Bins and I go to Middletown, to visit the giant retail store from which home owners can find every kind of tool, building material or piece of equipment for fixing and decorating their homes.

Entering the store with the cheery bright orange logo always makes me feel like a tiny mouse creeping into an airplane hangar to search for a crumb of cheese. But it’s a great place: a Museum of Raw Desire, where the dreams of a gazillion consumers are distilled down into all manner of enticingly colour-coded, packaged and branded products. I am looking for some plain white glazed tiles to use for an art project and I already know, from the internet, that this store stocks exactly what I wanted.

It is late in the evening. When I can’t find the size of tile I want, the friendly but tired sales attendant suggests ordering them. “Fine,” I say, “I’ll pick them up from the store.” On the invoice however, he enters: HOME DELIVERY. Bins and I are also sleep-walking because neither of us notices this fact. Bins is ogling a set of shiny new pliers, I am dazzled by the sheer variety of merchandise on offer. Bins uses his card to pay and never once glances at the $3 extra that’s been added for shipping.

A week passes and now it’s the 3rd. I have stuck a bright orange Post-It on the invoice to remind me to go collect the tiles. I ask Muriel for a ride, because I realise that 10 glazed tiles might be a little too heavy for my shoulder-bag. But at the store the front desk attendant takes one look at my invoice and says “Oh — but it went out for delivery. By UPS.” Confusion! So we all look at the invoice again. Aha! There’s only a partial address: no apartment number. So the man calls UPS to add the number. The lady at the other end says “Okay, but it’ll be delivered tomorrow, not today.” Fine.

I stay in all day Friday, no delivery. The next day, still no delivery. Ditto Sunday. Then on Monday, I see a post-card in my mailbox dated December 1. “Delivery failed” it says, due to “incomplete address”. Uh-oh! Now the final date for collection is tomorrow, the eighth, from the UPS facility in Warwick. Bins jumps into the pick-up truck belonging to Jiggs our neighbour and we race off to Warwick, half an hour away. At UPS there’s a serpentine queue with a pretty-but-grumpy woman at the counter. I show her my post-card. She looks up the order history. “Address adjustment on the third,” she says. “And the package was delivered. On the fourth.”

Oh no! Now we’re in the Twilight Zone. We race home. “I’ll try upstairs,” says Bins, and runs up. Sure enough, there’s the package! And it’s got our apartment number on it! But also, for no earthly reason, the name of the upstairs tenant. Fortunately, she’s been out all weekend and hadn’t seen the package yet. So we tip-toe downstairs and verify the contents. Twilight Zone. No explanations.

Manjula Padmanabhan, author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column

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