The UPS Send Off

Just when I thought UPS couldn't be stranger, they go and outdo themselves. My latest tango with the company started when I embarked on one of my favorite hobbies, shopping, the place, deep in the throws of cyberspace.

Like most expert shoppers, I operate on the following premise: If I think I am going to need it at some point in the future, it will be placed in my cart, even if it is a cyber-cart. So if I think an outfit would be good for high tea with the emperor of Thailand, then I will go ahead and buy it regardless of whether or not I know who he even is. Die-hard shoppers are like that. We like to be prepared.

So I hit the "complete order" tab, which is when the whole affair began to unravel.

My regular delivery man, Miguel, is wonderful, kind and helpful, but alas he was absent the day the order arrived. I knew this when their requisite gold and white calling card was on my door but when the package was not laying on my back patio, which is where he usually throws the thing.

The requisite phone calls to UPS headquarters helped. They would reroute it to the local headquarters where I would pick it up later that night.

There at 8:12 p.m., I waited my turn in line. The problem was someone in front of me who apparently showed up on a weekly basis.

The clerk looked at him and said, "Sir, we've already told you several times to call ahead with this. Now everyone is going to have to wait in line while I go look for your package."

Being late already, that was something up with which was not going to put (borrowing a phrase from Winston Churchill.) If someone had the IQ and consideration of a string bean then I had to suffer as well. He was going to have to be that way somewhere else.

She accepted his slip anyway and she disappeared into the black hole of a place known of as the UPS Shipping and Receiving area. I, in turn, pulled out my trusty cell phone while he waited, looked in his direction and used the word "idiot." When the employee returned without his package, she repeated the company policy again, which he apparently hadn't followed thus far.

When my turn came, they nearly lost my package but then later found it in the time it takes to drive a mile on an LA freeway. Meanwhile, I had been there for an hour, so I called the manager to ask why they didn't follow their own rules and why everyone therefore had to wait because of one nimrod.

I described the nimrod as being a nimrod, which I thought was pretty mild considering all the other words I could have used, but he got mad and told me not to disparage anyone as if being politically correct was the point of the whole thing to begin with. Maybe a packing crate landed on his head.