The Missing Box

My workday yesterday was consumed by an unsolved mystery.

Several weeks ago, we ordered a couple of hard-to-find DVDs for the library, at the request of one of the administrators. They were not cheap, and we grew increasingly concerned when they didn't arrive in the mail. My co-worker looked into it and found that they'd not only been shipped from the USA but supposedly delivered on Oct. 22, and sure enough, one of our security guards had signed for them.

We looked into it more and found CCTV images of the package in our loading bay, and then in the process of being delivered inside the school by one of our staff members.

So where the heck did this box go? Normally, library deliveries come to my desk, but I was shelf-reading that day and wasn't sitting there. My boss and co-worker were also in, but neither of them remembers seeing it arrive. It has completely vanished.

I went down to the loading bay yesterday morning -- before we were certain the box had made it into the school itself -- and looked everywhere I could think of. I got down on my knees and peered beneath pallets and cleaned up randomly scattered catalogs and newspapers to make sure our package wasn't somehow among them. We then looked everywhere in the library we could think of. Nothing.

I did, however, find...

...this bag of baked pita chips in the depths of my desk, behind my bottom drawer. I never eat chips, so it seemed kind of weird. And then I looked at the expiration date.

They expired in January 2013 -- or perhaps October, if the date is written American style, which seems unlikely. In any case, they're really old. They've been there since before I took this job in autumn 2013! They were my predecessor's chips!

No, I did not eat them. I'm not that adventurous. They're now on their way to the landfill or the incinerator or wherever our rubbish goes.

Meanwhile, our DVDs are still lost. We've put an announcement in our internal newsletter asking people to keep an eye out for them, in case they were simply delivered to the wrong office -- but it seems weird in that case that someone wouldn't have discovered them by now.

It's just amazingly bad luck that of all the packages to go missing, this is the one that did. Most of our deliveries are £5 paperback books. Why did it have to be the £200 DVDs that disappeared?

(Top photo: Outside the Swiss Cottage tube station on a recent rainy evening.)