Thats normal UPS service, they say 3 day shipping but there is always some delay or laziness that causes your package to come late :)

Note that the package was shipped from Columbus to San Francisco. Somehow it found it's way to Canada, where it spend hiding all that time.

What's surprising is that UPS never purged the original record. I think, online, you can only look up shipments that are no more than three months old.

The best is when the website tells you "out for delivery" - you adjust your schedule to sign for the package - and sometime after 6pm the status magically changes to "rescheduled"

@mrsam:

That's Ontario, California, not Canada. UPS has a major sorting facility at the Ontario, California airport.

@mrsam: That's Ontario, California. The country, "US", is on the next line

@MickeyMoo:

I hate when that happens.
Happened 2 days in a row when I ordered a new motherboard and UPS was delivering it.

@mrsam: "ONTARIO, CA, US" is a city south of Los Angeles in California.

@MickeyMoo:

That is the best.

There was a 6-month period in 2006 where we had dozens of various hardware deliveries coming to our house while we were remodeling our offices. The San Gabriel UPS dispatch center that services our house only delivered about 40% of our packages on time over that 6-month period. That's still about the average now.

We also had to ship some hardware overnight to a client in the Bay Area, and this same dispatch center sat on the packages for 4 days before finally forwarding them on to San Francisco. There was no apology, no admission of error, and no discount for the reduction in service. It was just, "Oh, these packages. Yeah, they say overnight. We'll send them out tomorrow."

UPS makes it impossible to get to the bottom of this stuff. I truly can't stand them.

@RayonFog:

If you are the shipper and a UPS Overnight or Next Day Air package is delayed, they will refund most of the money if you call. You have to call after the package is delivered, and press 0 twice to get through to a person in their infernal phone system. This happened to me with a job for a client earlier this year. I was expecting the whole thing to be refunded but they ended up taking off all but the normal ground charge. Whatever. I had to apologize for the to my customer and reinvoice the customer to take the shipping off on their end.

If you are on the receiving end and something you paid for Overnight on is late, call the company you ordered from and ask THEM to refund your shipping. UPS arn't going to help you unless you have an account with them.

You would think that UPS would have there computers look for packages like this in the database, then find them physically to avoid delays of this magnitude. Seems part of the point to the technology to me.

This is why when I have to sign for something, I call UPS and have my local receiving facility hold it so I can go pick it up on my lunch break.

Sadly I'm not shocked. While not many months or years, FedEX lost my 37" TV for 20 days 2 years ago. It showed as departing Phoenix (heading to Los Angeles) and then about 20 days later it was listed as being "picked up" in North Salt Lake City. That was a fun adventure with the FedEX phone tree.

Are you sure this is the same shipment? UPS reuses tracking #s (usually tracking #s over 1 year old) and I've seen quite a few where the original tracking data wasn't purged completely.

If you look at the locations/dates:

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, US
03/17/2005
DELIVERY

COLUMBUS, IN, US
05/25/2006
OUT FOR DELIVERY

That makes me think that these were 2 separate deliveries.

It must be the government's fault. Remember the USPS? According to many republicans, the government's participation in any market makes private, commercial concerns unable to compete.

Typical UPS.

@mrsam: The other commenters are correct but the story is funnier if you imagine a Vietnam era draft dodger in the package.

@mrsam: There is also an Ontario, Oregon. There's about 20 Springfields in the US, too.

When you assume, you make an....

@bgbg: That's understandable. With a package that small, it could have been pushed to the back of a shelf where nobody could see it.

I mean, hell, it's not like it was a 37" TV or anything.

@Razor512:
Actually, 3 day UPS shipping almost invariably arrives in two days for me. I guess I'm just lucky.
The only time I've had issue with them is when they took four days on a package I requested 2 day shipping on. Apparently Newegg decided to keep their shipping rates the same but remove the benifit of Saturday delivery. Go figure.

@Sheogorath: Generally, 3 day shipping is 1 day from location to regional distribution center, 1 day from regional center to local center, and 1 day for actual delivery. If you live near enough to a regional center, then you can make out pretty well.

@Razor512:
That's actually NOT UPS service. We deliver more packages on time than FedEx. There's not always some delay or laziness.

@Sheogorath: Depending on where you are and where the package is coming from, the package might arrive early. Here, packages from CA usually arrive on thursday night/friday morning, so if it's ordered on Wednesday, there's a chance it'll arrive on Friday.

Also, UPS only delivers Next Day Air packages on Saturday, and not every NDA package gets delivered on saturday, it, of course, costs extra.

@threadislocked: No it's not. Go troll elsewhere.

@TeraGram: And all those poor private campgrounds just can't compete with the national parks.

I usually have great service from UPS, and my packages are almost always early. Whenever we have to send anything out at work, it's through FedEx, and I've had so many problems with them that I refuse to use them when I ship my own packages.

@Kurt: They could do that, but then they'd have to go find out what actually happened.

And they don't have people to do that.

@Stroll:

seems to have messed up when commenting (comment never posted so sry if it eventually pops up)

but basically where I live, there 2 shipping centers, one in queens NY and another in Brooklyn, if a package winds up in the queens center, there is a minimum 2 day delay before it leaves that shipping center, but with the Brooklyn one the package comes on time and in some rare cases, comes in 2 days instead of 3 if the package comes to the shipping center early and it goes out for delivery the same day.

It is just painful when ever I order something on line and the package winds up queens ups shipping center as the schedules delivery will randomly change multiple times a day and the item will never come on the scheduled delivery, and it will really be a problem because you never know when it will come and you have to be late all week or get someone to stay in the house all week, it is annoying

Fedex is normally great, however we have the world's laziest Fedex driver where I work. She sits in the back, sitting for hours sorting our outbound things into plastic bags. Surly. Grumpy. Curses out our workers. Blocks our loading bay with her van, while she sits and sorts and sits and sits some more.

