OK, I’m going to scream.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!

That’s better.

It seems that the big package which I waited in for all day on Wednesday and again on Saturday morning was, in fact, delivered at 9am on Saturday morning.

But not, obviously, to us.

No, instead it was delivered to someone else on our road, about three doors down and on the other side of the road. Someone we’ve never met.

Here are the odd things about this, in no particular order:

• We were in all Saturday, listening out for the delivery. No-one knocked at our door.
• The delivery man didn’t phone or leave a note or card to say where he’d left the package. Perhaps we were supposed to guess?
• We were in most of the weekend. The bloke who accepted the delivery didn’t drop a note through or pop round to tell us he had a sodding great package sitting in his flat for us.
• The bloke who accepted the delivery is on the first floor. That means he had to lug a 95kg package up the stairs on his own. The delivery driver is specifically not allowed to step past the front door - it says so on the company website.
• That’s an awfully big favour to do for someone you’ve never met.
• The item was delivered to a totally random number which has nothing in common with ours. Is that because:
  a) The delivery driver got the number wrong
  b) The delivery driver got the number right, didn’t bother trying our doorbell, tried all our neighbour’s doorbells at 9am on Saturday until he found one who was in, halfway down the road.
  c) The bloke who accepted the delivery was outside at the time and said “here’ I’ll sign for that…”
  d) Some other creative and equally obscure reason?

It’s all very weird. It’s also all very academic, as the flat in which our package currently resides is completely dark. P went over after work and knocked on the door. No answer. An hour or so later, I popped over and stuck a note through the letterbox saying “hello, sorry for any inconvenience, no idea why they delivered it here instead of to our house, but please call us to let us know when might be a good time to collect it…” Since then, I’ve been periodically peering out of my study window to see whether the lights have come on. They haven’t. In fact, I must say that the house in question has all the hallmarks of a house which has been vacated for the Christmas holidays.

So the question now is this: Should we call the company from which we bought the blasted thing and ask them to
a) send us another, to be delivered at 9am on Christmas Eve (or else it will have to be the week of 5 January), and let them deal with getting the original delivery back off Mr V, our mystery neighbour?
b) give us a full refund and go and buy it elsewhere (and let them deal with the return from Mr V)?
c) do nothing, but inform them that we will wait for Mr V to come back from holiday and then ask him again for our package, assuming he still has it and hasn’t flogged it.

I mean, really, if you accepted a package on behalf of a neighbour, wouldn’t you tell them you had it? I mean, if you felt neighbourly enough to lug it up eighteen steep stairs, wouldn’t you want to be rid of it? Or would you think “yippee, presents for me” and them pretend you’ve never even seen it when the neighbours come to the door in search of their Christmas present to each other?

So what’s going on? And what should we do? Help me, Internet!
Am I being uncharitable? I don’t mean to. I’m just sick to the back teeth of waiting for this poxy thing to show up. And it’s so frustrating knowing that it’s tantalisingly close, and yet so far away.