Shipping Shennanigans

Pay close attention because this story is about to get complicated. Fast.

About 10 days before Christmas, Norm shipped his brother's and his mom's presents to the brother's house. in North Carolina. They were all going to be together for Christmas. As usual, Norm brought the receipts of the transactions home, so I entered them in Quicken.

There were two transactions on the receipt that showed payment, one was $11 and some change and the other one was $14 and some change. Along with the payment receipt were two separate pieces of paper that had the details of the shipment. So naturally, I look at those.

The $11 was for a shipment to his mom's name to North Carolina. The $14 charge was for a shipment to some random lady in New Jersey.

Norm came home that night and conversation went like this:
F: Love, I think we paid to send somebody else's box
N: yeah?
F: yeah, no big deal, it was only $14, so it's like paying it forward, Merry Christmas to them!
N: how do you figure?

[I show him the detailed shipping sheets]

N: uhhmmm... this is not right. Tripp's box was sent to this lady in New Jersey

[I figured that the box that went to his mom's name included ALL presents, but that was not the case. There were physically 2 boxes]

F: weird.... that's okay. When that lady gets the box, she won't recognize the sender and send it back to us
N: well, the problem is that we do not show as the sender. Our name is nowhere on this paper.

.................................

The brother's box had somehow been linked to this other account in the computer and it had been shipped to the New Jersey lady with some other random person in our city as the sender.

What do we do. What do we do. Let's think think think think. Crap! Let's think think think.

So we decided to send these people letters. We sent a letter to New Jersey lady with a detailed description of the box asking her to reject the shipment and "send it back to sender". We also sent a letter to the sender giving him our phone number and asking him to call us when he received the box back.

Fearful that these people might think this was a scam, we included both letters to each person. We figured the guy from Georgia must know the lady from New Jersey because he's sending her Christmas presents!

We waited and waited and finally the lady from New Jersey called to say she received our letter. The box wasn't there yet, but that she'll return to sender as soon as she received it.

Then the guy from around here called with his story.

He didn't know the lady from New Jersey, he had actually sold her some items on eBay. So he went to the Office Depot to ship his box. Did all his data entry (in the computer) and when it was time to ship it, Office Depot rejected the box because it was too large. He was going to have to take it to the actual Post Office. So he left Office Depot.

It must have been shortly after that when Norm arrived to ship his boxes. The man's shipping details must have still been active on the computer and somehow, the clerk must have carelessly associated that information to Norm's first box.

Christmas came and went and we finally got another call from the local guy, our box had finally arrived! So on New Year's day we went and picked it up from him.

Now, Norm's brother's birthday is January 8, so we went ahead and bought a Birthday present, birthday card and included it in the Christmas box that finally was shipped today before Norm went to work

Norm is not back from work with the shipping orders yet...

Lesson to be learned: ALWAYS CHECK ALL INFORMATION. From Christmas presents shipping addresses to to-go orders.