Kinda sad they haven't figured this out and put in a real driver.

I once ordered a bunch of computer parts from Newegg which had UPS shipping. It shipped from about 20 miles away in three separate boxes with ground shipping. Should be a quick delivery right?

Somehow UPS lost two of the boxes. The online tracking said "Out for Delivery" but they never actually made it onto the truck somehow. No one in UPS seemed to know where they were, some agents said they were on a truck, some said they were in the warehouse. When I got the first box the driver said he had never seen the other two boxes, even though his info said they were on his truck.

Eventually the other two boxes showed up 3 days later after many angry phone calls to UPS. Newegg was nice enough to give me a credit of $25 for the inconvenience.

@ColoradoShark: That was the first thing that popped into my mind!

Ah... great another thing to worry about. Now not only is there a 50% chance of my package looking like it got drop kicked by the delivery guy, but it could disappear for a year too.

@Stroll: @Razor512:
If I had to guess ... and this is stupid, but ... What happened is that your package got loaded on the wrong truck and sent to the wrong center (Queens). I'm guessing, and I have no idea, but there's probably no Queens ->Brooklyn 18 wheeler route so the package returned to whatever center it came from and got sent back out again to the right one.

When I worked inside the building, that is how it would work with packages that were sent to a wrong center in Vermont. There was no VT center to VT center route so it returned to our center and then got put on the right truck, hopefully.

It is annoying, I totally agree with you. I'm guessing it just boils down to human error. Why these routes are not in place I dunno. Someone in management has thought about it more than I have (possibly) and came to this solution. The Vermont thing is one thing, as the centers are farther apart and harder to get to than Queens -> Brooklyn ... although they might take the same amount of time depending on that NYC traffic.

"By the time it arrived, I had forgotten that I had bought the tools that were in the box," he wrote.

Uhm... I'm not slamming the victim here, I'm really not. I'm just confused to how someone orders tools, pays for them, they don't arrive... then forgets about them for a year. That's patience and then some.

@krunk4ever: Yea, I have to agree with you on this one... It says delivered twice. Something is up here

@TheRealAbsurdist: Happens when you are in a busy phase and order a bunch of stuff from different places at once. if something is not that important, it is possible to forget about it after a while.

@Dondegroovily: @TeraGram: The 'cons claim that private industry can do it cheaper, faster, and better than any government-run program. But shipping through the USPS is half the price or using UPS.

And of course, we all know that if we had government run health care, costs would come down dramatically because there wouldn't be a profit margin attached to it.

@MickeyMoo:

Or when it shows "Delivered" an hour ago, and you go look for it...half an hour later, the UPS guy finally shows up with it.

@TheRealAbsurdist:

It depends a lot of the shipper: I've got a few things in the works that don't ship for a month or more after they're ordered, so unless I keep the order information up where I can see it, it's easy to forget what was ordered before it gets delivered.

@krunk4ever: Except, you know, the part talking about the delay...and the fact that the guy REMEMBERS ORDERING THE ITEMS 14 MONTHS PRIOR.

@krunk4ever: That's not how I'm reading it...I see the "OUT FOR DELIVERY" part being under San Francisco's heading.

It's not unusual for a package to be first shipped to a sorting facility, and it's my understanding that there's a major one in Ontario.

@TheRealAbsurdist: Also happens if you dealt with the company who shipped the order 13 months ago and they sent a replacement at that point.

@Kurt: How would the computers physically find the packages? I fear walking computers with scanners installed. I mean, that's pretty much a Cylon.

@TeraGram: Except UPS delivers mail and packages to the USPS to deliver to people at their homes. Look up UPS Mail Innovations.

@MickeyMoo: I had this happen before.... WITH A RIFLE! Needless to say, I saw online that it was going to be delivered, so I left work early... and waited. Went back online later that night and it had a message like "Package forgotten at sorting facility, will deliver tomorrow". WTF?! I had shipped it out for repairs, and I took it right to my nearest sorting facility, just to find that the hours posted online were wrong, and the place closed 15 minutes earlier. The security guard there told me to put it in the drop box, I said it was too big, he said "just lean it up against it"... Again... WTF?!

@saya: Yeah, except that they won't hold a package for you until at least one delivery attempt has been made...

OK, I hate to raise doubt, but I note "Billing information received" is missing here. I checked in my archive of UPS tracks, and in every one, "Billing Information Received" was one of the first three steps. I'm trying to find my funny track where a train caused my package to be delayed, but it's taking awhile. I'll post it when I find it.

I would like to say UPS has always been pretty reliable for me. On a busy day sometimes he might not come until after 7pm but delivery is always attempted on the day the tracking indicates. And if you miss a delivery during the day, you can plug in the number on the slip and go out and still get your package from the distribution center that night usually.

The only thing that would be nice is if there was a way to know when your delivery was nearing. It's not usually feasible for me to take off a whole day to wait for a package, but I could slip out of work for a couple of hours without much of a problem most days. Seems like with GPS and all the other technologies available, this should be possible.

@Razor512:

Don't even get me started about the Maspeth UPS facility...the absolute worst. They're infamous for bungling things.

@LastError: Seems to me that the how is their problem. The fact that they should is implied by their taking money to get a package from here to there.

As a manager who has to deal with assets that can get miss placed, in all its shades, I have found that items tend to either not get lost or found effectively when you place an emphasis on tracking them and finding them. If you are willing to not accept a lost item the rest of the process becomes much easier.

Bottom line, it is all about your priorities.