Waiting for a parcel

Source A: an original contemporary non-fiction-style account.

The delivery page showed my parcel six streets away. I watched the little van icon turn a corner and felt, absurdly, that its progress had become part of my own work. There were twelve deliveries before mine, then eleven, then twelve again after the route changed. I had ordered a replacement lampshade, not a medicine or a machine on which anyone's livelihood depended. Nevertheless, I arranged the morning around its arrival and interpreted every pause as a personal setback.

Tracking had promised to remove uncertainty. Instead it divided uncertainty into smaller, more watchable pieces. Without the map, I might have read a book or left a note for a neighbour. With it, I knew enough to keep looking and not enough to stop. When the driver finally arrived, he apologised for the delay. I had spent two hours imagining obstruction and incompetence; he had spent them lifting boxes up staircases. The lampshade was exactly what I had ordered. My morning was less easy to account for.

I still want reliable deliveries and honest estimates. Information is useful when it helps me make a decision. But not every moving icon deserves my attention merely because it can obtain it. Next time I shall choose a place for the parcel to be left and close the page. Convenience should release some part of a day, not turn waiting into unpaid supervision of a stranger whose route I do not understand.

Source B: an original letter in a nineteenth-century voice. This is a period-voice simulation, not an archival document.

My dear sister, your parcel reached us yesterday, after an interval long enough for your nephew to imagine that the promised book had become an entire library. Each afternoon he asked whether the carrier had called. We could offer no answer beyond what the road and the man's arrangements allowed. The snow on the higher ground had delayed several deliveries, though we learned this only when a neighbour returned from the town. Until then, the delay had been a blank space into which every explanation might be placed.

When the parcel arrived, its paper was worn at the corners but the contents were unharmed. We opened it together beside the fire. The boy examined the pictures before reading your note, then returned to the note when he understood that it belonged to the gift. I confess that the waiting gave the arrival a ceremony it might otherwise have lacked. Yet I would not prescribe such uncertainty as an improvement to the delivery of household necessities. A book can gather imagined importance while it travels; an urgently required tool merely remains unavailable.

We are grateful to the carrier, who had a difficult road and more stops beyond ours. I gave him a warm drink while he adjusted the load. Still, I should welcome a message telling us when to expect him, particularly when someone must remain at home. Pleasure in this arrival does not oblige me to praise every obstacle preceding it. I hope your next parcel will come more promptly, and I promise that its contents will not be loved less because the journey has provided us with fewer occasions to discuss them.

Use the whole of both sources. Compare the writers’ perspectives on waiting for deliveries and how their methods convey those perspectives. Support your comparison with evidence from both sources.