I love USPS...:(

Notice anything odd about this tracking summary:

Code:

ARRIVAL AT UNIT
May 11, 2016, 7:47 AM, SAN JOSE 95118

PROCESSED THROUGH USPS FACILITY
May 11, 2016, 3:20 AM, SAN JOSE 95101

PROCESSED THROUGH USPS FACILITY
May 09, 2016, 5:12 PM, NORFOLK 23501

PROCESSED THROUGH USPS FACILITY
May 07, 2016, 8:19 PM, OAKLAND 94615

ORIGIN ACCEPTANCE
May 07, 2016, 7:04 PM, DANVILLE 94526

PRE-SHIPMENT INFO SENT TO USPS
May 07, 2016, 1:27 PM, DANVILLE 94526

Luckily it only seems to have added a needless two day delay (so far...)

 

LOL.

That makes a lot of sense

 

Norfolk VA? Someone put it on the wrong truck!

 

I think wrong airplane...

 

I had an ebay seller claim FedEx screwed up but I think they sold an item twice and re-routed it to another customer who paid them more.

I paid for item, it left East Coast got to Sacramento, and then next day it was back in the East coast, and the next day delivered to someone else out there!! They claimed fexed was at fault for screwing it up, and that the person they dropped it off with refused to 'give it back'.

 

I used to joke that I never knew anyone who had ever successfully used DHL for anything - everybody's experience was that bad. But then maybe 10 years ago, somebody send me a Christmas present of those fridge magnets that spell out words. It came via DHL. I was quite surprised that they managed to not screw up.

But then, as I was getting ready to discard the box, I noticed another airbill pouch rolled up in a ball and stuck to the bottom of the box. I peeled it off and discovered there was an airbill inside. It was Motorola sending a piece of semiconductor manufacturing equipment (according to the description) from Texas to California. I called the phone number for the shipper and told them there was a problem. After I got Motorola to stop telling me to return their big-bucks package, they realized that their item was floating around somewhere in the DHL void and might never return.

I added the tracking number to my nightly "check the tracking for these packages and email me about any changes" script. It stayed in the DHL system for over a year, never being delivered, until it finally aged out of the system.

All carriers occasionally have foulups. Misroutings seem to be more common than loss in my experience. Here is a FedEx package that developed "wandering gnome syndrome". The closest it ever got to me (on this screen) was NJ. It was eventually delivered to me, but I had to call FedEx to have someone physically rescue it from the location it was in that day, re-label it, and send it along to me.

 

In a former life I was an Industrial Engineer at UPS for a decade and also worked for a year at the Oakland FedEx Air Facility. What most likely happened is the USPS "Silk" bag that the package was in got stuck on the conveyor and was "opened" and when it was put back together it was probably put in the wrong "Bag". Happens too often as USPS overstuffs the bags.

 

The most frustrating one I had was from UPS back in 2011 for the delivery of my then-new Thinkpad W520.
IIRC it went: Singapore->Frankfurt->London (Dartford) in the space of about 48h. Sat there for a day or two then went to Dortmund, then on a flight to Kazakhstan (huh?!) then Paris then London then Bristol (that little sojourn took about 5 days).

 

I spent about 6 months over 2010/2011 playing "chase the van" with DHL after RS changed to using them during some shuffle with their normal delivery service. The packages were signed for and if I missed the delivery, every time my packages made it back to their depot they were returned to RS instead of being re-delivered. It got that bad that I knew all the dispatchers by name as I was calling them daily, to find out where the van was, who was driving it and where it was going next, so I could meet up with them and get my damned package! A couple of times I met the drivers at the gate on the way back into their yard having chased them around the city for an hour or more! It was a mad time, but the stuff I needed was critical