{"id":3754,"date":"2014-12-09T14:29:34","date_gmt":"2014-12-09T21:29:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.coolkarma.com\/dharma\/?p=3754"},"modified":"2014-12-09T14:37:53","modified_gmt":"2014-12-09T21:37:53","slug":"for-your-lies-only","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/?p=3754","title":{"rendered":"For Your Lies Only"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"handcart\"<\/a>
Its 10:00 p.m. do you know where you package is?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There are Black Friday sales, Cyber Monday <\/a>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.<\/p>\n

Online shopping is a blessing for those of us who can not get out to the stores anymore.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Can’t beat her lentil soup in a mason jar!<\/a><\/p>\n

The number of couriers continues to grow from the once upon a time only game in town USPS<\/a> to the myriad of players the likes of FedEx<\/a>, UPS<\/a>,\u00a0 Ontrac<\/a> or DHL<\/a> who will be soon competing against the Amazon Drones<\/a> for your next special delivery.\u00a0 It use to be that your Christmas cards<\/i> came in the mail, now we have futons, smart phones and refrigerators all\u00a0 tussling for truck space during the holiday chaos.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 What I have a problem with is when we try and cover up our mistakes by re-writing history.\u00a0 Truth matters<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My Aunt Betsy’s fruit cake for the purpose of this story is a futon.\u00a0 Its actually part of a sofa\/futon set.\u00a0 Two items that I take great pride in finding on Cyber Monday for $150 off.\u00a0 To my delight, the furniture was scheduled for delivery last Thursday.\u00a0 So we disassembled the rednecks computer and moved it to make room for our new ergonomic plan.\u00a0 (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.)\u00a0 Unfortunately only ONE of the pieces arrived.\u00a0 Making the now displaced computer station an orphan in the back room.<\/p>\n

To the credit of the courier .. we’ll call them FUPS, the website package tracker said honestly … 12\/04\/2014\u00a0\u00a0 2:53 P.M\u00a0 “We’ve left the package in our facility. This may cause at least one business day delay. \/ Delivery will be rescheduled.<\/i>”\u00a0 I appreciate that.\u00a0 Its a step up from the dog ate my homework and makes it clear that they missed the boat on this.
\n\"shellgame\"<\/a>
\nThe next five days would be a shell game<\/a> of hide and slight of hand seek.\u00a0 For starters, on Friday the package said it was out for delivery.\u00a0 We held out hope until probably 11 p.m. but the website never updated the display that it would still be delivered that night.\u00a0 That is until Saturday morning.\u00a0 We woke to see the status paged changed and a new delivery estimate for the following Tuesday.\u00a0 By Monday morning however the tracking system<\/i> and I use that term loosely, would tell me that once again my package was OUT FOR DELIVERY!\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Needless to say by the blog, the futon still is circling the globe on the back of someone’s truck.<\/p>\n

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”. \u00a0 I chatted with FUPS this morning for a while trying to understand the whereabouts of my fruitcake futon.\u00a0 The first patient customer agent assured me that my package was on the truck and out for delivery today.\u00a0 I explained kindly that I had been told that before.\u00a0 However the log the agent was looking at, had no record of my package ever being out for delivery<\/em><\/strong> 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.\u00a0 Clearly he didn’t realize I worked at AT&T for 99 years and technical data was my strong suit.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We can make it look any way we want to in the spin doctor version of our progress report.<\/p>\n

So who cares?\u00a0 What difference does it make?\u00a0 None, if we don’t mind living in a world of illusory truths.\u00a0 What if this “tracking data” is used to determine “on time” stats for the company.\u00a0 So when we go data mining to see which company has the best track record their score will be higher than actual results.\u00a0 Does it matter if I paid for two day shipping and they can fumble the ball without penalty?\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

All of us look for Truth at one time or another … from Grand Juries to GMOs, rape accusers to domestic abusers.\u00a0 We want the truth.\u00a0 We want to believe our word will mean something if spoken at our house or the white house.\u00a0 But its not always black and white, however we might want it to be.\u00a0 Each of us in one way or another want to make our self look good.\u00a0 So we take the Selfie <\/em>at a good angle, we touch up<\/i> the blemishes, we remove some of the extraneous noise in the “picture” so that we look to be in our best light.\u00a0 Even if the end result no longer resembles the actual events that occurred, even if we let the guilty<\/i> go free because the system at its core is flawed at best.\u00a0 Nothing against your fruitcake Aunt Besty, I’m sure it was delicious back in the day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Its the holiday season and everyone has a horror story in their backlog when Santa’s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[58,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-customer-service","category-dharma"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3754"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3761,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3754\/revisions\/3761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}