1 Happy St

I wish I knew someone personally who worked for a shipping company. If I did, I would invite them over to my house "tomorrow" just to see if they showed up 3 days later.

Last Friday, I had a package shipped "guaranteed overnight delivery". It just arrived today. And the shipping company is claiming that they weren't late. I'll repeat that in bold just to make sure you were paying attention, as well as for unnecessary dramatic effect. Last Friday (4 days ago), I had a package shipped "guaranteed overnight delivery". It just arrived today (Tuesday). 4 days later. And the shipping company is claiming that they weren't late. How, you ask? Because they're bleeping stupid. No, that's not it. Well not really. Logically-challenged yes, but not stupid. You can't be stupid to come up with logic like this. In fact I think you have to be a genius. The only way to be stupid in this scenario is to actually believe that the logic you just came up with is smart. Or something like that. I'll explain.

Last Friday afternoon (actually it was just after 5pm), I ordered a piece of equipment for my customer to be shipped to one of their stores. The store is a 24x7 location, so I requested the "guaranteed overnight delivery" option from the shipping company so that my customer would have their package by Saturday. Saturday came and went, but no shipment. Then Sunday came and went, still no shipment. Monday, I tracked the shipment and noticed that it had a scheduled delivery date of Tuesday before 5pm. What the bleep? So yesterday (Monday) I made a phone call to the shipping company to find out what the dilly. I'll recap the convo:

Him: "Orders have to be processed before 5pm to ship that day. You didn't order it until after 5pm on Friday, which means it didn't get processed until Monday. So the guaranteed overnight isn't until Tuesday."

Me: "Wait that makes no sense."

Him: "How does that not make sense?"

Me (thinking): Actually I'm really not sure.

Me (out loud): "Umm. Well. Wait, you have weekend deliveries, right? So what should I have done to get guaranteed overnight?"

Him: "Sir, you are getting guaranteed overnight."

Me: "Okay, a Saturday delivery then?"

Him: "Well you could have picked the Next Day option. But even then it may not have shipped on Friday because you didn't place the order in time."

Following that exchange, we had some semantic arguments that got me nowhere, and then I spent the next few minutes after that trying to balance my head from the dizziness. Bottom line, my package was never going to arrive on Saturday no matter which option I chose, and the words "guaranteed overnight" to this particular shipping company means "guaranteed overnight from the arbitrarily-chosen date and time in which we shipped your busted package."

Bottom line noted.