Several years ago, being a deliveryperson was an actual full-time job for which you had to apply to a shipping company, wear a uniform, and operate their huge delivery trucks. However, in the past handful of years, Amazon started a new system called Amazon Flex where people can essentially be their own boss and deliver packages for Amazon during their free time on their own schedule – essentially like Uber, except you’re transporting packages instead of passengers.

Ever since this started in my area(s), package delivery has been catastrophically bad. Amazon Flex was a thing in Southern California where I lived before I moved to Las Vegas, and the deliverypeople had massive issues actually reading the address properly such that they would confuse unit and building numbers and think that the number 6 was the same as the number 8.

Amazon Flex deliveries haven’t quite been as bad in Las Vegas, but I had multiple instances of deliverypeople failing to deliver and saying they did not have access to my apartment building during normal business hours when there is literally a leasing office and an unlocked front door. I had even more instances of people not realizing we had package lockers, getting lost in my apartment building while trying to find my door, then proceeding to just leave the package in a random place on the first floor commercial area.

That brings me to the amazing feature my apartment building has that people don’t use – the package lockers. My apartment building installed Luxer One into the mail room, a system that essentially accepts packages on my behalf so we (theoretically) never have to miss another package again. For the deliverypeople who actually know it exists, it’s worked very well.

However, apparently this is still a somewhat new system that not many locations have, so beyond the people who just don’t know we have package lockers in our mail room, there are others who aren’t really too familiar with how the system works. For everyone who actually isn’t familiar with it, the deliveryperson registers the package in the little tablet computer that controls the lockers, holds the package up to the camera so the resident can see the package, then places the package into the designated locker for pick-up. The resident then receives an email with the photograph and a notification to come pick up the package.

The deliveryperson who delivered my package yesterday got all the steps right… except for the photo.

But he was close.