Daily Dose of English 49
Deliveries
Daily Dose of English 49
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about deliveries. Deliveries, when something comes to your door that you asked for, or I guess potentially didn't ask for, because that can also sometimes happen too if someone else sends you something. But usually you asked for it, you asked for the thing to be delivered. Because I got a delivery today and I want to talk about it a bit. In general, deliveries are pretty common in a lot of countries around the world nowadays because online shopping and general just delivery around a city is very, very easy now because we've made it so normal and common to get deliveries. And so a lot of people get deliveries multiple times per week or even per day, depending on how much they do shopping online or what they order, what they get delivered. Um, the mail service has been around for a very long time, uh, far longer than like video calls or anything like this that I'm doing on this podcast. And those are also considered deliveries, right? You can get a special delivery of a letter from someone that you know. I don't know how long the official United States postal system or other countries' official postal systems have been around, but people have been sending letters for a very long time. And so the deliveries are an old, old thing. Originally, like you didn't have a lot of ways to deliver something, right? You'd have to send it to a specific location and give them a name and they'd have to wait and hold on. And it would take a very long time, weeks, months, even depending on how far it was going and who you needed to reach. However, nowadays, I got it. Do I say that word a lot? I feel like I say the word nowadays all the time on these podcasts. Ah, whatever. However, nowadays, deliveries are really quick and easy kind of anywhere in the world. Yeah, there's tons of places that still don't get deliveries. However, most of the human population lives in a relatively small area in the world and can get some kind of delivery. Especially if you live in more developed countries, deliveries are very, very quick. Something that's always surprised me is that in most of the US and pretty much any large city above about a million people, you can get a lot of things delivered in one day or even the day of, a couple hours after you order it, which is pretty crazy. If you told somebody, I don't know, even 40 years ago, that they could order something like a random electronic component from online and get it delivered in a couple of hours or even like minutes sometimes, they would think that you're crazy and talking about the absolute future, some sort of utopia society where everybody is insanely rich or something like that. It just sounds crazy. However, it's pretty normal. And like I said, we get deliveries for a lot of different things, and it's different depending on where you live. I've gotten deliveries in only a couple different countries, but the differences are big enough that I kind of want to go into them and talk about my experience with my package today. So growing up, I grew up in the U.S., as I've said a couple times. And I get deliveries, or got, I guess, I don't live there anymore. I got deliveries relatively often. I didn't order things like every single day, but like often I would need something and I would get a delivery. And it's very common for, or almost always, they leave the package just right by your door, typically on the porch. Because in the US, a lot of people live in houses rather than apartments, unless you're in some cities where there's a lot more apartments, and then obviously there are apartments in every city. But a lot of people live in houses, especially families. And so a lot of people grow up in houses with porches. Porches are right out front of the door. No. Yeah. Right out in front of the door. Something like that. I speak English. Anyway, porches are right outside in front of the door. And they're a little bit raised off the ground, usually. And they're sort of separate from the sidewalk or the yard. And you can put stuff there. And so packages usually get put on the porch and the delivery driver might ring the doorbell or just knock or something like that. And then they leave the package there. And that was pretty common for me. That's how I got packages for a long time, whether I was ordering a book or something from Amazon eventually when it started to become really popular. And then occasionally they'll ring the doorbell and you need to sign for a package. Signing for a package is where you take a pen or something and you put your name on a document of some kind to say, I received this package. It's a confirmation that someone at the house got the package that they ordered. And that usually only happens with larger or expensive orders. Because if you order something that's a couple, I don't know, thousand dollars, like a computer or something like a piece of art or whatever, I don't know what you're ordering. You should confirm that you got that thing, right? They need to hand it to you and say, I gave you this package, you signed for it. Um, we're good. And so that's not that common, but it does happen occasionally. And so I had that happen a couple times. And the annoying part about that is you have to be at home, obviously. And so if you're somebody that works or goes to school, you can't be at home all the time. However, delivery drivers typically deliver during work hours as well, because that's their job. And so it's this weird kind of mismatch. It's this weird mismatch of time and being able to be at home, but also you should be at work and you can't really take a day off because it's just a package. And so it often creates some difficulty when getting a larger package. However, in Latin America, in Mexico, where I live, packages almost always have to be given to somebody, right? It's not a common thing to just leave a package somewhere, especially if you live somewhere with lots of apartments, which is very common in Mexico City. And so it's a bit annoying, but you have to almost always get your package and be there. And so it makes online shopping more difficult, which is probably a good thing, honestly, but it makes online shopping more difficult because you have to be there to receive your package. And they don't tell you when they're gonna bring your package, right? They tell you between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Okay, great, that's a 12-hour window? Sure, that's helpful. That was sarcasm, by the way, it is not helpful because they can show up at any time. And I know I've gotten packages outside of that time window as well, right? They come just kind of whenever they want the day before the day after it's totally random. Um, and so if you don't have somebody like down at the door to receive packages, it can be pretty annoying because you have to stop what you're doing. You have to go downstairs. You have to get the package. Um, within just a couple of minutes, because that's their job as well. They have, they have to continue delivering things. And so it's really nice to have somebody who can receive packages for you and just leave them there at the door. And then you get them when you, when you come around the next time that you have to go upstairs or whatever. And I'm lucky enough that I have that now. I have somebody who receives packages for me for the entire building, really. And they just put the apartment number on them. Then you go back down later, and you pick up the package. So it's really convenient is a good word for it. However, I got a package today that wanted a signature for some reason. I'm not really sure why. And actually, when I got it, I didn't even give a signature. They just handed it to me. But it meant that I had to go downstairs. And so, and the weird thing is that a random guy called me. And so I was like, okay, I'm not going to answer this. A random person is calling me. And then I didn't see the text after that said that they were at the building to give the package. And then I realized later. And so they had to come back again later. And then they said, all right, I'm here. And I went downstairs, and I didn't see anybody. And I go, oh, where are you? I don't see you. And they send a picture at the building. And I go, what's the address? And they give me the address. And then we learned that there's another street that's called the exact same thing as my street, has the exact same number. It's just a little bit, a couple of minutes away. It's like 10 minutes away. And so we had to come all the way to the other address where I actually live and give me the package there. And we saw that the address had the wrong part of the city in it, like the wrong, yeah, I guess, section of the city. And I'm pretty sure I didn't do that. Maybe I did. It might have been my fault. However, it was a bit of a difficult process getting my package today. However, it's okay. It still arrived like two weeks early before it was supposed to because I ordered it from all the way across the world. And I'm excited to have something that it's sort of fun. It's not anything important. It's a sort of a dumb thing, but it's nice. And I'm excited because I don't order things that often, like I said. And I try not to order things from too far away because it is not a great habit to buy things online because it's so easy to just spend money. And so I really try not to. But this was a a for me gift. Anyways, that's all that I have for today. That's all I have to talk about deliveries. I hope that you enjoyed this episode and maybe learned a word or two. And I hope to see you again tomorrow for another one. Bye.
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