“Hey, Michelle, can you do me a favor? I ordered something online…” My friend, Michelle, who lives across the street from me, has come to dread those words. For the past two years, Tim and I have escaped the cold, miserable snow that is a Michigan winter to spend a few months in Arizona. While we’re gone, it falls upon Michelle to keep an eye on our house, check the mailbox for mail that wasn’t forwarded and, much to her dismay, return Amazon packages that I have mistakenly sent home to Michigan.
So far, I have sent home a six-foot, square outdoor rug, a crate of Orville Reddenbacher popcorn, socks, underwear for Tim and an enormous three-foot in diameter wall clock. It’s just so easy when ordering from Amazon to click the “Order Now” button and not pay attention to the address. You would think that since my Amazon Alexa knows everything about my personal life, she would be smart enough to know where I spend my winters. Unfortunately, clicking on the wrong address is not the only problem I’ve encountered while ordering online. There’s also the distorted photos.
Now, everyone knows I’m no math whiz, so I skip over the “Details” part of the item that lists sizes and dimensions. What’s the point? I once measured my half-bath and came up with 800 square feet. I also should have paid attention when I ordered a small scoop for cat food and a lovely candy bowl for the coffee table.
The candy bowl holds approximately 17 M&Ms (plain not peanut) and I gave the scoop to the landscapers for shoveling gravel.
And then the armchair arrived.
I ordered an armchair online for our spare bedroom so I could have a little corner refuge for reading and talking on the phone. The day it showed up I was so excited. The UPS driver left it outside the front door and I was so pleased that I was able to carry the big, flat box upstairs all by myself. Those three pound weights I’ve been lifting have really made a difference! “That box looks awfully flat for a chair,” Tim said when I laid the box down. “The cushions are probably vacuum packed like pillows,” was my reply. I grabbed my box cutter and tore into that cardboard box with gusto. I pulled out some metal legs and set them aside. “Those are awfully long legs for a chair,” Tim said. Undeterred, I continued to pull piece after piece out of the box. “Where are the cushions?” I asked. “Maybe they’re coming in a separate box,” I reasoned. After I took everything out and started to assemble the legs I pulled the last large flat piece out of the box. Tim looked at me, scratched his head and said, “I hate to tell you this, but you’re assembling a table.” He was right. There were no vacuum packed cushions or curved wooden legs in the box. It was a table. I was devastated. Not in the fact that I couldn’t tell the difference between an armchair and a table, but in the fact that my chair didn’t arrive. I now had to try to repack the table into a box that was clearly two feet smaller than when it arrived, and ship it back to Amazon. At least the UPS guy didn’t complain when I saw him trying to wrestle that demolished cardboard box with the metal legs sticking out of the side into his truck. And speaking of UPS, they are leaps and bounds ahead of the US Postal Service who should stick to delivering junk mail.
Not all online orders come FedEx or UPS. Some come from the post office. Take for example that large three foot round clock that I had mistakenly sent to Michigan. Michelle kept her eyes open for that clock for weeks and it never showed up. In the meantime, I had ordered another one and was already admiring it on the wall of my kitchen. Periodically, I would get emails from Amazon telling me that the original clock order was being redirected to Arizona. Then, the next week, I would get another notice that it was “undeliverable” and redirected back to Michigan. These seesaw messages kept crowding my inbox and whenever I tried to contact the post office both by email and phone, there was no response. I just ignored the emails, and then I ordered a utility ladder.
Once again, I didn’t realize that Amazon was sending the ladder through the mail. The mail! I sent five postcards that took three weeks to get from Arizona to Michigan and now I have to rely on the postal service to deliver my ladder? By the way, two postcards never made it. On the date the ladder was to arrive, I received an email from Amazon saying that the post office was unable to deliver my package because my “mailbox was full.” My mailbox is a small square that barely holds mail let alone a utility ladder. The online chat person at Amazon assured me that the ladder would be re-delivered the following day. The following day brought the same email from Amazon; the post office was unable to deliver the package because, once again, my “mailbox was full.” Now, I’ve seen my mail carrier. He appears to be a normal guy, he’s totally capable of reading and driving a mail truck. But, apparently he isn’t capable of figuring out that that a ladder won’t fit into a mailbox! Frustrated and angry, Tim and I got in the car and sped over to the Scottsdale post office. I asked the woman behind the plexiglass if there was a package being held for me. She left the counter and disappeared behind a wall to search. In a few minutes she came out carrying an oversized flat box that was ripped on both sides. Of course, when I saw the flat box I just assumed it was another armchair. She pushed the box over the counter to me and when Tim grabbed it, he saw through the ripped cardboard that it was the large wall clock we had ordered months before. By the amount of forwarding stickers on the box it appears that that clock could have accumulated a lot of Delta sky miles between Michigan and Arizona. I calmly told the postal worker to please return that box to the sender and take another look in the back room. Within minutes she emerged with the right package and we took our ladder home.
Now, all of this confusion and chaos isn’t stopping me from ordering online. Actually, one of my friends said that her parents keep getting packages from Amazon that they never ordered! So far they have received reams of copy paper, a carton of coffee filters and a cute pair of pink Crocs. This revelation gives me hope that if I can’t get the right package, I might get someone else’s!
terrystangents 