Are you one of those people who always seems to break the world? Someone for whom the phrase “That’s strange, I’ve never seen that before” gets said around them a bit too often. Or you always seem to be in the wrong place at the right time?

Yeah…

So I thoroughly broke Amazon. Like, properly broke them. Well, their locker delivery system for my order. Not the whole of Amazon. Although, that probably wouldn’t be too hard.

I tried to buy this, it’s a big item. Think 5 litre bucket of fence paint big.

And this, which is a small item

I tried to get it delivered to my local Amazon Locker, but the system said the locker was “unavailable”, so I chose another nearby one, which it let me do. The system knows what will be in each locker, and has to allocate a specific box in the locker for your items. They know what’s going on.

Sometimes they also seem to tell you a locker is “full” or “unavailable” if they don’t want to send an item there. I’ve often tried to order something small and cheap to a locker, to avoid the £4.99 delivery fee (or at least reduce it to £2.99) and the system has told me all my lockers were full. Except if I added some more things to my order, the lockers magically became available again.

Being cheap I opted for free three day delivery on my massive tub of gym powder and a case for my headphones, so it should have come on Wednesday. Sometimes you can cheat the system and it just turns up the following day, so it’s like getting next day delivery for free.

So far, so good… so what?

This is where normally you get a notification the next day and an instruction to pick up your items from the locker, and go away happy.

Sometimes the system gets a bit messed up though, and you might see this in the tracking info

No problem, maybe the locker was full. The item was supposed to arrive on Wednesday, so maybe the driver was chancing it.

Oh, well I guess the locker is still full. Still, tomorrow is Wednesday and the day it was due to be delivered, so it’ll turn up tomorrow.

And this is where the story gets a bit strange. For five days the delivery guy took my parcel, went to the locker, went “uh, full…” and put it back on his van.

Yes, it’s possible it’s a different driver every day, but you’d imagine the delivery system would cancel deliveries after a certain number of failed deliveries?

It took me contacting support twice to get them to cancel it, so I could order it again to my house. Which they managed to do pretty efficiently. The box it came it definitely wouldn’t have fitted in a locker. Bit strange it was despatched. Bit stranger they tried to deliver it five times.