Pandemic Jackpot
My hunter-gatherer husband met his match in Instacart. The elusive electronic beast appears, engages, and then disappears without a trace. Suffice to say, the process does not bring out his kinder, gentler side.
“Damn it! WTF?” is my new 6:30am wakeup call resounding from the home office down the hall from our bedroom.
When we purchased our 250-year-old farm house 23 years ago, the previous owner used that room as a walk-in closet. Raising two boys in a two-bedroom one-bath house transformed the tiny space many times from play room to toy storage to junk pile. And now, voila, a pandemic home office and headquarters for online shopping in the middle of suburban Philadelphia.
“It happened again! Our order just disappeared,” whines my tech-savvy husband.
He was teased by easy success in the early days of CDC warnings. He chose items, he chose a delivery time, bags showed up at our doorstep. The head-of-household puffed his chest, called himself an excellent provider, kept his family fed and generously tipped delivery warriors.
Then the rest of the world locks down and catches on. Competition takes over. Instacart turns into a clock-less casino. A craps table on the dark web with chips that change brand and are mercilessly swept away by an invisible dealer.
My husband turns into a gambler, addicted and determined. Assuming each previous order is lost, he re-enters items at different times on different days from different stores to beat the odds. Then a virtual blackout. No notifications or confirmations, no Instacart messages.
“It could be weeks before we get an order to go through,” he warns me. Starvation looms.
Like a junky, he doubles down on essentials: two white breads, two wheat, two gallons of milk, three boxes of spaghetti, steaks, chicken breasts and thighs. Screw the low-carb non-dairy vegetarian diet. This is war. He orders and reorders compulsively.
I only dare poke my head into command central to remind the ordering CEO that our son’s teenage girlfriend needs tampons. She is living with us in lock down after her college closed while she sat at our son’s hospital bedside for three weeks prior to COVID-19 crippling the United States.
In February our 18-year-old suffered from acute tonsillitis while a bacterial infection ate away at the back of his throat. He lost 75% of his epiglottis, the flap that keeps liquids from going down the wrong way into lungs. Emergency surgery required a tracheostomy, which left a gaping hole in the outside of his throat just in time for the crisis onset of the deadly respiratory virus.
Given our son’s life-threatening vulnerability to pneumonia from aspiration and infection of his throat wound — on top of the coronavirus threat — our family is in extreme quarantine. Online shopping is our only option, our only life line.
“Try to get Playtex Sport Tampons, the combo pack with regular and super size,” I gently remind my husband.
“I know. I’m trying,” he replies again, and again, again. “It’s beyond my control now.” His shoulders slump in defeat.
Privately I succumb to my own online consumer mania. Yes, I clicked “reorder” on an $8.49 party-size bag of peanut butter M&Ms with a current price of $38.02 on Amazon Prime. Or was it eBay? Maybe virtual bidding was involved.
But in the real world we have much to celebrate. Our son is alive and healing, even attending classes online. The spring sun and rain nurture blossoms in every shade of hope.
And then it happens. The first grocery delivery, followed by another. And the next. It seems Instacart has restructured to a queue format. All of our virtually identical orders are put through. Ding, ding, ding… We hit the Instacart Jackpot!
Which translates to a lot of bread. And milk. And chicken. Many, many tasty M&Ms. All wiped off and stored in our very small house, where every day, we count our blessings. And our 432 super-sized tampons.