The 5-Minute Panic When the Delivery Driver Said 'Food Has Arrived' But There Was No Sign of a Plastic Bag at My Doorstep

On a night when my stomach acid was about to melt my insides from hunger, the most fatal blow is never waiting an hour for food, but suddenly getting a notification on your phone: 'Your order has been delivered. Enjoy your meal!' Below it, a blurry photo of a concrete floor, as if taken of a ghost, was kindly attached. Barefoot, I sprinted to the door and yanked it open. A cold wind howled through the hallway, and the dim sensor light flickered on and off. The tiled floor was completely empty, not even a drop of condensation from a drink. In that moment, I felt like I'd been shoved into a rift in a parallel universe. I stood there, my mind racing at 800 revolutions per second, trying to figure things out: First, did they deliver to the wrong floor? Second, did the neighbor next door swipe it? Third, was the delivery driver actually a time traveler from another dimension, who sent my extra-spicy fried chicken to this address in the year 1990? In my pajamas, I began a silent search of the entire apartment building. To avoid alerting the neighbors, I tiptoed up and down the stairs like a nocturnal animal with a guilty conscience, peeking out on each floor. There was a bag of trash by the door on the third floor, nope. On the fifth floor, just a pair of moldy slippers, still nope. Just as my stomach growled ferociously, my dignity completely shattered, and I was about to click on customer service to type out a tearful complaint of 'I did not receive my food,' I inadvertently glanced at the top of the inconspicuous fire hydrant's metal door in the stairwell. There it was: the fragrant bag of fried chicken, sitting peacefully on the metal box about 1.8 meters off the ground, like a revered deity.