Adventures in Shipping

Once upon a time, there was a Papa who wanted to join the 21st century. His little girl thought that was pretty cool since she works in the 21st century. He picked out the perfect smartphone and said, "Let's get it!"

Trying to be super sneaky, they ordered it but had it mailed to her (she lives in Oregon, he lives in California). There was a method behind that madness, that is now forgotten especially in the face of what happened next.

What happens next is also sort of the moral to this story: never ever ever mail packages while not 100% lucid. Because this little girl hurt her back and so was on a pain pill or two and not all there when she decided to mail that smartphone to her papa in California.

For some reason, she decided to mail the phone not from the post office but from a store called Postal Connection. Now, she had mailed stuff from them before and all went smoothly, but this time was different.

Two weeks went by and her papa didn't receive his phone. And her sister, to whom she had also mailed a present, hadn't received hers either.

Now lucid, the little girl went to Postal Connection to find out what happened to her packages.

Turns out, the guy who helped her was a moron.

He saw that the last name on the packages was the same (this is the only thing we can think of that happened) and so instead of double checking the addresses, he printed the same address on both labels.

Unfortunately, the address he printed was the sister's.

And in her haze, the little girl had used her sister's old address instead of her current address.

So both packages went to some random person in Massachusetts.

And then the guy, instead of using the return address that the little girl had written on the box, used the return address that was in the system. Which was her old address. So all of the addresses on the boxes were wrong.

Luckily, her sister's got shipped UPS, and UPS is nice and helpful and allowed her to pick it up at their office instead of waiting for it to bounce back to Oregon. So her sister got her present. But Papa's smartphone had an adventure.

The box that had a great b i-coastal adventure.

And the US Postal Service is absolutely no help at all. They won't tell you where the package is being forwarded to. They won't allow you to pick it up until they've attempted a delivery. They won't tell you doodly about where your mail is!

Thank goodness I know the new tenant in our old house and she knew to call me when my dad's smartphone bounced back to her house because I let her know about the cluster that was this whole scenario. Needless to say, I'll be a little gunshy about mailing stuff in the future and I definitely won't be using Postal Connection!

The ending to this story is a happy one though, the box made it back in to my hands, and the manager of Postal Connection not only refunded my shipping costs, but reimbursed me for the $8.83 I was charged by the post office because of the return to sender business!

And for the record, this whole adventure took about 3 weeks.

Good luck with your next postal adventure!

Ciao,
kc