A file photo
I once thought to myself, “Ei, life in Ghana has improved oh! You can do most of your shopping online. You don’t have to endure any of those horrible traffic jams any longer.
Yes, it is nice to hear a knock on your door and find a motor-rider or a van driver outside, ready to deliver the groceries and other supplies that you have ordered from your neigbourhood mall.
Until something unusual happens like, when you are busy, and your house-help has managed to slip out of the house just before the delivery arrived.
You indicate a table and ask the guy to put the stuff on it. They are usually quite nice, and this one is no exception. When you ask him his name, he says, “John.”
Soo, there are many 'Johns' in the world not? So what? He looks okay. But maybe if you weren’t trying so hard to choose between the different words offered by the computer’s Thesaurus, you would have remembered to ask him what his surname was.
You pay him. But he says he has no change. What you knew I would be paying by cash and you didn’t carry any change? Hey, my deadline is getting closer! And John is wasting my time over change?
He says he’ll go and change the money and bring your “balance” to you. Gee – where is that house-help? Meanwhile, my mind is trying to get me an answer for this: Is the word I am looking for 'savour' or 'flavor?
I don’t notice that “John” has not given me back the bill, which he’d taken from me to try and work out how much change he should give me!
The house-help comes back. I ask her to check the contents of the delivery. But in the meantime, I’ve remembered the quotation and the word in it is 'savour'. Not a word one uses often, is it? No wonder it took so long for my mind to accept it.
The house-help now makes an ominous announcement: “There is no beef in the parcel! Only the chicken thighs!”
This is devastating. The beef is the most expensive item in the whole order. And it wasn’t delivered?
I call the Mall. I am still agitated over my inability to find the correct word with the speed I am used to. How do I find the words to explain what’s happened? That:
I didn’t have the time to check the contents of the parcel before “John” left?
That “John” should have been back with the change by now?
That the beef was not delivered?
Whatever confusion was in my mind was as nothing to what happened when the cheeky operative at the mall told me coldly: “The delivery man is not supposed to carry change on him. He will bring you your change, but you will pay a transportation change!”
When I ask about the beef, she tells me “There was no beef in the order!
“What?”
“Yes!”
“But you showed me a picture of it!”
“No that was only a picture of the chicken!”
This woman wants to give me a heart-attack, my sub-conscious mind says.
I put the telephone down.
The Mall operative later calls to tell me that they will be sending my change to the driver I once sent to collect stuff from them to me!
“Bu he’s not involved in this deal at all, I say. “How did he become concerned with whether I get my change or not?”
In my mind, the question arises: “Why are they in contact with that driver when I haven’t brought him into this matter? Why do they have his phone number and are keeping it in relation to me? How can they bring him into the matter?” I ask myself again.
The whole thing now sounds so utterly bizarre that it feels as if I have become the victim ova scam that can only be credible in a piece of fiction!
In fiction, the plot is easy to unravel.
Thus: A small group within the mall have established a 'mirror' website that can pick up communications meant for the mall. They fiddle with orders. They rope in the drivers of online customers. So if a customer orders items A, B, or C, they can supply B and C, but not A. If the customer detects the omission, they pretend it was a genuine mistake. If the customer doesn’t detect it, they sell the item and share the proceeds.
If the customer detects the irregularity, they confuse issues by pretending to be solving the problem – a driver who is not involved in the deal is inserted into it, willy-nilly, and (as in my case) the water is muddied so much that no certain answers emerge.
“Why contact the driver?”
“Because we know he works for you sometimes. He did bring out the change, didn’t he?”
”That’s not the issue. Why bring in someone whom I have not told you is to collect the change on my behalf?”
I am too polite to ask, “What other deals do you carry out with him?”
In a fiction piece, I should have asked: “ Does he sell deliberately “undelivered” beef for you? And so on, and so forth.
Question: In this age of online scams, does the online shopping industry bother to check on the background of the staff they unleash on unsuspecting customers?
If I do go to the mall and make a complaint against 'John', won’t I look stupid?
Do they warn their customers to ask for ID papers from people supposedly delivering food for the mall? Especially, customers paying cash?
Me, it will take me some time to shop online again!
As the Twi proverb aptly says, “Annya antor a, annya anntua!”
[To be translated loosely as: “If you don’t attempt to buy it at all, then, the question of payment does not even arise!”]
