Gimme it! It's MINE! (update)

You know, in real life I am a pretty calm and reasonable person, usually happy and cheerful.

The first time FedEx messed up my delivery at 'the new place', I was understanding. All I did was send a nice email to the office, saying that I understood that there were two families with our last name in our new, tiny town, and that maybe the delivery person should read the ADDRESS instead of the name and assume...

But today I got pissed. I've been waiting for something for three weeks, and it finally got shipped out Friday. Whoo hoo!!! FedEx has a cool tracking system so you can see where your package gets scanned in, then out, every step of the way. So I watched it off and on all weekend. This morning it said that it was "on the truck for delivery". So I opened the front door, and busied myself slicing and dehydrating tomatoes, cleaning the bathroom and kitchen, mopping the floors, all within hailing distance from the door. Finally about 3 PM I thought, better check the status, it isn't here.

There on the tracking log it read - "package delivered, put at side door, no signature required".
WTF? Did s/he walk up while I was walking the dogs (even tho I kept the front of the house and the road in view)? I went to the side door - actually the BACK door, but since it is close to the side driveway, maybe... Nope, no package. I went to the verandah on the other side of the house... nope, no package. I went to the front door. Nothing. So I called them and told them. Of course they didn't have a clue where I was, so they are going to send out a note to the FedEx contractor for this area.

Meanwhile, there are supposed to be thunderstorms tomorrow morning, and my package is either at someone's door and they didn't see it/don't use that door, or at a vacant house somewhere (there are a couple here), or - who knows where, with the possibility of getting soaked. The nice thing about this place is that if someone DID come home and see a package that wasn't theirs, they would drop by and deliver it, or at least call. No calls, no visitors.

I guess what really pisses me off is that when we bought this place, one of the first things we did was to get some LARGE house numbers, paint them bright red and white (goes with the house) and put them right on the front proch. You can see them from the road. The houses are numbered sequentially all through the town - and the town only has 10 streets. So it is really really hard to miss an address. Part of what pisses me off, too, is that UPS can find my house, no problem, every time. It isn't like I only order stuff to be delivered once in a blue moon - I am a regular customer of a couple of places. Still another part that chews at me is that I had things to do today, like go pick up a prescription, that I forewent to be home for a nonexistent delivery.

So tomorrow morning some delivery person is going to get a nasty note about their incompetence, and we'll see what happens then. If wherever they left the package has residents who work all day, and who simply took the box inside without looking at it, how will the FedEx person get it back if they are at work again tomorrow?

Meanwhile, somewhere out there, is a very big box with some stuff in it, out in the dark, alone and cold and with rain threatening... and my name on it. And the FedEx courier is sitting somewhere warm and dry, actually thinking that s/he earned his/her paycheck today.

UPdate: well, got a call this AM from the local FedEx guy, trying to locate the package. I told him that I stayed home yesterday and I HAD to go 40 miles to the pharmacy today to get a prescription. Sure enough, he called back in an hour and offered to leave the 'found' pkg at the pharmacy for me. (They are really nice folks there.) This tells me that the pkg never left that town (the county seat) at all - because no one would make an 80 mile round trip to find a package, when they could just take it over to the right house in the same town.

I know what it was, of course. People in my little town are not expected to have enough Internet access or savvy to check up on things like that. Someone got lazy, didn't want to make that long drive for one package, got caught and had to cover their ass really fast.

Don't ever lie to me. Ever. It pisses me off, and some way, some how, thru me or thru karma, it will come back to haunt. If the guy had simply waited and delivered it today, that would have been fine. If he had called and asked if he could meet me in town initially, that would have been fine too. But to put on the log that the package had been delivered when it wasn't - THAT was a blatant lie, and a result of sheer laziness. I really hate that. When you are hired to do a job, you do the job, no matter what a pain in the butt it happens to be.