By Ed Humphries and Stefania Zajdel
As Christmas drew closer, panic started to spread across the AUC community. People who had ordered gifts for their friends never received them, leaving those expecting a present to take their loved ones at their word.
It all began with a doorbell. Gavin (a pseudonym used to maintain anonymity) looked through the glass door of his ground-floor apartment and was greeted by a delivery man standing on the other side. He had himself been waiting for a package, so seeing the delivery man didn’t strike him as odd. A student who had been walking past Gavin’s place at the time states that the delivery man had said, “No one is next door. Could you take the package and hand it over to them?”
This was the first time that this had happened for Gavin, but it would not be the last. Package after package arrived at the apartment. Some were the standard books or clothes but some were a bit less expected. Like, for example, a bike wheel.
As it turned out, Gavin shared his address with the dorm’s bike shop Recycle. When it was closed or a delivery driver got confused and came to the apartment door rather than the shop, he would be the one who ended up with its packages. Bike wheels, pumps, chains, saddles. At times his room was better stocked than Recycle itself. Soon, a working relationship blossomed between the unlikely allies. Their packages were safe and sound during off hours and Gavin got his bike fixed on the house – it was a win/win.
Unfortunately, word spread amongst the PostNL, DHL, and FedEx drivers and soon Gavin’s dorm became the unofficial package locker of AUC. In an exclusive interview, a DHL employee reveals how the situation had escalated. At first, the delivery men tried to find the actual recipients. After a few weeks, they realised that it would take too long to drop off every package at its proper destination. Instead, they tried optimising their workload by moving everything to just one apartment, that being Gavin’s.
Gavin quickly became frustrated by the sheer volume of post arriving on his doorstep, and (in his eyes) the ungratefulness of his neighbours for the service he was providing. He agreed to share the rest of his story, hoping that it would help people understand the motives behind the events that followed.
The DHL employee admits that halfway through November he stopped reading the address labels: “They didn’t matter. In the end, all the packages ended up in one place,” he states. It was a small victory for the postal system, but a death sentence for Gavin.
Up until the first weeks of December, he performed his civic duty and spent hours tracking down the rightful owners to return their post. His resentment towards fellow AUC students deepened with each ring of the doorbell. “You cannot imagine how much I hate the sound now,” he says.
In the end, it wasn’t a package that broke him; it was the smell of deep-fried chicken tenders. As he was typing for the umpteenth time on the dorm’s Whatsapp group chat for someone to pick up their Amazon order, someone else’s KFC order landed on his door. He used the chat to ask who ordered the meal, but there was no answer. After twenty minutes of waiting, he couldn’t resist – he finished his day with the chicken.
A terrified neighbour confirmed that this was the moment a switch flipped in his brain. Gavin realised that no one could stop him from keeping all the packages as “gifts” for himself. With Christmas right around the corner, students all over the building have been ordering presents for their friends and loved ones. And every single one of them has ended up in his hands. People have now begun calling him the “AUC Grinch,” as they claimed he steals joy by collecting things he neither needs nor wants.
“Who wouldn’t do it in my place? I mean, I didn’t even have to “steal” gifts to ruin Christmas. All it took was living on the ground floor,” Gavin states.
In the wake of Gavin’s spree, DUWO has had package lockers installed. So far, though, no one has used them, leaving the door open for a newcomer to fill the void Gavin left with his graduation. With Buy, Sell, and Trade already beginning to buzz with students enquiring about missing packages, it seems they may have already begun their work…
The Herring 