Let your biases not run you

At the outset let me be very clear. This isn’t going to be a sermon rather a self-critique and a true one at that. It so happened that earlier this week, I was supposed to receive a packet and a rather expensive one at that.? Also there were a few more deliveries which were due. While none came during the day, when I was somewhere in the market, I received a call from the delivery guy that he is at the building and checking me if I was at home to receive the package. I told him that I wasn’t and asked him to drop it with the guard at the gate of my apartment. He got me to talk to someone who I assumed to be the guard. I asked him to keep the package and told him that I would collect it when I was back. Delivery person asked the OTP to confirm the delivery which I duly told him. And I received the delivered message.?

When I came back, the guard at our apartment gave me a parcel and I happily went home. Nothing seemed amiss. After two days I realized that the expensive package wasn’t there yet and I checked with the sender. To my surprise the person told me that the package has been delivered with OTP confirmation. And then I lost it. How was it that the package had been delivered but it didn’t reach me.?

Now who would you doubt to siphoned off? My first hunch was the guard. I went downstairs and asked the guard if he had received the package and unknowingly might not have given it to me or might have given it to someone else. He flatly refused.?

Then I called up the delivery guy to check who he had given it to? He told me that he gave it to someone old in our society. It so happens that there is a departmental store in our apartment which is manned by an old person. Now I couldn’t have gone to him without any proof. So I started going through CCTV footage from the day. And there it was. At the time mentioned in the delivery there was a delivery van which stopped just outside our apartment. From it alighted a delivery person who carried a box and delivered it to the shopkeeper. It was clinching proof and furious I went to the old man. I asked him if he had received the package which was meant for me. He said no. I asked him to accompany me to the CCTV footage. I showed it to him. I couldn’t tell whether he was more hurt or guilty but he said that the delivery person shown in the footage was the delivery person for Lays, the chips. He asked for conclusive proof that it was my package only. I had none other than my bias to doubt everyone less powerful than myself.?

Now the last person I could doubt was the delivery person himself. What if he never reached my apartment and he just made me talk to someone who pretended to be the guard of my apartment and I shared my OTP. This time I had to be right. I called him to ask where he delivered it to? He told me that he would be at my apartment in 10 minutes. After 10 minutes I received a call from him saying that he was at the apartment. I told him I was there as well but I couldn’t see him. Then a brainwave struck me. He might have been genuinely unaware about the location. I asked him to check with the guard there what apartment it was? And the guard told him about an apartment which is in the street next to ours. The package was safe with the guard who was waiting for someone to collect it. Even after three days none came to collect it but he still had it. Finally after so many twists and turns I received it. But it left a bad feeling inside for having doubted so many just because they weren’t “people like us”.?

At worst it was a comedy of errors but I had been hurtful to so many just because I couldn’t see that this whole episode was my own making. In the first instance itself I should have checked at the time of delivery, which apartment it was? I didn’t do that but doubted everyone else but myself. It just shows that I am still a work in progress.?