I finally got around to hopping onto Amazon.ca support live chat^[1], and the net effect is that they are shipping me my order again.

So things are cool between me and the Mighty Amazon for now. And they will stay that way… provided the damned thing actually gets delivered this time.

Last time, as you may remember, Purolator tried a maximum of one times to deliver the thing then stuck a sticker on the door of the apartment complex saying I had to go pick the damned thing up at some godforsaken depot out by the airport.

That ended up not happening. I could not pull it off. I looked it up and I could have gotten there by transit. The Canada Line’s airport spur would have gotten me to within about a kilometer of it. And I can walk that far when needed.

But it would have meant having to find my way from the Skytrain to this place, and I have done fairly poorly at that task lately. And it would have meant going to somewhere completely unknown to me, which ups the ante on the social anxiety considerably. And I would have had to carry the thing home myself.

And I was pissed off about the whole thing, which was a factor. I can understand them missing us once. But according to the email from Amazon, they were going to try again next business day, which was the next Monday.

But no. Sticker on door, job over, come and get it, fuck you. Makes me wonder how much Amazon knows about how Purolator is dicking people around.

Well they know more now, because as it turns out, it shows up on Amazon’s side as “lost in transit”, so they think Purolator lost the shipment.

As far as I am concerned, they did.

I tried to arrange a ride to go pick it up, but that was not an option. Felicity was too busy and the depot closes at 7:30 pm, and Joe usually gets home at around 7:15 pm these days, so that wasn’t going to cut it either.

I will meet the forces that be half way by making sure someone is awake and around for the entire business day on Thursday, which is the guaranteed delivery date. That way,  I can be absolutely sure that if it does not arrived, it was not delivered. It wasn’t that they “missed” us. It was that they didn’t even fucking try.

I wouldn’t get my keyboard under that circumstance, I’d get vindication for my dark suspicions about the state of courier delivery these days, and that’s almost as good.

Better, in some ways. Not healthy ways. But ways.

It will be a big load off my mind when that problem is solved. I have had a number of very scary moments lately where I thought this keyboard had died for good and I had a genuine crisis on my hands, but luckily I have been able to coax it back to life so far.

I really hope that somewhere, somehow, Purolator will get in shit for fucking this whole thing up. Customer complaints mean more today than they ever have before because they can be acted upon so swiftly and we live in a world where the reputation of a business is paramount.

You don’t want to get on the internet’s bad guy list, and have people shun your company because you are now seen as a corporate villain and part of all that’s wrong with the world today. That can cost a company millions of bucks in a matter of minutes.

Other than that, things are fairly decent in my life. I have decided to stop beating myself up for my current dissolute lifestyle of pretty much nothing but Skyrim.

So what if it seems like I am wasting my life? It’s mine to waste. And I am spending my days doing something I enjoy, and that means I am pretty happy a lot of the time.

And that is quite the accomplishment in my life.

Most importantly, beating myself up over it accomplishes nothing. Worse than that, it makes me want to escape reality even more and hence pushing me deeper into the arms of my addiction.

While I am Skyrimming (ha!), I am deeply absorbed and quite happy. I am not worried about my life and the time passes easily.

That might not be the life I envision when I graduated from VFS, but spending your days doing something you enjoy is not the worst fate in the world.

Eventually, my Skyrim obsession will fade away (might take a while, but it will) and ambition and discontent will re-emerge naturally and organically.

Over and over again, I must learn the lesson that I am far, far better off working from the inside out – from motivation to acting on said motivation and thus rewarding it with result – rather than from the “outside” in as my fractured and malformed metaconscious tries to enforce its preconceived ideas on my fragile id.

Fuck self-control as we define it in the West, like it’s a thing we impose on ourselves as an act of will as opposed to something which flows naturally from one’s desires for a better future with better outcomes for oneself.

As long as it relies on the mythological substance known as willpower, self-control is doomed to fail. In a sense, that’s the definition of the tragedy of modern life, or at least one of them.

Real self-control flows from within and comes from doing the emotional work necessary to find the part of you that desires the improvement increased self-control will give.

Then it becomes an issue of choosing between two things you want, not a matter of not getting what you want.

And that’s a way easier equation to solve.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.