11.16.06

The Short Story

Tagged as My Life

There is a long, long story behind this post, but I don’t have the time, the energy, or the inclination to type it. This is the short version.

The University of London shipped me a package of study materials last week—five pounds of papers in all. When I arrived at the FedEx service center to pick it up, however, the package I was given weighed eighty pounds instead of five. A manager helped me open the large box and load dozens of smaller boxes into my car (so many that they obstructed the rear-view mirror somewhat), and not until I got home did I find out that the shipment I received was actually supposed to go to the Apple Store Fifth Avenue, and was apparently shipped from the Apple office where I work.

I took the boxes in to work with me the next day—conservatively, I’d say it was about ten thousand dollars worth of replacement parts—and when I got home that night I found another delivery attempt notice for the same tracking number.

What happened, it seems, is that the Apple package was relabelled during shipping for some reason, but was assigned the wrong tracking number. The new label, therefore, had my address on it, and the return address of the University of London’s print shop. The next day the real UoL shipment arrived, but since it was already marked as delivered in the computers, there was no way to track it or verify its location. It still had an address on it, and stubbornly refused to blink out of existence, but if my building manager hadn’t run out of the building to intercept the driver on his way back to the truck, I might never have received it.

And I’m still trying to convince FedEx that it is, in fact, possible for two shipments to end up with the same tracking number (even if it’s not possible for them to start out that way). I have my package, of course, and Apple is being credited for their shipment, but now it’s a matter of principle.

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