I remember when Amazon’s lockers were new. I read somewhere, Times I guess, that such delivery mechanisms had been common in Europe for a long time. I just found it neat to know that I could turn any of these locations into a mailing address for myself.

It was not so true in its early days but now they seem ubiquitous enough that I could add them to my list of reasons for giving up the 181,  my permanent fake-home-address for over 30 years. The 181 expired yesterday and the robo emails to renew are already getting annoying.

Today’s attempt to pick something up at an Amazon Locker was met with a conflict of sorts. In the past I’ve only had to punch in a 5 or 6 digit code and, like magic, one of the doors opens and my bag of Jelly Belly Sours or a bottle of skin cream is released from the jail of the locker cell and into the welcomed clutches of my ownership.

Today, with less than 24 hours to make the pickup, I was met with a screen telling me I needed an app to make this pickup. I was like wtf, why make this complicated?

I am sure it will not be complicated but I had to get to work and I don’t like being anything but over-early, largely so I can mentally unload with these morning missives. I suspect others see me at this desk most days, typing furiously, and they have to ask if that dude is writing a book about working here. I don’t see anybody else here doing anything on their down time here but read a book or surf the web.

So my lens cap sits still in that tiny chamber on Maiden Lane. it’s a lens cap replacement for the Sony camera I use for most of my YouTube videos. I don’t know what caused the original cap to stop fitting but I suspect it was the heat. If not maybe I could have chosen not to use it as a chew toy for myself.

That was a joke about the chew toy but, as this weekend and last week reminded me, I love having a tongue and a mouth.

One fascination I had with the Amazon lockers had been their names. Why is today’s locker named OWAIN?

The intrigue about the locker names has cooled, for me at least. But in the early days of the Lockers they seemed largely to be named for rivers, streams, and even creeks. It made sense to me, given the eponymous connection between Amazon and one of Earth’s longest, largest rivers.

In that respect the names seemed positively insouciant, bringing the name of a tiny creek in a Washington D.C. suburb a new life in a way the creek itself had no capacity to comprehend.

I don’t know if they ran out of bodies of water or if my theory about that aquatic naming convention was just wishful thinking. I seem to remember finding lockers named for trenches, firth and fjords, swamps and streams, and other relative obscurities by most peoples’ reckonings of what we, as a civilization, name our water bodies.

If I made it all up it’s at least a decent inspiration.