Ordered some stuff from Amazon UK on Monday, for next day delivery which as is sometimes the case became Wednesday on the payment/delivery page whereas it had been Tuesday on the order page. This was a mid-day order so I had assumed Tuesday was reasonable when "next day" was specified. 

I'm not especially concerned, the package isn't urgent (just some little brass feet to stop the speaker stand spikes making holes in the bamboo floor) but I am curious now.The fistful of emails still insist it's arriving today by 9:00 PM but tracking says that it departed Lonate Pozzolo, VA IT at 05:30 this morning. Lonate Pozzolo is literally metres from Malpensa airport so I'm not sure whether it actually left Italy at 05:30, or left an Amazon/Vendor facility at that time. In any case it then has to travel to a UK airport, be unloaded and sorted to travel on to a UK Amazon facility and from there to the local distribution hub down the road from me, where it will be loaded onto a van before being thrown into my neighbour's garden delivered. (That's mean. I have some respect for the Amazon delivery people who are usually very friendly in spite of the shitty pay, long hours and pressure to deliver).

So much for deliberately picking a UK company with a BRITISH (in capitals) product to avoid the month long delay from China - even though it's so much cheaper to have stuff like this made by political prisoners. I wonder if it will arrive today. 

I've fallen foul of their next day delivery thing before - it's next day delivery /after/ dispatch. Which could be 3 weeks from when I've put the order through.

Once you've got the notification though telling you it's getting delivered on a particular day, then that is usually the case. In my own experiences they've been 100% accurate.

 

I'm always amazed when tracking packages by the circuitous routes and time-consuming warehousing and sorting measures taken, that anything can get delivered inside of 3-weeks.

WooHoo!

Checked in at Castle Donington, UK and departed the facility at 09:17.

That's in Leicestershire, bang on the doorstep of East Midlands Airport - so I assume that's where it landed. That's 178 miles away and realistically a 4 hour road trip away from the local Amazon depot (and about the same if they deliver straight to me which is unlikely). So will probably arrive locally early afternoon.

Now it all depends on whether the local depot sends another van out today.

It managed less than 20Km in my direction and is currently "Loading"* whatever that is supposed to mean at Bardon Hill (another Amazon site, still in Leicestershire).

Amazon says:
   
I wasn't irritated but now I am. I expected something a bit more fulsome than a qualified 'sorry'. It actually comes over as 'too bad, never mind'.

*and has been "loading" for the last 3 hours

Whenever I've ordered something from Amazon that hasn't shown up next day^* it's because I somehow magically managed to order it from a third party seller instead of directly from or fulfilled by Amazon.

^{* Amazon Prime in USA isn't even next day, but that might just be an east coast thing. I'm sure California has it down to next hour by now.}

It just means it was barcode-scanned on a conveyor belt (or a digital manifest submitted), and is now sitting in a bin or back of a truck awaiting the next leg of its journey.

That's true, but I knew that was the case here; it comes from a firm called PrecisionGeek. 

I But all the promises and failures are Amazon's. Also only bothering to notify me after I'd waited when they must have known it was going to be late much earlier (and probably very likely to be late seeing as the items were in Italy).

So now (20:14) the package has 'departed an Amazon facility Bardon Hill...'

I'm optimistic that this will be a big van doing a series of drop-offs at distribution centres at various points in my direction ending somewhere near Littlehampton (my local depot).

On a totally unrelated topic, I was once told that in the days when homosexuality was illegal, a common coded approach was to ask the time, presumably in a suitably suggestive manner. If the reply came back "12 O'Clock" then that was confirmation of mutual interest. I always thought that the towns Southampton and Northampton could be worked into a similar code; which begs the question of how Littlehampton would fit in. 

On another unrelated note, a friend of mine who went on to great things in Newspaper editorship once worked for the Maidenhead Advertiser which I thought would be a wonderful name for a medieval contact magazine.

I should leave.

OK, since I imagine you're all hanging on every word of this thread...

Gripping. Can't wait to see how it ends.

It's tense. Can't wait 'til it's past tense.

It ends with a late delivery, or a lost parcel.

Eh voila!