This is a story about a woman who has been receiving, on average, one wrong Amazon package per month for the past three years, what she has tried and failed to do about it, and what she has, in the past twelve months, decided to do instead.
The woman — I will call her Frances, because she chose the name and would not, when I asked, explain why — is forty-seven. She lives in a small ranch house in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She works in the accounts payable department of a mid-sized regional trucking company. She has, by her own account, a very quiet life. She has been divorced since 2016. She has one adult son who lives in Denver. She has, in her words, “a routine I have gotten used to and which I do not, most days, question.”
Since April of 2023, she has been receiving Amazon packages that were not, in the strictest sense, ordered by her.
She has, at the time of this writing, received forty-one such packages.
She has not, in the past twelve months, opened a single one of them with the intention of returning it.
The first package
The first package, in Frances’s careful telling, arrived on a Wednesday afternoon in April of 2023. It was a small brown box, of the exact size and shape that Amazon packages typically arrive in. It had her correct address on it. It had her correct name on it. It had, however, one small discrepancy on the shipping label: the second line of the address, which should have said “APT B,” said “APT F.”
Frances does not live in an apartment.
Frances lives in a small ranch house. She does not have an apartment letter. She has never had an apartment letter. Her mail, which had been arriving correctly for the twelve years she had lived in the house, has never had an apartment letter on it before.
She opened the package.
Inside the package was a small item she has told me — with what I have come to recognize as a specific kind of gentle amusement — was “a novelty ice cube tray shaped like tiny goldfish.”
She has told me she stood in her kitchen, holding the tiny-goldfish ice cube tray, for approximately three minutes.
She has told me she had not, at that point, ever considered the possibility of a novelty ice cube tray shaped like tiny goldfish.
She has told me she was not entirely sure what to do.
The initial attempts to correct the situation
Frances did, in April and May of 2023, everything a reasonable person in her position would do.
She contacted Amazon. She was, after some initial routing, told that the package had been delivered correctly according to the shipping label, and that if she was not the intended recipient, she should either return the item using the standard return process (which she could not do, because she was not the account holder) or she should simply consider it a “gift from Amazon” (which she was told, apparently, is a phrase Amazon customer service representatives are trained to use in this specific situation).
She contacted the United States Postal Service. She was told that Amazon uses its own delivery infrastructure and that the postal service could not assist.
She Googled the address on her block. She found no evidence of an “APT F” anywhere within a five-mile radius. There is, she has told me, no apartment complex nearby. There is not, in her neighborhood, anything with an apartment letter attached to it.
She wrote a small note. She taped the note to the front of her mailbox. The note said, in Frances’s own handwriting: “If you are the person receiving packages intended for you at this address by mistake, please contact me at [her phone number]. I have your goldfish ice cube tray.”
Nobody called.
She left the note on the mailbox for approximately three weeks. She then took it down.
She placed the tiny-goldfish ice cube tray in a drawer in her guest bedroom.
She has told me she assumed, at the time, that this would be the end of it.
The second package. Then the third.
The second package arrived approximately five weeks later.
The second package was, in Frances’s account, “smaller than the first, and even more difficult to explain.” It contained a small set of what she has described to me as “specialty magnets, of the kind you might see in a very specific home organization catalog.”
The third package arrived three weeks after that. It contained a battery-operated device that Frances, at the time, could not fully identify. She has told me she believes it was, in retrospect, “some kind of small kitchen scale that only weighs things in metric.”
By the end of the first year, Frances had received twelve packages.
None of them contained anything expensive. None of them contained anything larger than roughly the size of a shoebox. None of them arrived in any predictable pattern — Frances has, at my request, checked the arrival dates against her calendar, and there is no pattern. Some months brought two. Some months brought none. The average, over the three years, has been just under one per month.
All of them arrived at her correct address with her correct name and the incorrect apartment letter “F.”
Frances has continued, occasionally, to try to fix the situation. She has, in her account, called Amazon two additional times. She has, once, called the delivery driver’s number that briefly appears in the app when a driver is en route. She has, once, in what she has told me was “a specific week during which I was, in my own private way, feeling both very lonely and very determined,” driven around her neighborhood looking for any building with an apartment letter on it.
She has not, in her three years of investigation, been able to identify the person for whom the packages are intended.
The person, she has told me, apparently does not exist.
