I ordered a laptop the other week. It was a rush job because the previous one was unusable so I selected a model that had next day delivery.

I got an email at about 8.30pm that day saying that they’d dispatched it early! They’d have struggled to have got it to me next day if you’d dispatched it any later.

It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.

Dear customer: Great news! We are screwups so we just kind of assumed your package would be late, but in this ONE case, we are apparently not going to screw up as bad as we usually do! Please do not expect this level of excellence in the future.

Plot twist, it already showed up, yesterday, across town.

I can’t believe you’re trashing them instead of giving them maximum praise on every social media channel, driving there and giving the CEO a handy, working your way down management until you reach the marketing bro/broette that pitched the idea

Shipping and tracking shipments is pretty hard, people. You should try running a small business and meeting consumers’ very high expectations for this kind of thing. It’s not f*ing easy, even for the big boys, but especially for small time operators. You have to partner up with more than one external service and rely on them to not f things up and do that many times per day perfectly.

I bet if you (and many others) complain to that retailer they will stop trying to tell you when to expect the shipment at all. Is that what you’d prefer?