visited again and redeemed the goods. Iona had the final say on the event (except for the girl who called to thank me): Following up on recent conversation on how messy we keep our kitchen, and how much we rely on George the Hillel caretaker to clean up after us, she pointed at the black liquid mess left on the table and, returning to her room, exclaimed, “poor George!”