not a food blog
It’s Saturday and the whole family is lazying around the house — except Ari who is doing his homework for his master degree. I just finished watering the plant when I felt a nice warm afternoon sun. Please note, it was scorching hot a couple of hours before.
For months, our apartment buildings have been terrorized by package thieves. Plural, because we caught one once. His bold attempt got caught on camera, and security managed to track down the car plate and blocked access. Things went peaceful for some months until new reports of missing parcels pouring in again.
Here’s the thing about the process of receiving package in our apartment building; before the pandemic, it was pretty normal for couriers to go up to the respective units and send their deliveries. When the person is not at home, couriers can just leave the package on the doorstep — and security-wise, most home owners put CCTV on the front door.
When the pandemic hits, a new SOP (one among many others) got implemented across apartments and high-rise estates. All package receivers — be it food delivery, package delivery, anything — should receive their packages at the lobby area. This to ensure minimum movements and reduce contacts.
This is when the problem started. This caused couriers to: 1. Wait for the package receiver to come down to the lobby, causing them losing precious minutes of delivery, and 2. Additional work when the package receiver is not at home. Couriers end up putting the packages on the mail room (an area that actually strictly for mail/letters only) and hoping the package receiver able to receive the package properly.
It was like a gambling. Some folks are lucky enough to be able to get their packages in good conditions. Some, not so. The neighbourhood has been reaching out to the apartment’s building management for security enhancement and possibility of putting CCTV facing the mail room, but it seems like every attempt was futile.
Until this afternoon, at 6 PM. I just came back from our apartment’s garden with Rey when we saw a slight commotion on the lobby area.
I didn’t think too much about it. It was Saturday afternoon, folks usually out and about. Some neighbours can be seen waiting for their food delivery to arrive.
I checked our apartment Telegram group, in case anyone knows what was that about (yes, we are gossip-y like that,) when a new message appeared: “The parcel thief finally got caught!”
The group exploded.
“YOOOOO. THOSE GROUP ON THE LOBBY JUST NOW? IT WAS THE PARCEL THIEF?”
“DID ANYONE GOT THE PIC?”
“PIC OR IT DIDN’T HAPPEN.”
“CAN SOMEONE KICK THE THIEF FOR ME? PRETTY PLEASE?”
We then found out the police even involved and thanks to them, the building management and the police managed to nab the thief. At that point, we were so confused; how could it be we have the police force ready on our premises? Did anyone file a report, and the police actually took missing parcel cases seriously?
Apparently, the police was in the area for another case. There was a burglary case on a store nearby our building, and the police narrowed down the search and found out the suspect’s car was seen regularly entering and exiting our apartment area.
The police force met with the building management, and they were in the middle of checking the CCTV when they realized something was really off about this person who entered the building empty-handed, yet he came out with packages. The rest, then, a history.
(Anyway, the police managed to catch the burglars too!)
Update: I need to update this post by saying the security guards are doing awesome job too! One of the guards noticed the car has been super sus (“he came to the building this morning and again in the afternoon? A courier usually comes once”) and he chased the car around the block, using motoped. He raised the flag as soon as he recognized the police and caught the thief.
I was doing my usual mindless scrolling on Twitter when I saw KLa Project’s tweet about their song “Yogyakarta”.
KLa Project is one of the seniors in Indonesia music industry. Their songs and albums holding legendary status among Indonesians.
One of their songs is “Yogyakarta”. Yogyakarta is a special district/area in Indonesia, and Indonesians usually associate Yogyakarta with “memories”; from fond memories to bittersweet ones. Apart from being a district, Yogyakarta is actually a city too, and the city is the topic of the song. Yogyakarta is special in many senses. It still upholds the traditions while the city keeps moving through urban development here and there. In its own ways, Yogyakarta holds mythical feelings of fleeting moments.
For Indonesiamatticians, this song is memorable. We sang this song one morning, one of those days during the company’s latest Grand Meetup in Florida, back in 2019. There were only a handful of us at that time in Automattic. There were only five Indonesians, me included, in Automattic. We are a tight-knit group, thick as thieves. We promised to sing this song again when we meet on the next Grand Meetup — then, you know, pandemic and all that. Now, whenever one of us mentioned this song, it always replied with groans and some frustrated text, “DANGIT WHEN THIS PANDEMIC GONNA END.”
We were jetlagged, it was 5.30 AM in the morning, none of us had our coffee or tea yet, some even haven’t slept since the night before, I woke up with barrage of messages on the Telegram group “OI! WAKE UP! WE ARE HAVING JAM SESSION!” and one of us, Eric, struck a chord followed by impromptu singing by Hafiz. Akeda and Ezra followed with guitar and bass.
For 4 minutes, “Yogyakarta” was heard in Florida, United States, sang by a bunch of sleep-deprived Indonesians. For 4 minutes, it became a memory.
A month too late, but I just stumbled upon IKEA France’s Tiktok video, hinting a possible collab with Animal Crossing. Unfortunately, no further information about this other than IGN picked up this news when the video was posted.
