via Amazon

I'd ordered two things for myself from Amazon: a tent and a Blu-ray of "Picard," Season 3 (reviewed here).* The Blu-ray got to me in a timely manner, but the tent was another story. It arrived in South Korean Customs at the very end of November, then languished there for weeks because of some sort of "delay" (according to Amazon). 

When this kind of delay happens (and it's happened before several times), Amazon normally advises you to contact the local shipper who takes over the delivery of the package. Generally, at least in my case, the holdup is almost always because Customs needs my customs-release number, an alphanumeric serial code that is linked to all my other residential information, e.g., my passport number and my Alien Registration Card number. It seems that no one saves your customs-release number—maybe for reasons of privacy—so every time there's a delay that needs to be resolved, you have to submit your number again and again.

In the past, a request for my customs-release number would come via Kakao, Korea's most popular messaging service. I'd see the request, hit the link to visit the website where I could enter my number, type that bad boy in, and wait for my package, which would be released immediately and arrive one or two business days later. Simple. 

Now, though, Korean Customs (or the Korean shipper) no longer sends me any notification, so the only way for me to know there's been a delay is to visit the Amazon "My Orders" section of the site to see what's going on. I must then contact either Customs or, in the case of this tent, Hanjin Shipping so as to give them my customs-release number verbally, over the phone. 

The problem, this time around, was that I tried contacting both Customs and Hanjin, and both put me through a complicated sequence of "Press 2 for..." nonsense. In both cases, I ended up wanting to talk with a human being, and in both cases, a computer voice told me there were too many calls at the moment—sorry. Click. That's right: unlike with many American services where you hang around and wait your turn, Korean services simply hang up on you, forcing you to call again. I went through this rigamarole several times and eventually gave up. 

I remembered that Hanjin had a branch somewhere between Seoul and Seongnam City—I would see the building on my walks down to Bundang. So I decided I'd walk to that office and talk to someone directly. But a day after I'd made the decision to walk toward Bundang in the sub-freezing cold, Amazon actually auto-emailed me to say that my package had arrived, and that it had been "left in a mail slot." Now if that were true, there's no way the package could be my tent, but the Amazon auto-email showed a picture of my tent. I checked my mailbox, which sits in a bank of mailboxes in the same area as the elevators on my floor, and sure enough, it was the "Picard" Blu-ray that had arrived. I was happy to see "Picard" but frustrated that there had been some sort of mix-up: I'd been hoping to see my tent. 

I picked up "Picard" before work, and while I was at work, it occurred to me that the mix-up could also mean that the tent had indeed arrived but had made it only as far as my apartment building's front desk at the lobby level. When I got back from work, no guard was at the front desk, which is built like a long bar, so I peeked over the edge of the bar and saw a large-ish package with my apartment number scribbled in marker. It then occurred to me that my buddy Mike had said he'd also sent a package my way, so I started wondering whether this box could have been Mike's package and not my tent. Frustrated, I went up to my apartment, did some errands, then went back to the lobby in hopes of catching the guard/concierge. He wasn't there, so I sat and waited for him, and he showed up, looking apologetic, two minutes later. He went behind the bar, handed me my box, and I took it upstairs.

So as it turned out, it was my tent! Sorry, Mike, but your package hasn't arrived yet. I assume it'll get here when it gets here.

As I'd mentioned elsewhere, I'm switching back from using bivy sacks to using a tent. Roomier. More comfortable.

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*People have asked me whether I might go back and watch Seasons 1 and 2 of "Picard"—the bad seasons—just to see the difference in quality for myself. A morbid part of me is curious about doing that, but the more practical side of my brain responds that watching the universally panned Seasons 1 and 2 would be a waste of time and wouldn't amount to much more than hate-watching. So for the moment at least, I'm leaning toward a "no" for the first two seasons of "Picard." 

Trivia: a lot of the badness of the first two seasons comes from Patrick Stewart himself. He was apparently sick of playing the Picard we'd come to know and love in the 90s, and a condition of his coming back to play the role in a new series was that he wanted none of the regular trappings of the old Trek: no Starfleet, no uniforms, no Enterprise, no captaincy. 

Now, if you know anything about Patrick Stewart and his dramatic choices, you know he's gotten into trouble in the past for how he incarnated certain Shakespearean roles (his "Tomorrow and tomorrow" delivery in a production of Macbeth got him in hot water; his weird shrug as King Claudius, right before drinking poison in Hamlet, was also interesting to say the least). As an actor, Stewart likes pushing boundaries, and that can be risky, resulting in great praise or great blame. Something like that urge must have carried over into Trek, and the result was two seasons of things done Stewart's way. The fans hated it. So Season 3 of "Picard" was a rare example of filmmakers acceding to a vociferous fanbase in an age when fans are ignored at best and spat upon at worst. A lot of credit for rescuing "Picard" goes to screenwriter Terry Matalas who brought back old-school Trek.