The Many Many Packages of Olivia Pando Martel
A mid-2020's saga of Amazon deliveries and the weirdness they've wrought
A week ago, three packages arrived at my house: a smallish one and two large. All three had the correct address but were meant for someone named Olivia Pando. I brought them inside, then set about trying to figure out what to do next.
The first thing I thought of was to ask the people who live in the houses on either side of mine if they knew this person. This was not the reliable method it used to be because my street is now so full of Air’B’nB rentals that I have no idea who lives near me at any given moment. Perhaps Madame Pando was conducting a shopping spree while occupying a vacation rental and somehow made a mistake when she wrote down her house number. Then again, it was also possible that she had a similar address to mine in some other city or country and AI, in it’s infinite re-combining and montage-making abilities, somehow co-mingled our two addresses?
Because there was no return address, the next best idea seemed to be to just give everything back to the Amazon delivery person who had left it all here and let this be THEIR problem. So when my dogs alerted me to the arrival of a delivery truck in the driveway, I grabbed all the packages and ran outside. But by then, the Amazon truck was turning the corner at the end of my street, vanishing from sight forever more. And as if that weren’t reward enough for all my rushing around, now a NEW pile of four more large packages were waiting at my gate. For reasons of her own, Olivia had now added her married name to her orders. These packages were all addressed to my house but meant for Olivia Pando Martel.
Naturally, I googled her and looked for her on a few social media sites. This also did not lead to any easy answers. There was one Olivia Pando, in Buenos Aires. There were also several Olivia Martels in the U.S. but I didn’t see any using all three names.
Now it seemed like what I needed to do was talk to someone at Amazon, which I realize sounds like the premise for a binge-able science fiction series but I couldn’t see any way around it. It’s a blind spot I have from being born in the 20th century and raised as part of a generation of delusional American children who were incorrectly trained to believe that our culture was based on a series of interlocking and universally agreed upon morals and principles. (Ha ha. I know. Right? ) But believe it or not, I was taught that the idea of keeping someone else’s belongings was wrong, therefore it was incumbent upon me to try to do the right thing and return them. In my own defense, my indoctrination started young. When I was about five, I once came home from a play-date with a fellow kindergartener having pocketed a tiny plastic charm that she got out of a gumball machine. Upon learning of my misdeed, my mother promptly drove me back to that little girl’s house and made me return that half inch long plastic hotdog to the little girl and her mother, who I’m sure were both bereft when they saw it had gone missing. My family of origin definitely said and did many strange things in this lifetime but receiving stolen property was not among them.
I know. I know. All of this is so 2015 of me.
Nevertheless, I knew before I even picked up my phone to dial the Amazon Customer Service number that this act was going to be futility itself. So I began by trying to relax and take a few deep, cleansing breaths. But by the time I got to the robot voice explaining the numerical menu, it was hard to ignore the way my mood had already plummeted into despair. From the moment the Scarlatti piano sonata in D major that they play in a loop for their on-hold music started running in a circle, chasing it’s own tail, I was so saturated by the dark hopelessness of thinking that there was someone useful I might connect to at Amazon that I considered taking a straight shot of scotch even though it was only eleven o’clock in the morning and I really, really hate scotch.
I am well aware that before attempting to call any kind of customer service “help-line”, a person needs to have cleared their schedule for the rest of the day. I knew I would be on-hold for a very long time. And I was not disappointed. I was also not in the least bit surprised that fifteen minutes later, when someone finally decided to pick up my call, that person was someone who had a lot of difficulty understanding English. As I expected, my customer service person was so difficult to understand that I had to ask her to repeat everything she said to me three times. This is just how it is in today’s global market place. If I ever found myself talking to a customer service rep for a giant tech company who was good at speaking English, naturally I would be shaken to my core.
But because I am someone who lives with the curse of a crippling amount of what we of the 20th century used to refer to as ‘empathy’, my first thought when this was occuring was to put myself in the shoes of my poor beleagured customer service representative. There she is, trapped in a giant call center in the middle of a slum in Mumbai or Manila, working 12 hours a day for fifteen cents an hour. How can I not acknowledge that she is doing a much better job of communicating in English than I would be doing trying to communicate in Farsi, Kashmiri, Swahili or Tagalog, were the situation reversed.
That said, my customer service rep and I were able to communicate to some extent, even if I never ascertained whether she actually comprehended my problem. When she asked me for my tracking number, I figured out how to provide her with one of them. But by now there were six packages, and every package had a different tracking number. And the idea of explaining that to her seemed like far too many specific details to push toward someone who was had trouble understanding English. So I gave her the tracking number on the largest package after which she thanked me and, of course, then she disappeared.
