Funny Package Delivery Stories

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

We get a lot of stories here about deliveries gone wrong, but I wanted to share my good experience with y’all.

Recently I decided to subscribe to the TCM wine club (wine drinking may have been involved). It sounded like a pretty good deal - 12 bottles of wine plus 3 special bottles for signing up for about $80.00. 15 bottles of wine for about $5.25 US each? Sure! I’ll give it a try. I like wine.

A couple of weeks ago I got a call from a UPS driver who told me he had accidentally dropped the box and broke one of the bottles. He was very nice and apologetic and sent in the damage report to the vendor. My repackaged box with the other 14 bottles was delivered the next day. I sent a polite email to the vendor and told them to expect the damage receipt and a request that when they send me a replacement bottle, that I prefer Cabernet Sauvignon. I received what appeared to be a form letter stating that I would be receiving a replacement case in the next 7-10 days. I thought to myself, that doesn’t seem right, I only need one bottle replaced, but figured it was just an autoreply and didn’t think much more about it.

Apparently right now in my front hall is another entire case of 15 bottles of wine. I will be contacting the vendor about this today to see if it is a mistake or if I will be charged for another case (not that big of a deal, really). Either way, more wine!

2

UPS hired a temp to deliver packages at my office in December 2012. She would insist that we opened boxes immediately so she could snack on the “edible” corn-starch packaging peanuts.

3

Many years ago, when I was in college and worked at a student run co-op, I placed an order to Kodak including 20 bottles of fixer. (Note to millennials: that was a chemical used in processing film.) Instead of the fixer, they shipped 20 bricks of color film (i.e., 400 rolls). Full of youthful virtue, I sent it back to them with a clear note explaining their mistake. They sent the box back to me again saying they had changed the address for returns, and I would need to re-ship it to a different location … and they charged me for the shipping! So, I kept it, and we had a blowout sale on the film. I feel a little bad about that, but even my conscience has a statute of limitations.

4

One would hope so.

5

I ordered a $10 Chuck E Cheese gift certificate for my sister and my mom called up and said “wow, that’s really generous of you!” and I was taken aback until she told me that CEC sent 10 $10 certs instead of 1 $10 one. I didn’t feel bad though because they charged a $4 fee. Well, I felt a little bad for my mom who had to endure CEC several times during the next few months.

6

I believe that under the circumstances, the OP is stating things as clearly and simply as he may.

:slight_smile:

7

Some years ago I ordered a book by the SDMB’s own Eve Golden. It arrived in a plastic bag, sopping wet and reeking of wine, with a note from the post office saying that it had been damaged when a bottle in another shipment broke. Amazon quickly sent me a replacement but I couldn’t resist ribbing Eve about it.http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=405555

8

At one time, the company I was working for had open positions in China. Since the facility there was still being built and they had no HR folks yet, they directed individuals to send resumes and information to a mail service in China, who collected a batch, put them all in a mail bag and sent them off to us.

Sometime during the transit, the mail bag had sat next to a crate of some type of garlic oil which had broken apart and totally soaked the mail bag, inside and out. The shipping company had taken the resumes and letters out of the garlic soaked mail bag and put them each inside a baggy, but there was no eliminating that super strong odor. The postman brought them to our office, stinking to high heaven, and even though we took them directly to the outside trash container, our office stunk for several days.

We did file a complaint with the shipping line, but hadn’t asked for any recompense. We really did it mainly to alert them that there was a problem with their shipping methods. After all, we still had plenty of other resumes rolling in.

Lo and behold, a few weeks later, our office received a delivery of two large crates of various oriental cooking oils and sauces as a sort of apology from the owners of the broken crate.

9

Here’s a kind-of-funny story about mailing a package, rather than receiving one:

Years ago my older sister, who is a scientist, deputized me to collect snails from a certain coastal location for a study she was doing. Since she was thousands of miles away, I was to wrap the live snails in wet paper towels and FedEx them to her.

I did as instructed, and went to the FedEx office to send the package. The woman behind the desk asked me the usual questions about prohibited items. No explosives, contraband, etc. …

" … And this doesn’t contain any live animals, does it?"

I stared for just a moment, then blurted “Yes.”

She stared back at me.

" … But they’re just snails," I added as dismissively as possible.

After another moment’s hesitation, she accepted the package, and it was sent with no problem!

The lesson is either “honesty is the best policy” or “snails aren’t real animals.”

10

:stuck_out_tongue:

I contacted the supplier and they confirmed that to make up for the broken bottle, they just re-shipped the entire case. I now have 29 bottles of wine to find storage space for. What great customer service.

11

Take one down, pass it around …

12

How is the USPS going to survive if you don’t use them when you really do have to send snail mail?

13

TCM probably buys their wine selections pre-packaged from the distributor or some other partner and I’m guessing they don’t have the business infrastructure in place to inventory, package and ship single bottles.

14

A year or so ago I found some clearance sale nightshirts on K-Mart’s website. I owned a few of the nightshirts already and really liked them so I’d thought I’d stock up I ordered 6 of them, I think and they were something like $7.50 each. They were the same style and size, a mix of 3 different colors. Standard shipping was maybe another 6 dollars or so for the entire order

Now, I didn’t pay much attention when I got a cluster of confirmation e-mails from K-Mart, I thought it was some sort of e-mail glitch since at a quick glance they seemed identical.

