This story belongs in the archive even before I find the perfect photograph for it.
I was doing supply operations for a family that had lost nearly everything. They finally bought a container — the first container they had ever bought — and then it disappeared.
It did not land on my desk as a normal late shipment. It was simply gone from the operating picture for months. When I finally traced it, my recollection is that it had been left on an island in the Mediterranean in a kind of customs limbo: not properly inbounded into Italy, not moving toward the United States, and not useful to anybody.
The working theory was painfully physical. A 20-foot container had been set aside so somebody could reach another container beneath it, and then the vessel left without putting ours back aboard. It sat long enough that the inventory problem became a business-survival problem.
Instead of simply pushing the problem back toward the United States and an Amazon listing that no longer had the same position, I went to Europe. I remember riding on top of that container in Germany on the way to the fulfillment center. The same general period overlaps in my memory with the Germany toy-fair trip and the little München souvenir that kicked this story back loose.
This is a working-memory page. The exact year is probably around 2017, but I want the freight records, travel records, and toy-fair dates before I lock that date.