For Your Lies Only



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Its 10:00 p.m. do you know where you package is?

Its the holiday season and everyone has a horror story in their backlog when Santa’s reindeer trampled Aunt Betsy’s Fruit Cake that she sent one Christmas but didn’t get delivered until Groundhog’s day.  Which was all for the best because let’s face it, Aunt Betsy may have been a wonderful lady but she was no Betty Crocker.  There are Black Friday sales, Cyber Monday discounts … which by the way has nothing to do with technology items on sale or sex related toys much to some people’s dismay, it actually just refers to ANY ONLINE sales at a discount on the Monday following Thanksgiving.

Online shopping is a blessing for those of us who can not get out to the stores anymore.  But in some ways we have shifted our battle with the department store crowds to the struggle with our transit couriers who ship our precious cargo … or Aunt Betsy’s Fruit Cake, Bless her little heart for still finding time to show us how much she cares.  Can’t beat her lentil soup in a mason jar!

The number of couriers continues to grow from the once upon a time only game in town USPS to the myriad of players the likes of FedEx, UPSOntrac or DHL who will be soon competing against the Amazon Drones for your next special delivery.  It use to be that your Christmas cards came in the mail, now we have futons, smart phones and refrigerators all  tussling for truck space during the holiday chaos.  And I can understand when an item that was scheduled for delivery, indeed claimed to be OUT FOR DELIVERY doesn’t make it to your front door as promised … things happen — trucks break down, workers get delayed, items get misplaced behind hopes and dreams of sugar plum fairies.  What I have a problem with is when we try and cover up our mistakes by re-writing history.  Truth matters.

My Aunt Betsy’s fruit cake for the purpose of this story is a futon.  Its actually part of a sofa/futon set.  Two items that I take great pride in finding on Cyber Monday for $150 off.  To my delight, the furniture was scheduled for delivery last Thursday.  So we disassembled the rednecks computer and moved it to make room for our new ergonomic plan.  (Since I can’t sit up at a desk, we are opting for a lounging workstation space that will work for the both of us, with a little luck and lots of pillows this may pan out yet for my POTS … but that’s a blog for another day.)  Unfortunately only ONE of the pieces arrived.  Making the now displaced computer station an orphan in the back room.

To the credit of the courier .. we’ll call them FUPS, the website package tracker said honestly … 12/04/2014   2:53 P.M  “We’ve left the package in our facility. This may cause at least one business day delay. / Delivery will be rescheduled.”  I appreciate that.  Its a step up from the dog ate my homework and makes it clear that they missed the boat on this.
shellgame
The next five days would be a shell game of hide and slight of hand seek.  For starters, on Friday the package said it was out for delivery.  We held out hope until probably 11 p.m. but the website never updated the display that it would still be delivered that night.  That is until Saturday morning.  We woke to see the status paged changed and a new delivery estimate for the following Tuesday.  By Monday morning however the tracking system and I use that term loosely, would tell me that once again my package was OUT FOR DELIVERY!  Now it added the boasting comment that this was in fact an EARLY DELIVERY schedule because the item wasn’t really slated to be out until Tuesday.  Needless to say by the blog, the futon still is circling the globe on the back of someone’s truck.

My concern (complaint, kvetch, criticism, censure, castigation) is that each time the promise for delivery was broken … the web site tracking the package DELETED the record from the log and replaced it instead with “destination scan”.   I chatted with FUPS this morning for a while trying to understand the whereabouts of my fruitcake futon.  The first patient customer agent assured me that my package was on the truck and out for delivery today.  I explained kindly that I had been told that before.  However the log the agent was looking at, had no record of my package ever being out for delivery before and tried to offer a “technical” explanation of how the package was only “scanned” at the destination site and not actually ON the truck as it was today.  Clearly he didn’t realize I worked at AT&T for 99 years and technical data was my strong suit.  I then uploaded images to our chat log (maybe this was cyber Monday after all) to demonstrate that in fact the package had taken at least two previous joy rides on the truck earlier in the last five days.  After being transferred to two of other departments, I realized no one was going to admit to tampering with the data, but I did have a chance to explain to them why I thought it was important for “tracking data” to represent actual logs and facts as opposed to “manual over ride data” which just becomes a fairy tale story about a walk in the woods to grandmother’s house.  We can make it look any way we want to in the spin doctor version of our progress report.

So who cares?  What difference does it make?  None, if we don’t mind living in a world of illusory truths.  What if this “tracking data” is used to determine “on time” stats for the company.  So when we go data mining to see which company has the best track record their score will be higher than actual results.  Does it matter if I paid for two day shipping and they can fumble the ball without penalty?  As I said to a friend this morning, I didn’t mind the hour+ chat an mouse log searching for the fruitcake this morning … an exercise in futility can be enlightening, it like cheap therapy that shows you all the places you are stuck in your life.

All of us look for Truth at one time or another … from Grand Juries to GMOs, rape accusers to domestic abusers.  We want the truth.  We want to believe our word will mean something if spoken at our house or the white house.  But its not always black and white, however we might want it to be.  Each of us in one way or another want to make our self look good.  So we take the Selfie at a good angle, we touch up the blemishes, we remove some of the extraneous noise in the “picture” so that we look to be in our best light.  Even if the end result no longer resembles the actual events that occurred, even if we let the guilty go free because the system at its core is flawed at best.  Nothing against your fruitcake Aunt Besty, I’m sure it was delicious back in the day.

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