I always have a hard time talking on the phone. The other person can’t quite understand me, or I mishear something they say. The other side waits for a second to see if their brain will review the words and come up with some kind of conclusion only to eventually shrug its shoulders and send the command to say something like, “Yeah, yeah,” or laugh in the hopes what was said was supposed to funny.
It’s worst when I have to contact any kind of customer service and tell them my name is James Sannah. “That’s James the most popular way, then the last name is S-A-N-N-A-H.”
They always nail the first name because like unlike many of them out there, James is not done very many other ways. The double Ns in the middle of Sannah seem like they would be landmines in waiting, but only rarely do they come out the other side as Ms. The H, understandably, is left off half the time. It is silent, after all. But where things get twisted and tangled and mangled is the S, which according to my estimates gets turned into an F about 96% of the time.
I think it’s that I’m so very concerned about the way that the end of James and start of Sannah might get muddled together that I over-enunciate and in doing so end up making the other person hear something I’m not saying.
That’s what turned my 30-minute phone call with FedEx into a 45-minute call. Maybe another 15 minutes was trying to get them to understand that although I had indeed received my package, and did have access to the tracking information showing the journey it supposedly at one point took, what I wanted to know was where it had been for the past month.
Like anyone, I got a tiny jolt of excitement when the first email popped into my inbox. It was late June, and I had ordered a sciencey make-your-own-toy kit for my five-year-old daughter, Rosa. She didn’t know anything about it. Birthday presents are best that way. I was proud of myself for ordering far enough in advance that even if the projected three-day shipping window slipped to a couple of weeks, I could still get it wrapped and next to a cake in plenty of time.
I followed the package’s route, refreshing the page multiple times a day. It left the factory in Minnesota on a Sunday night and by early Monday morning made it to Indianapolis, presumably at some kind of fancy FedEx terminal. I hope it had a nice breakfast, and then lunch as it hung out there for most of the day. An evening flight took it to Virginia and sometime on Tuesday it went, again presumably, by truck to my local FedEx distribution center a few miles from my house. Wednesday was the big day, with the happy anxiety-boosting status OUT FOR DELIVERY appearing at the top of the screen. Only a matter of hours.
I busied myself around the house, reminding my brain over and over that the next line of the status said it would be delivered by 8 p.m. Sure, it could be the very last thing they put on the truck and thus the first one off, but how likely was that? Had it ever happened that way? I tried to keep myself occupied, first knocking out the seemingly never-ending loads of laundry a family accumulates, then going through the weekly ad from the grocery store we like to see what kind of sales we might take advantage of. My phone buzzed with a text notification: YOUR PACKAGE HAS BEEN DELIVERED.
It was just past 10 a.m. How lucky was I?! I had forgotten I signed up for texts when things get delivered, and wondered for a second if that gave me some kind of VIP status for an early time slot. No, couldn’t be. I bounded for the door and swung it open to find only the faded brown welcome mat I bought four years ago. I peeked my head out as if getting my own package was some kind of secret mission the neighbors couldn’t know about, but looking to the left and right of the door revealed no boxes. I retreated inside for a second to put on some shoes and began trying to think like a delivery guy who is trying to hide something for someone he assumes isn’t home. But in these times, with so many people working from home, so many avoiding public interactions at all costs so we can all stay healthy, shouldn’t the calculus have shifted to assuming we are here?
There was nothing in the vicinity of the door, nor around the side of the house, where the garage is. I peeked under the large green leaves of hosta plants, behind each one of my car tires, and even went to the mailbox just in case they found a way to jam it in there. Nothing. I checked my phone again to make sure I read the text right, and yup, it said what I thought it said. I double-checked the original tracking link, and there too were the words: YOUR PACKAGE HAS BEEN DELIVERED. Not wanting to sound foolish when I complained, I proceeded to Google whether there could have been some kind of error in the system. I found one post saying it could take another day for a package to show up once that status changed, but then underneath a bunch of people who said they used to deliver packages for the company said absolutely there would be no way for that to “accidentally” happen. If it said delivered, someone scanned the package.
My calls to customer service over the next four days all ended with assurances of varying degrees of them taking the situation seriously. First, a lot. We’re sending a message to the driver to go back and doublecheck where they left it. We’ve now opened an investigation and should have results in the next day or two. Then more of a blowoff situation. We’re still checking. We’ll let you know if we find anything. The result of it all was that after those four days, I assumed they never delivered the package, had no idea where it was, and never would.
