CraBlogged

I've been having some trouble with Fedex lately. I came home a few nights ago, and there it was, another package. I was excited - I thought someone sent me a super fun big box of things to enjoy for the holiday season. But alas, it was another misdelivered package. This makes number four this year, though the others might have been ups. But in the course of a few days, I received two distinctly different packages to other people with different but similar addresses to my own.

Instead of opening them up and enjoying the treats for myself, like any normal person would do, I actually called up Fedex to let them know I'm sitting on two URGENT OVERNIGHT packages that were misdelivered to me. It was actually fairly difficult to track down the Fedex number. It wasn't anywhere on the box, and searching online at their homepage was a baffling mystery of cluttered pages full of useless info. But I finally got it, and sat on hold for 25 minutes due to their holiday bumrush. I finally talked to a lady who took down every piece of information possible, name, sure, number, ok, address, of course, I give it all willingly and happily in the name of good will towards men. I told her the problem, which took a while because she kept thinking the packages were mine and I was trying to deliver them somewhere but they had come back to me instead of being delivered. She seemed surprised that I was just an innocent Joe trying to set a wrong right, but once that was clear, she put me on hold again to figure out what she needed to figure out. Ten minutes later, she apologized and let me know that due to the overbooked season, she wouldn’t' t be able to send someone to pick them up until Tuesday. After Christmas. Which was 5 days from when I called.

I said, well, they're really close by - I mean just a few minuets drive. Maybe you can call them to let them know it's at this address? I'll leave them outside for them to pick them up if they want. She said she couldn't do that, they're not allowed to make outgoing calls. I can sort of understand this, if that was their policy, they'd need to hire a bunch more phone ladies, and their call numbers would go through the roof. I asked if I could contact them and have them pick it up, or if that was illegal and a breech of confidence or some legal whatever, and she said I could do whatever I waned to do, assuming I didn't open the package. So I said, all right lady, I'll leave the boxes out and you can pick them up whenever you want.

I called the numbers on the boxes, one was an incorrect number that wouldn't dial, and the other was an answering machine where I left a message saying I was holding one of their boxes ransom for the cost of them coming over to pick it up. They came by an hour later quite grateful. One out of two I suppose isn't terrible.

But! But then the worst. The next day, this would be saturday. The next day, at 9am, I got a phone call. I was so excited to be able to sleep-in since I haven't been resting well, but I answer this call and it's FedEx. It's some gruffy guy and he's full of chipper cheer, and he wanted to follow up on me regarding the packages. See, he was confused, was it MY packages? Was it a "bad" address? What's the deal?

I was so sad. What was going on? Why are they penalizing me for being a good person (not great, I mean, I could have just drove the boxes to the addresses). I told him again that I had packages misdelivered to me, no, not my packages, someone sent something somewhere, and instead of ending up somewhere it ended up here by accident, yes a bad address, but not a bad address in the regard of the address being bad, just bad in that it went sent badly instead of goodly, and please, why are you calling me, I don't understand. Thank you sir, happy holidays.

I was baffled, and a bit angry but mostly tired and fell back asleep after 20 minutes of being baffled and angry and mostly tired.

I told jo we need to put up a big sign outside our door in bold print letting ups/fedex know to double check their addresses.

Annnnnnnyway.

So Matt and his bro came by yesterday to hang, it was fun. Got some food, talked about life, went to the game store to marvel at hand-painted figurines. And of course to go visit work to play games.

On the way there, just an exit away on the freeway, I was sure disaster struck. Imagine going 60 on a freeway, when all of a sudden you notice everyone around you slowing down. Brakelights everywhere - but you also see everyone pulling over. 20 cars on the side of the road with hazard lights on. I was sure there was a corpse on the freeway, something terrible had happened. And then I saw everyone was looking up out of their window. People had cameras out, cellphones taking pictures and movies. All staring upwards, in the middle of a freeway.

I instantly thought: UFOs. It had to be. Something crazy was going on. But we couldn't see anything in the sky - until - there it was. Birds. Just a bunch of birds. People had stopped on the freeway, endangering the lives of themselves and their loved ones and their babies, all to gawk at birds. I admit, it looked pretty cool seeing about a thousand birds flying in a swarm. But was it worth almost killing people? Was it worth almost causing the biggest accident since Episode I? (see how I did that?)

At work was a special treat - Wii. We finally got to play a bit of it, and I wasn't as impressed as I thought I would be, but more impressed than I should have been. Tennis was interesting, I found that the best thing to do is waggle the joystick as fast as you can left and right (don't even think about it) so that you're hitting the racket at max acceleration constantly. The guy auto-moves, and since he's constantly swinging he always gets the ball. Sometimes it goes wide but you always get it. Mostly. It almost worked. It worked better than actually trying.

The saddest thing of all about it was that the best game was Bomberman 93. I mean seriously, how is that game more fun than the new zelda game? It just was. You can't beat the old turbographics Bomberman 93. You can't. Nothing can. We played that for hours.

So in short, I'll buy a Wii one day but only to download old Bomberman games. And maybe bubble bobble. Life force. Mmmm.

Anyway! Happy Merry Xmas Eve!