Errant Packages

Today went pretty well -- a bit busier than I like it to be. It's amazing how often I get a call asking me where something is that turns out to be exactly where it was supposed to be all along. Today it was a form. I got a call a few days ago asking about a form that should have arrived. The call was from someone who gets a lot of forms, so when items for her show up, it is no mystery where they are supposed to be delivered to. Since she claimed it wasn't there, and since I knew Angie would not have delivered it anywhere else, I told her it likely hadn't arrived yet.

So today I checked my work e-mail about midday, and found a message from the woman's boss with a forwarded message from the people at Standard Register (our forms supplier). They showed that the form had already been signed for by yours truly back on the 8th. (It was actually more grief than this -- the e-mail from the boss said it had arrived on the 9th, and the tracking number in the forwarded message was invisible. So I had to call to find out what the tracking number was, and only by accident found out it was the 8th and not the 9th, and so on.) Angie dug through our files with all our delivery information and, sure enough, our records showed that the form in question had been delivered by us to the place it was supposed to go on the 8th.

As it turned out, the person who had called me in the first place (who is very nice and I've known her for years) eventually discovered the errant forms in her cabinet, but shoved way in back and underneath other forms (by other people). More often than not, it turns out the package in question both arrived on time and was delivered on schedule, but something unusual happened in the department and the person expecting the package doesn't know it's there.

There have been times where the mistake was all mine, but that's rare. I've had packages that we in receiving delivered to the proper name and place on the box, only to find out that the contents were intended for somebody else in another department. And there was one time where FedEx showed I had signed for a package that had actually been delivered to a different hospital in town.

Yesterday I had Don from Maintenance come looking for a package. It had supposedly shipped a month ago and he wondered if I'd seen it. Indeed I had -- in fact, it had been sitting on my bench for a month while awaiting someone to come claim it. The item in question had arrived without a P.O. number, ordered by "Victor." I tried, Purchasing tried, we all tried to figure out who Victor was, but to no avail.

Most often the "where is my package?" question is best answered by pointing out that people who take orders are not to be confused with people who ship orders. I've lost count of how many times I've been told by someone that "they said it would be here this morning," only to discover that what was actually said was: "We're shipping it FedEx." See, FedEx and UPS are both good services, and offer many options for getting a package from here to there as rapidly as you desire. But for many people, unlike with UPS, FedEx is synonymous with "overnight", which is not at all correct. FedEx can get things to you by 7 a.m. the next day, or guaranteed by 1o:30 a.m., or just sometime the next day, or in two days, or in three days, or via ground which could be anything. Usually the errant package is in transit, blissfully unaware that it is "late" getting somewhere.

It can take up a lot of time to track down a package that went astray. But you'd be amazed at how long it can take to find out that one didn't.