Reader Chris and his girlfriend were spared a long rush-hour drive through hideous Boston traffic because a FedEx driver making a large delivery to a single location had the good sense to load up his spare truck space with packages bound for nearby addresses.

Chris writes:

Hi consumerist,

Just wanted to pass along “above and beyond” kudos to a Fedex driver who saved us a ton of time today.

Backstory: I work from home in the Boston area when not traveling on business. Since I’ve been doing a lot less travel recently my GF and I have gotten in the habit of having packages sent to our home rather than our rented UPS Store mailbox because 99% of the time I’m able to catch at least one of the three attempted delivery attempts.

Amazon Prime is our friend and we order online very often.

My success rate at signing for packages took a plunge last week when travel and meetings forced me to miss all three Fedex delivery attempts for an important package my girlfriend was expecting.

Shortcut to today when my GF called me – she had been planning the extremely long and out of the way afterwork drive to the South Boston depot to pick up her package before it got sent back to the shipper. She called the depot to confirm that the package was still there and got a surprise result – the package was listed as being out for delivery again (attempt #4)! The dispatcher could not tell her why the box was out on a truck so my GF hung up and called me ASAP to tell me to keep an eye out.

As I was on the phone with her, Fedex arrived at our door.

After signing for the package I got the backstory on the extra delivery attempt. He told me that he was supposed to be working a downtown Boston route but got pulled onto another truck with a large bulk delivery to a single site near our home. Before leaving for his route he took a look through the depot for packages going close to where his bulk delivery had to be.

Ours was just one of (a few it seemed) that he put into his truck just to see if he could get them delivered while making his large run.

Anyway, this was a huge deal for us and saved my GF at least an hour and a half of rush-hour cross-city driving – all because a driver heading out with a big delivery took the extra time to see if anything else was going to the same area. There was no reason at all why Fedex had to make a 4th delivery attempt and we are darn happy they tried.

This was a thoughtful and efficient move on the driver’s part. It’s also nice to see that, at least somewhere in New England, going for it a fourth time worked out.

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