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Rejected by the Porch Pirate

CorkscrewAnnie
2 min readDec 10, 2024

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Apparently they didn’t want what we ordered?

Man in hoodie and balaclava stealing a courier package off a suburban stoop
The results of the author asking Bing Image Creator for a photo of a human porch pirate stealing a package. (Earlier prompts that didn’t specify “human” resulted in images with inexplicable roosters?!)

As I have recounted previously, we live in a big city in a “neighbourhood in transition”. That’s a euphemism for gentrification and urban development, in an area where shiny new condos share the streets with single room tenements and artist spaces.

One of the down-sides of this situation is that our street-level townhouse is subject to oversight by a less than savory opportunistic element, the urban porch pirate.

Most recently, a delivery to our doorstep fell prey to thieves before we could get to the doorstep and retrieve it. (The fact that the Amazon driver didn’t bother to ring the doorbell didn’t help, but that’s a different rant.)

The loss of the package presented a setback to the resident tinkerer, who had ordered parts for his latest project: a Steampunk-themed enclosure for the Bitcoin server whose waste heat warms our living room. (I know. He’s special.)

The contents were small furnace filters, designed to both filter the air pushed out from the server’s cooling fan, and muffle the considerable noise generated by that fan.

Online photo of a furnace filter, edited to remove the name of the brand and manufacturer.
The filters in question look something like this. Thanks for the photo, Amazon.

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CorkscrewAnnie
CorkscrewAnnie

Written by CorkscrewAnnie

Recreational writer, collector of antique corkscrews, urban gardener and retired management consultant. Still trying to figure out what to do when I grow up.

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