Disappearing for a long time is apparently an important part of the job of a customer service representative. Sometimes, after they disappear, you hear a click, immediately followed by a subtle change in the audio landscape, then a dial tone. That is because the solution your customer service representative has figured out that best suits your needs is for them to simply hang up on you. But most of the time, they just leave you alone to build hatred for Domenico Scarlatti who, of course, had no inkling, during his lifetime (1685-1757) that his Keyboard Sonata in D major would one day be used as an audio form of waterboarding. I feel certain had he consulted a psychic and been made aware of this fate, he would have insisted that every existing copy of the sheet music be buried with him when he died.
And what, you may wonder, is happening at the call center during your customer service representative’s disappearance, while you are battling your simmering rage and depression? My guess is that your customer service rep takes advantage of this gift of free time to hit the vending machines for a pack of peanut butter crackers, then grab a much needed (and forbidden by Amazon) bathroom break. That’s what I would be doing if I took a job at a big call center in a slum where everyone I talked to kept complaining about how much trouble they were having understanding my Swahili. After all, from the minute they offered me the job, I was acutely aware that the definition of a ‘customer service representative’ was to be “a live human vocal interface for an unreachable mega-corporation. My job would be to make audio noises like someone who is smiling and nodding, just like I would be doing at the customer service desk at an airport. But under no circumstances should I be narcissistic enough to think I that I was going to actually “help” anyone with anything. No. I was hired to be a living emoji! A human ‘thumbs up!’”
So when my customer service person decided to return, just under three hours later, I admit I was encouraged that she seemed to acknowledge that some kind of a mistake had been made by THEM, not by me. I mean, she didn’t actually SAY that. But on the other hand, she didn’t NOT say it either. And she had a definite suggestion for what my next move should be: “ Leave the packages outside your gate and sometime in the next 48 hours an Amazon delivery person might or might not pick them up.” she told me, “If they do NOT pick them up in 48 hours, then you are free to keep them or throw them away. Whichever you like.”
Though that seems like a crazy way to run a business that intends to turn a profit, Amazon, the most successful example of late-stage-capitalism, apparently made 575 BILLION DOLLARS last year by remembering to employ the old axiom: “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” (And my own pathetic, continuous focus on the small stuff is just one more reason why I never figured out how to make the big money in the current version of The United States.)
Anyway, I followed the instructions of my Customer Service representative, to the extent that I could understand them, and put the first six packages in a pile by my front gate where I planned to let them enjoy the fresh spring air for 48 hours while awaiting rescue by their Amazon deliverer. (unless they were stolen by one of the many roving Amazon package theives that I read about on a daily basis on Nextdoor.)
Which reminded me that it might be a good idea to post something on Nextdoor in case Olivia Pando Martel was known to anyone in the area who could ask her if she wanted to come get her stuff.
And having done my job as a very good citizen, my husband and I got into our car and went out for the evening.
That night at dinner with some friends, I explained this whole situation because I was looking for parallel stories and possible solutions. The entire table full of people all seemed to agree that Amazon takes all the stuff we return to them and stores it in a giant warehouse, never to be looked at again. “Ah! “ I thought, “That is exactly the kind of wasteful negligence I need to learn if I ever hope to become more successful.”
By the time we got home from dinner, another medium sized delivery full of packages had arrived. And the delivery people, upon confronting my sign and seeing the pile of existing packages, had done the Amazon professional thing and shrugged, then piled five new packages on top of the existing packages. Included in this new batch were two packages that were actually FOR ME!! And four more for Olivia Pando Martel.
And to add to the fun, not all of today’s haul came via Amazon truck. Two were delivered by the US Post office. And one was delivered by a private delivery service I did not recognize.
So now we had a total of ten packages for Olivia Pando Martel. And also this:
Which brings us to the next day when I began sharing this saga via e mail with a couple of my friends. I explained to them how my customer service representative, feeling refreshed after a forbidden bathroom break in the bowels of a call center in Mumbai or Manila, had suggested I just leave everything outside and if luck was shining on me, an Amazon delivery person would come pick them up. Or not. To which one friend promptly sent me back an e-mail written in ALL CAPS. It said ‘THEY ARE DRUGS. OPEN THE PACKAGES AND YOU WILL SEE THAT THEY ARE DRUGS. DO NOT PUT THEM OUTSIDE. THE DEALERS COME AND PICK THEM UP. THROW THEM AWAY SO THEY STOP SENDING THEM TO YOU.”
That was certainly unexpected, also alarming. But this very thing had apparently happened to my friend. So I immediately felt up the packages for content clues. At least one of them appeared to be something that felt like fabric from The Gap. The others were a wide assortment of shapes and sizes, which of course, didn’t mean they WEREN’T drugs. But now I felt like I had better have a look.
The next person I consulted was my friend Megan, who co-hosts a podcast called GRIFTHORSE which is about “the comedic side of flim-flam, scams and grifts” And she immediately recognized what was going on with these deliveries as something called “BRUSHING.”