Or, more precisely: the person exists somewhere, at some address, and Frances’s address has been, through some administrative accident nobody at Amazon has been able to correct, permanently linked to that person’s account.
The realization
I asked Frances, in our second phone conversation, when she began to think about the packages differently.
She has told me it happened, as best she can remember, at some point in the spring of 2024.
She has told me she was in her guest bedroom. She was, that day, cleaning out the closet — a project she had been putting off for approximately eleven months. She opened the drawer where she had been placing the packages. She had, at that point, accumulated seventeen unopened packages and, alongside them, the small pile of items she had opened and set aside — the tiny-goldfish ice cube tray, the specialty magnets, the metric kitchen scale, a small ceramic bowl painted with what appeared to be an oyster mushroom, a battery-operated cat toy in the shape of what Frances has described to me as “a shrimp with a face,” a set of six coasters printed with black-and-white photographs of small European cities, and several other small items she has told me she cannot fully catalog because she has, at some point in the last two years, “genuinely lost track.”
She has told me she stood in her guest bedroom looking at the accumulated items and had, in her own words, “a small useful realization.”
She has told me the realization was: “These are, when you look at them, mostly interesting.”
She has told me: “Somebody, somewhere, has been very carefully curating a small collection of very specific items. Somebody has been thinking about goldfish ice cube trays and shrimp cat toys and mushroom bowls. I do not know who that person is. But that person, I have decided, has better taste than I would have given them credit for. That person, I have decided, has a very specific and consistent sensibility. That person, I have decided, has been quietly furnishing my guest bedroom drawer for eleven months, and I have been ignoring it.”
She has told me she then, that afternoon, arranged the items on the guest bed. She looked at them.
She has told me she saw them, for the first time, as a collection.
She has told me she took a photograph of the arrangement. She has told me she did not know why she was taking the photograph, at the time.
She has told me she showed the photograph to a coworker, at lunch, the following Monday. She has told me the coworker said: “Frances, where did you get all of that. That is amazing.”
The first gift
The first gift was given to Frances’s coworker.
The coworker — who Frances has told me is named Beth, but who she has asked me to identify only as “a woman I have worked with for eight years and who I have, in that time, not really known personally” — mentioned, at that lunch, that her daughter’s birthday was coming up. The daughter, Beth said, was turning fourteen. The daughter was, Beth said, “in one of those phases where she is very hard to shop for.”
Frances, according to Frances, looked at the arrangement of items in the photograph on her phone. She looked at Beth. She said, in her own account: “Do you think your daughter would like a battery-operated cat toy shaped like a shrimp.”
Beth said, according to Frances: “Frances, that is exactly what my daughter would like.”
Frances brought the shrimp cat toy to work the following day. She wrapped it in brown paper. She gave it to Beth.
Beth’s daughter, apparently, was delighted.
Beth’s daughter, apparently, sent Frances a thank-you card.
The card, which Frances has shown me a photograph of, said in a fourteen-year-old’s careful handwriting: “Dear Ms. Frances — thank you for the shrimp. It has become the best thing in my room. Sincerely, Melody.”
Frances has told me she has, in the past year, given twelve additional gifts.
She has told me she has, in the past year, received four thank-you cards.
She has told me she has, in the past year, become — in a way she did not anticipate — “the person my friends and coworkers come to when they need a strange, specific, thoughtful small gift.”
She has told me she does not know how to feel about this.
She has told me she suspects, tentatively, that she likes it.
What she does with the packages now
I want to describe Frances’s current system, because it is one of the more careful small systems I have encountered in the course of writing this year.
Frances, when a new package arrives, no longer opens it immediately. She takes it into her guest bedroom. She places it on a small dedicated shelf she has, in the past six months, cleared for this purpose. She waits until, in her own phrasing, “she has a reason to open it.”
The reasons, in her account, vary. Sometimes she waits until a coworker mentions a birthday. Sometimes she waits until her son mentions a friend she has not met but whom he thinks would appreciate something small. Sometimes she waits until a neighbor’s dog dies and she wants, in some small quiet way, to acknowledge it.
She opens the package. She looks at what is inside. She decides who the gift is for.
She wraps it. She gives it.
She has told me that in the past twelve months, she has, in this way, given fourteen small gifts to fourteen different people. She has received, in return, one hundred and thirty-two words of thank-you-card correspondence, which she keeps, folded in a small envelope, in the same drawer she used to keep the accumulated packages in.
