And now it's a story

If you have been following this blog, you know that UPS lost the shipment of the bag with my computer and other electronics. With the help of K, I finally was able to track it using “Find My” on my phone to track the iPad in the bag.

I saw last night that the package was sitting at El Paso International Airport. It was to have been delivered yesterday morning by next day air. This morning I saw that it was actually in Austin at the UPS facility. Still no UPS tracking, completely my own tracking. I immediately drove over, but by the time I arrived I could see that it was moving around in a truck. I spent the next several hours chasing the truck around the few blocks near my hotel. It never actually stopped at the hotel to deliver the package. I was either following it by car or on foot, and for quite a while I was always one step behind. The Find My tracking was always a few minutes delayed. Finally, I saw a UPS truck a block away and thought it might be the truck with my package. Picture this, I literally ran to intercept the driver to ask him to look. He was incredibly nice and helpful and immediately emerged from his truck with the correct package. It took us a minute to confirm that it was indeed my package. He actually opened it up so I could check.

Let me backtrack a couple of days. When I first set up the shipment and generated the shipping labels, I was concerned because the weight I had entered was incorrect and I was also not convinced they had the correct pick-up information. It kept coming up with my home address from my account. I was advised by UPS to void the first label and generate a new one. I was also advised to generate a receipt for the driver to sign. In spite of the fact that I had voided the first shipment, I continued to get updates. They kept saying delay, and I assumed that was just an error because of the void. In retrospect, that should have been a clue.

When I looked at the shipping label on the package I finally rescued from the truck, it had the original label on it. No wonder the new one was never scanned into the system. Here is where human error comes into play. I sent the new label and receipt to the hotel in El Paso, with instructions to replace the label and to have the driver sign the receipt. The hotel failed to replace the label with the new one. The driver did sign the receipt. However, she failed to notice that the tracking number on the shipping label and the tracking number on the receipt were not the same. Hence the beginning of the problems.

So what was the delay? At one point it said severe weather. That made no sense. The weather in El Paso and Austin was just fine. Although maybe the plane had to route through Dallas and there was weather there? However one of the supervisors let drop that, when he contacted the El Paso UPS center, they told him one of the planes had mechanical issues. Hmmm - mechanical is the responsibility of UPS, the weather is not. I’ll never know for sure, but I think the weather advisory was a sham to cover the mechanical issue. Either way, it just added to the confusion.

Ultimately, I recovered the package and am once more in possession of all of my electronics. But only because K had suggested I try to track my own devices. Had I trusted UPS with the delivery, it would probably still be riding around in a truck.

Once I had recovered my belonging and took a short time to organize and charge, I drove up to Fort Worth where I will be staying with my friends M and M for a couple of nights. I’ll be taking tomorrow to chill out and catch up with my photo editing so that I can backfill the last few days.

Hopefully I’ve used up some bad juju. At the very least, I will now not only be checking the room three times but the area around my car three times.