“You ever hear of brushing scams?” she wrote back, “This most certainly is one. Sellers send shitty merchandise to your home so they can post fraudulent five star reviews about it and make said products look more legit.” she explained. HERE IS THE LINK to the article about brushing scams that she sent me. And HERE is one that Amazon itself posted on its own website. But their version of the article refers to packages you receive that have your name on them but that you did not order. Part of what their post suggests you do is “Contact Customer Service who will support you in reporting the issue to the investigations team.” This was posted in print because if they had made an audio file, the giggling and snickering of the customer service employees near by would have drowned out the whole message. I laughed for a good 35 minutes straight after reading that.
(SIDE NOTE: I have definitely had this so-called ‘brushing’ thing happen to me. And because I am me, I wrote about it here on substack a few weeks ago. It is item number 2 on my list of ‘things that happened to me recently’. Because I was unfamiliar with the term ‘brushing,’ I referred to it as “My Amazon Secret Santa”.)
Meanwhile, I admit I had started to wonder if perhaps I had developed a mysterious alter-ego, a second independent personality, who was waking up in the middle of the night and ordering weird stuff on-line that I was too ashamed to purchase under my own name. What if it turned out that Olivia Pando Martel c’est moi!?! And if that was the case, maybe these items would turn out to be interesting or possibly alarming.
Since 48 hours had now passed, and no Amazonian delivery person, roving neighborhood thief or drug dealer had come for the packages, I decided to open a few and have a look at what the unconscious, psychotic version of me had purchased without my knowledge. In the first 4 packages I opened, here is what I found:
a strange plaster container with a lid that Amazon identifies as “a microwave kiln for glass fusing.”
An “ Etcokei Microwave Flower Pressing Kit”
Two rolls of copper wire for jewelry making and a package of “beadio copper beads.”
Many colorful packets of powder labeled “Delphi Glass assortment for metals”
A wax tube cutter, apparently used in ring sizing.
A set of “diamond grinding burr bits” for glass sculpting
An extra large black off the shoulder jersey from Banana Republic.
I immediately checked the Amazon listings for all of the afore mentioned stuff to see if any so-called person calling themself ‘Olivia Pando Martel’ had left any 5 star reviews. They had not. But by now I was also unwilling to take possession of any more of someone else’s random purchases. I have more than enough clutter at my house between my husband’s collections of Napoleons and my own weird assortment of unintentionally funny cultural detritus to have space for any more of the purchases of Olivia Pando Martel. So I took the remaining four packages, some of which were pretty large, and turned them over to a woman working at my neighborhood post office.
I was right on the verge of handing all the jewelry making bits over to a friend who sells things on Ebay….I was actually packing them all up…when my husband got a text from a neighbor on behalf of the people we do not know very well who live down the street. It said “Did you receive any packages for someone named Olivia Pando?”
“DID I?” I screamed, “Let me see… that name sounds vaguely familiar. I kind of remember something like that!”
It turned out that O.P.M. was a guest of the daughter of someone who lives on my block and all these packages were from her mother, who had the address wrong. Of course they were from a Mom. Of course they were. A Mom who was expecting some home-made jewelry. So I texted right back and said “Maybe we have this stuff. Let’s say we do. It sounds a little familiar. But it’s going to cost you. What’s it worth to you, sister?”
Actually it was already all packed up so my husband brought it right over. The owner of the house took possession of it, making it HIS problem now. By the time you read this, perhaps a young woman named Olivia Pando or Olivia Pando Martel has been united with a bunch of jewelry making equipment that her mother thought she was going to need while she was away on her vacation.
So…..Summing up: WHAT did we learn from this whole misbegotten delivery saga?
There is a weird scam called BRUSHING, and if it happens to you, Amazon would like you to agree to be on hold for however long it takes for you to report it to a customer service representative who will probably not speak enough English to understand what you are talking about and almost certainly have no idea how to help you. But Amazon does not care about that part. They would like you, a person who maybe remembers a world where more people used to be better at pretending to give a shit, to at least make the effort to talk to this customer service representative because they are not paying them fifteen cents an hour to sit around eating peanut butter crackers and going for bathroom breaks.
Do not blame any of your bad mood on Domenico Scarlatti. It is not his fault. He is dead. Though if he were alive, the idea of a class action suit would be very appealing.
If the packages that are not for you turn out to contain drugs, throw them away or dealers will keep sending them to you. I don’t know what happens next in that scenario but at some point, we will all watch a netflix special where we will learn a lot more about this chain of events than we ever wanted to know.
This whole thing turned out to be as America 2024 as anything that has ever happened to me…at least so far this week.
Similar happened to me, but as I “live” in Florida, it nearly ended up on the news.
I'm sorry but where are your hand-made, sparkly drop turquoise earrings from Ms. Pando for your troubles??