The New Ray-Bans

I had nightmare ordering sunglasses from RayBan.com.

Despite the PO's contract with UPS and the fact that I pre-signed delivery slips, UPS didn't even try.They have no competitive interest in making USPS customers happy.

My phone battery was dead so I couldn't get alternative delivery together quickly. Just a 15 minute wait on a pay phone for no answer from UPS robot voice mail.

Then on Fri before president's day they tell me by postcard that I had one day left to go to UPS last chance outpost on the county line with Contra Costa to retrieve them.

It was farther out than Hilltop Mall and totally out of the way--a rare bus goes nearby.

My friend Chester drove me after a doctor's appointment with sand running out of the hour glass.
There we were in his quaintly anachronistic  1967 VW bus progressing along roadways crossing rolling hils arrayed before the Bay close and huge and the more distant mountains of Marin.

It was on a road off the Richmond Parkway --a locale for a Hitchcock movie like "North  by Nortwest." The office was in an isolated trailer like building fronting the resting place of elephantine trailer trucks for UPS long-hauls. You could see the Point Pinole wildlife refuge beyond UPS' grim precincts.

Two Chinese-american attendants. The lady took the postcard and squinted at it.

She went toward a back area with shelves.

But my intuition said silently, "Why are you going back there? It's over here in this small bin."

She came back,  hems and  haws as if its uncertain what I've done wrong. Then she went over to where I suspected it was and it was.

They were already shipping it back . But despite their malfeasance I finally got a modicum of relief.

Things got even weirder on the way home and I wasn't even high.

We followed signs to the "Giant Highway" ( I looked out for Paul Bunyon and Babe the Blue-ox.)

Then it was a long drive through an industrial Monument Valley of towering grey black smoke stacks and the like all made chiaroscuro by my new wrap-around sunglasses with radically polarizing lenses.

(excerpt from a letter to a friend)