A few days later I come home to find a chest high stack of boxes piled outside the door to my apartment-- all from K-Mart.

At first I thought -oh, crap, I somehow accidentally placed this order 6 times and now I have 36 freaking nightshirts.

Then I opened the first box. Please note they were not small boxes. At the bottom, under a bunch of packing filler- was a single nightshirt.

Each nightshirt had shipped in a box that was about 18" square and 8"deep. And each one had been sent as separate UPS shipment with its own tracking number. And I checked the labels and they all came from the same warehouse in New Jersey, IIRC.

I had to go downstairs and borrow a cart from the building super to take the boxes and packing material from my 6 nightshirts down to the recycle bins.

No wonder K-Mart has trouble making money.

15

I used to work in the stationery and printing department of a modest computer company, filling orders from our interstate branches.

Once I got an order for a dozen boxes of “paper gliders” (the paper clips we stocked were branded “Glid-a”). So yes, I spent half the day folding paper planes, and sent them off.

Hoho, very funny they said, can we please have some frickin’ paperclips?

Boy I was a smart-arse back then.

16

These are great!

Ann Hedonia, I’m sure. I was dealing with the wine distribution company directly. And about your shirts, funny and frustrating!

17

A few years back my wife had accepted a short-term assignment at an overseas office of her firm. She was away for about five months. I got to travel a few times to an exotic locale (Thailand).

So one day I came home from work, and there was a package waiting for me. I wasn’t expecting anything, but I took it up to my apartment and had a look. It was from a company called “Nubian Kink,” which threw me a little bit. Nubian Kink? I had no idea what it could be. Some kind of pornography targeted to a very specific audience? Sex toys? I was baffled.

So I opened the package. It contained hair care products. They looked like very expensive hair products for African-American women.

This must be a mistake, I thought. I don’t buy expensive shampoo and stuff, let alone expensive shampoo and conditioner and whatever made for black women. So I got online and tracked down the company. They were in Brooklyn, where I live, and not all that far from me. Stranger and stranger.

I called them. I got someone on the phone who managed to track down the order, and she looked it up and assured me that it was legitimate, and that the products had been ordered and paid for and they’d been instructed to ship them to me.

I told the woman that it could hardly have been me who ordered the stuff, since I’m a white man not given to a lot of expensive hair care. Basically a daily shower and combing my hair is all I do. But she said that as far as I could tell the order was legit, and she gave me the name of the person who placed the order. The name meant nothing to me – it was a woman’s name that I’d never heard in my life.

It didn’t seem like fraud – why would someone send me hair care stuff? The company wasn’t asking me for any money. I didn’t see how this could be a scam. I didn’t see how it could be a mistake, either, though – they had my name and address right.

A day or so later I mentioned it to my wife, who cracked up. Seems that one of her colleagues in the office in Thailand was another American woman who had been bemoaning the fact that she couldn’t find good hair care stuff suitable for her hair (she’s an African-American woman) in Bangkok. My wife suggested that she order whatever she needed and have it shipped to me, since I’d be coming to visit in a week. And she just forgot to tell me about it.

So there’s my funny package delivery story.

18

Waaay back in the late 90’s, future Mrs. Morbo and I were wandering around… Target? Macy’s? can’t remember… picking stuff for our wedding registry. I was in charge of the price gun that would shoot a laser at the price tag of items we wanted which would add them to our registry - she was in charge of everything else. As I got more and more bored, I decided to grab a Sprite from a fridge, and casually fired the gun at it.

Many many months later as she was opening wedding gifts, sure enough, there inside a pretty box, underneath a layer of packing peanuts, was a single Sprite. :slight_smile:

19

:dubious: Hmmm…

20

Not funny, but one time when my father was still alive, he sent us a package. He used a private postal service near his home and paid for for air-mail delivery. The package, which we were expecting, didn’t arrive in the normal two or three weeks, and we’d just about given it up for lost when it finally did arrive after a couple of months. It carried surface-mail postage, and you could see where “Air Mail” had been marked out and replaced with “Surface Mail.” I tore of the lid and mailed it back to my father to show him. He confronted the private postal service, and it turns out it was an employee who had been pulling this scam. My father was told she’d quit and moved out of town before her scam was discovered and that he wasn’t the first to complain about something like this regarding her. He received a letter from the owner of the chain expressing sincere apologies, but the chain is still lucky not to have been sued.

There used to be a bar in Bangkok’s Soi Cowboy red-light district called Shadow Bar, owned by an old Vietnam War vet called Shadow Jack. He came up with the idea of having all his bargirls shave off their pubic hair and hand it in to him. When he had enough, he’d encase it in Plexiglass for bar keychains. I still have one or two squirreled away somewhere myself. And I bought several and mailed them to friends in the US. But one friend told me he received an envelope with a large hole in it (I’d used padded envelopes) and nothing inside but a note from the Postal Service apologizing for the mishap.