With my cushion gone for getting the kit in time for Rosa’s birthday, I contacted the company, let them know what happened and they were kind about promptly sending me a new one. It arrived exactly when they said it would, perfectly intact and placed lovingly right on the weathered mat. Rosa blew out her five candles and immediately told everyone her wish even though we told her she was supposed to keep it secret. She wants a dog. FedEx will not be involved.
When it came time for her to play with the set I chose, it quickly became clear that while the product was rated for ages 5 and up, perhaps it was a little ambitious for her. It was supposed to be a low-tech tablet kind of thing that she could use in place of commandeering the family iPad all the time, with buttons perfect for her mashing and a solid plastic case suited for multiple unintended trips to the hard floor. But there were a total of 54 pieces, one of which I figured out in step 76 of the instruction manual was a GPS device.
That came in handy in mid-August when I opened the front door to go for a run, and a battered white box was sitting before me. I assumed at first my wife had ordered something and was about to toss the box inside and leave when I noticed the name of the sender. Joytech Enterprises. Shipment date June 28. The original package.
All my plans for exercise immediately evaporated and I ran instead back into the house in a frantic search for my laptop. Armed with the tracking number on the box, I punched in the numbers, ready to see an elaborate trip through multiple FedEx warehouses, possibly in multiple countries, that might explain why a three-day shipment needed six weeks to arrive. I hit Enter and watched as the page loaded. Could that be right? In bold letters across the top was the same message I had seen that started this whole mess: YOUR PACKAGE HAS BEEN DELIVERED. Last updated July 1. I refused to believe that was the whole story and assumed FedEx must have gotten somewhere with its very serious investigation of the matter and maybe attached a different tracking number I didn’t know about.
That’s how I ended up on the phone with Robin from customer service, spelling my name four times before she was able to find my records. Even she sounded disappointed at the result. The driver who was supposed to come back and look again at the house to see if that is in fact where they left the box hit his overtime quota before he could do so, and so he went home. The supervisor who was supposed to go out and take a picture to send to the driver as a backup method had their phone run out of power, didn’t have a charger at the office or in their car, and forgot to go the next day. The promised thorough investigation started and ended with the assumption there really was no way of figuring out what happened other than looking in the truck again, and there was nothing there, Robin told me.
I moped for a solid two hours. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter at all. Rosa had her present, which we eventually built together and she loved. The company probably charged FedEx some kind of fee for losing the item (they later told me to keep the second one, which I gave to a neighbor). But there was the nagging sense of the fact that something had happened in the world, and it seemed like it must be possible to figure out where a stupid little box had been for six weeks.
Eventually I remembered the GPS component and wondered how exactly it worked. Thankfully the company that made the kit included the names of the manufacturers in the instructions in case you ever needed to replace just one of the parts. I spent the rest of the afternoon going through diagrams and customer service forums on the LocateTech website until finally I found two key pieces of information. First, the GPS unit had its own internal power source. That meant it had been running since the person in the factory snapped the battery into place. Second, with a bit of software from the company, it was possible to look up all the locations the GPS had pinged since that moment.
A few emails later, I had the code in hand, and a simple run gave me a massive spreadsheet with basically everywhere the unit had been since the beginning of May. The first chunk of rows were expected, all from South Korea where the components were manufactured. Then there were the ones that followed a boat across the Pacific to a port in California. It sat there for a week or so before taking what, according to the speed of the progression, must have been a truck journey to Minnesota where it again sat waiting for my credit card to be approved and a box with my address to hit the shipping line.
It’s been about four months now since I got all that data and I can pretty well piece together the entire journey. First, let’s start with the all-important question of whether the package ever actually made it to my house on July 1. The answer is unequivocally no. Not a chance. No way, nope, nah. The GPS coordinates show the package leave the FedEx facility and never come closer than about two miles from my house before returning to the hub that evening. It stayed there for five days, or just longer than the time I was in touch with FedEx about the supposed detailed investigation.
