Tried to order a coffee grinder on Amazon. Intelligently, they chose not to ship "non-essential goods" for a period of weeks or months.
Ah, but I could get coffee shipped immediately. And a new pair of headphones -- what with wearing them twelve hours a day both for entertainment and to block out the drunken bellowing from next door, my old ones have peeled through and are quite uncomfortable.
I suspect DVD's and boxed games are also considered "essential goods." GameStop tried that argument too. Didn't work as well for them.
Of course Amazon decided to hand deliver. Separately. Which means two trips, two contacts, two violations of quarantine for stuff that would easily fit in a mailbox. This is one more system that grew up in a different time and isn't managing to adjust to the new paradigm. China, they locked up entire buildings and only permitted one person out to buy food for everyone. We're still having a teenager run pizzas around town.
I want a pizza. I am hurting for meat and veggies. I am going on a no-carb diet when this is over. Oats in the morning, rice at night. Efficient, but...
***
I pushed through the next scenes and am on a new chapter. I am really liking this scheme of researching just enough to get the outline working, then fill in the details as you go. If I hadn't, I would have studied way more stuff about museum conservation. When I hit that chapter is when I figured out how much I could say and how much I needed to leave it off the page.
But my cast has just walked into a pub and that did mean an afternoon of catching up on pub food, pub names, pub etiquette...
And the outline is starting to look thin. It pretty much says, "Field school continues, Penny makes friends but is starting to feel the pressure, also goes around with Graham talking to British Character types like the first half of an Avengers episode" (the one with the bowler hats, not the one with the Hulk).
Edited down to 7.1K and I have enough aluminium-billet ground coffee for just one more cup...
Fourteen hundred words down today. The pub scene is in full swing. Wish it was NaNoWriMo so I had a public place to post my word counts!
I suspect much of the inconsistency at Amazon depends on whose warehouse the item is actually in.
ReplyDeleteYes, but that just underlines the point. The economics and organization of Amazon was around being able to funnel product from wherever it was cheaper to obtain to wherever it was cheaper to warehouse to however it was cheaper to ship.
DeleteNone of those were intended to be compatible with a reduction of potential disease vectors. Like large class sizes to overcrowded public transit, it is an finely-tuned economic system that has difficulty adapting to a new conditional.