This is a continuation of a post I put up on 3 October 2014 (if you want to check out the original, titled “Where’s My Package?”).
Once again, we received notice that a package had been delivered, went to retrieve it, and found no package. So, this time I checked my camera system to determine whether I had been the victim of “Porch Pirates”. To my relief (if you want to call it that), there was no sign of a package delivery at my residense. I checked my front door camera, my driveway cameras and my cameras which show 138th Ave. Ct. E. and 117th St. E. I saw no record of a delivery van when the package was supposed to have been delivered. Then I surveyed the time from early morning until after we received the e-mail telling us that the package had arrived. No sign of a delivery van that entire day. I contacted the carrier and explained that I had received an e-mail telling me that my package had arrived, but I had cameras and knew that no delivery man entered my property. I stated my cameras also surveyed the roadway and I could say for certain that no delivery van had been on 136th Ave. Ct. E. on the day my package was supposed to have arrived.
I asked the carrier to contact the driver and ask him where he had dropped my package. I was told that they would “try” but I would probably have to wait until the driver finished his rounds. They promised to call me back. Not very satisfactory, especially since the followup call back never came.
Further sleuthing convinced me that the carrier was using an unmarked van and it had probably dropped my package off at a neighbors. Their house number is the same as mine, just one street over from mine. A quick call elicited the information that my neighbor had just arrived home and found my package at her front door. Soon thanks to her husband, who brought the package over, I was actually in receipt of my package.
I was able to track down my package because I had access to my cameras and Neighborhood snapshots in our neighborhood repository. In this case it probably only saved me about 5 minutes because when I called the neighbors my package had just been discovered. Thank goodness for good neighbors.
It’s nice to have cameras. If someone had stolen the package from my front door, I would have had a pictorial record of them, from several cameras, all time stamped and evidence to show police. The pictures would have been far better than you can get from the 1080P that even the better doorbell cameras have.
Before I started this post, I contacted Dav Eide, and he told me that he too had a missing package recently. Dav knew it had never arrived because he also has a camera system. In his case, the vendor shipped a replacement which was lost, probably by delivery to the wrong address.