On July 7, a Tuesday, the box went to the home of Patrick DelMarr, an entrepreneur known in the area as the guy who runs the Black Cactus tequila bar and Joe’s Midwestern Steakhouse. Patrick has no idea why the package ended up at his house, where it remained for three days. Our addresses are nothing alike, our houses are very much nothing alike (his is what the dictionary would call pretty dang huge), and our names are not even close. He called FedEx once, he said, and they were pretty uninterested other than telling him to leave the box on his porch and that someone would come get it. He offered to take it to my house, or even the FedEx office, but they said due to coronavirus precautions they recommended he just set it outside.
Someone did grab the package, but it was not a FedEx employee. According to the doorbell video Patrick kindly sent me, a young man I’ll guess to be about 14 years old in a blue Washington Capitals t-shirt and matching mask was out for a walk in the neighborhood, saw the package and probably figured no one would notice it was gone. He left in the direction he came, one that would have sent him toward West March Avenue. GPS data from an hour later showed the package sitting at 492 West March Avenue, owned by Trevor Graham. Online records for the local high school show a Philip Graham on the freshman football team. Because of his excellent efforts to wear a facemask during his walk, I was unable to determine if the photo on the football team page matched the person in the surveillance video. Phone calls to the house went unanswered, which I understand since I haven’t picked up a number I don’t know since about 2003.
I’m guessing Mr. Philip wasn’t exactly impressed with what he found inside the package, because it was only at his house for a week. Early on Saturday July 18, there was movement, with the package first heading to the parking lot of the Target about a mile away, and then quickly over to the home of Gerard Garard just over the border in Potomac, Maryland. This one took me a while, but I was able to confirm a Craigslist post offering the kit up for sale for $50. The poster listed our town as the location of the item. When I got in touch with Garard (he said his father decided to name him Gerard because his mother wouldn’t literally let him be Garard Garard and relented on Gerard), he gladly told me everything.
Garard was similarly looking for a birthday gift for his own son, and had seen the kit in question online. By the time he was going to order, they were sold out, so he turned without much hope to searching other places and was pleasantly surprised to find one not only available, but for half the original price and located not far from where he lived. He immediately contacted the seller, who never told him his name, and arranged to make the pickup. An all-cash deal. Garard was a little skeptical and almost backed out, but he figured he would at least go to the store parking lot and see what was up, knowing he could just get back in his car and go. Everything went great and he was beaming as he sped along the unusually empty beltway back home.
When his son Eric’s birthday came, he was so proud to watch his boy blow out all 13 candles in an effortless swoop. But when it came time to open gifts, he quickly had a similar but opposite experience to what my family went through. Where the kit was maybe a little old for my daughter, it was on the young side for Eric. The kid was nice about it, Garard said, saying things like, “No it’s cool dad, it will be fun.” But Garard could tell, and he vowed to make it up to his son with something else. So he put the kit back in the box he got it from, and it was then he noticed the address label on the outside. He figured that was the kid who sold it to him, so he wrote back to the email address he had used to arrange the original deal, seeing if maybe he could get a refund. When he heard nothing back, he figured, what the heck, I’ll just give it back to him and let him get some extra money to go to the movies when that’s a thing people can do again. Back in the car, across the bridge, down the highway to the exit, and a couple of turns later, he placed the box on my porch.
It turned out, we missed each other by just a few minutes. At least, that’s what Garard figured. He said he was there around 8 a.m. (GPS data suggests 8:04), wanting to attract as little attention as possible in a kind of Santa Claus way. I usually aim to start my runs by 8 but that day had trouble finding my shoes (see 5-year-old above). It would have been nice to see him and at least get his part of the story without having to do the entire tracking process first. When we talked on the phone, he told me his son likes baseball, just like my daughter. We’ve been texting the past few days about trying to go to a game someday. My wife thinks I’m a little crazy for going through all of this, but also “it’s cute that you have a new friend.”
I’m thinking about typing up a very official report of all my findings and submitting it to FedEx. I have a good job now that I like and don’t plan to leave soon, but it can’t hurt to have something in their archives in case they are ever desperate to hire investigators. I don’t harbor any ill will toward them other than feeling like they didn’t try very hard to resolve my situation. I know they’re busy. I know it’s a company made up of individuals just trying to get through the same way we all are. I hope they all stay safe. I hope they all have someone like Rosa who makes them smile at the end of the day.