She has told me she reads the thank-you cards approximately once a week.
She has told me she is not entirely sure why.
What the packages have done for her
I have asked Frances, in the course of three phone conversations, what the packages have, in some way, done for her.
She has given me several answers. I do not think any of them is complete.
She has told me: “I have been divorced for nine years. I have lived alone for nine years. My son has lived in another state for six of those years. I do not, in the strict sense of the word, have a great deal of practice at being in other people’s lives. I am not the person, in my group of friends, who remembers birthdays. I am not the person who sends cards. I am not the person my sister goes to when she needs a small emotional favor. I have been, for approximately twenty years, the person other people help. I have not been, for a very long time, the person other people are helped by.”
She has told me: “The packages have, in some way I did not entirely design, given me a small reliable way to be helpful to people. They have given me a supply of small strange gifts I did not have to buy. They have given me a specific reason to think, once a month or so, about the specific people in my life and what one of them might, at that moment, need or want. They have, in the process of my thinking about this, made me a slightly better friend, and a slightly better aunt, and a slightly better coworker. I have not, before these packages, been particularly good at any of these things.”
She has told me: “The packages have, at the very least, made me pay attention.”
She has told me: “That is, honestly, more than most things have done for me in the past nine years.”
The one person she has not given a gift to
There is one person, in the story Frances has told me, that I want to briefly mention.
The person is the person for whom the packages are, apparently, actually intended.
Frances has told me that in the past three years, she has thought about that person a great deal. She does not know who they are. She does not know where they live. She does not know why the Amazon system has, without any correction, been sending her their packages.
She has told me that she has, in the past year, occasionally wondered whether she should, in some way, be delivering the gifts to them.
She has told me that she does not know how.
She has told me she has, in a small careful way, made her peace with this. She has told me: “If the person is real — and I have to assume they are — they have, at some point in the past three years, contacted Amazon about it too. They have received some version of the same non-response I have received. They have, at some point, given up. They have decided, in whatever way they have decided, that the packages they were expecting are not going to arrive. They have moved on. They have found another way to have a shrimp cat toy in their life. Or they have not.”
She has told me: “I am not, in the strict sense, the person these packages belong to. But I have, for three years, been the person they arrive at. That is, whether the algorithm intended it or not, a kind of role. I am trying to be, in the specific and small way available to me, useful in that role.”
She has told me: “That is what I have decided. I do not know if it is right.”
What this is
I have, in the weeks since I first heard this story, thought about the small and specific ways that modern administrative accidents create relationships nobody intended. Frances has been in a three-year relationship with a person she has never met. That relationship has been mediated entirely by Amazon’s logistics infrastructure. It has been sustained, on Frances’s side, by the small monthly ritual of a strange package arriving. It has been sustained, on the other person’s side, presumably, by the small monthly ritual of a strange package failing to arrive.
Frances has, in the past year, made something out of this accident. She has turned a stream of small unintended items into a small stream of small intended kindnesses. She has, in the process, made herself into a specific kind of person — a person who thinks about what other people might want, and gives it to them.
I do not know that Amazon meant for this to happen. I know that it has. I know that in some small way, this specific administrative accident, sustained for three years, has made Frances a slightly better member of her small Tulsa community. (For a related earlier piece on the small unintended relationships created by modern administrative errors, see the Wattalife story about the woman in Cincinnati who has been receiving someone else’s mail for nine years.)
Frances told me, in our final conversation, that she does not want the packages to stop.
She has told me she has, in the past six months, occasionally worried that Amazon will, at some point, figure out the error and correct it. She has told me the thought of this, when it occurs to her, makes her feel a small specific kind of grief that she has not, until recently, been able to name.
She has told me she suspects the grief is not, in the end, about the packages.
She has told me she suspects the grief is about becoming the person the packages have, over three years, quietly made her into.
She has told me she does not know what she would do, without them.
She has told me she hopes, tentatively, that she will not have to find out.
—
Margot Hale is the editor of Wattalife. She has, since reporting this story, checked her own mail delivery history and confirmed that she has, over the past several years, received exactly zero packages intended for other people. She has decided that this is either a mark of the specific administrative uprightness of her own life, or evidence that she has been missing an opportunity. She is not entirely sure which.