Where's My RAM?

I ordered RAM from Crucial in late November. 8GB to add to my Macbook Pro so that I could do some serious home studio amateur recording. I'm cheap, right, so I picked the free shipping option. I knew it would take a while to come, so I didn't sweat it. It would get here when it got here. Except finally, this weekend, I kinda thought to myself, Okay, I get that it was free shipping, but was it coming from rural Ecuador? I decided to finally track the package and find that things are not as simple as they seem.

First of all, although Crucial provided me a link to ups.com for tracking, the package was actually being delivered by my local post office. Part of some service or other called Mail Innovations where UPS gets the package as far as your local PO, and then USPS takes over. So you get one tracking number for UPS, then another for USPS. Oh, and information about your package may fall into a black hole of some sort when the transition happens and you have to wait for it to pop up in the local postal service system. Super.

The tracking information said that it was delivered on November 30th, at 8:41pm. To an address the next town over. Great. My package has been delivered to the wrong address, and since it's over a week since delivery something tells me the recipient wasn't a good samaritan type who would at least give it back to the post office. Unfortunately for me I discovered this Saturday night, so there were no official channels available to me. I made a last desperate effort though. I looked up my address in this other town, figuring that it was likely delivered there. I actually drove to this person's house at like 7pm. I checked with my wife first as she's my sounding board, my crazy test. If she thinks it's insane, it's probably best that I don't do it. She saw no problem with a black woman riding up to some stranger's house at night looking for a package. So I went. Unfortunately, the dude who answered didn't speak a ton of English (although he did answer the door and talk to me, which gets mad props), and I don't know if he even understood what I was asking. I was all like, "I live on 123 Sugar Lane in Middletown" and he's like, "No, this is Concord." Ummm...yeah. I walked away empty-handed from that encounter. But, alive! That's a plus.


I had to settle for filling out some crappy online form at the usps site, and then I had to do one of the things I am the worse at: wait.

I called USPS today, as I was really just too impatient to wait for them to maybe answer my form with some other form telling me my package had been delivered. They really, really don't want to let you talk to a representative. I mean, I went through the motions and put in my tracking number and listened to the automated bitch tell me that my package had been delivered, and then I tried to ask for a representative and she told me that she'd given me all the info they had, a rep would not be able to tell me more, and that I could essentially go pound sand now. I'll admit, I started yelling at her. I kinda wish someone would record those kinds of things and put them up somewhere; I bet they're hilarious.

We went back and forth like this for a while: me trying to find the right prompt that would let me speak to a person, her trying her damndest to dissuade me, including telling me that the call volume was high and then hanging up on me, not even giving me the option to stay on hold. After a lot of attempts to circumvent the system I finally resorted to simply saying "representative, representative, representative" over and over again until I wore her down and she gave up and put me in the queue. Not more than 5 minutes later I get to speak to a guy. Long hold time my ass. She's such a liar.

So I speak to this dude and he keeps putting me on hold, as reps do, except he never actually put me on hold. I'm not sure if he thought he did, his hold button wasn't working, or he simply didn't understand the concept of "on hold", but he essentially just stopped talking to me but I could hear him talking to others, and the clack of his keyboard. He came back and told me exactly what the website said—which, duh!—and I explained, calmly and politely, that that was not my address, and asked him how it was that it wound up there. He proceeded to blame it on either me or the vendor, albeit non-directly. You know: "the zip code on the package is for Watertown". Sure, buddy, but I know my zip code, and the confirmation from Crucial had the right zip code, so...

Then he had some sort of breakthrough or epiphany or something. Suddenly, brand new information popped up on his screen. The package had apparently been re-scanned in at a Belmont mail facility just this morning, and I should therefore receive my package today. Oh joy! I asked, pointedly, "So you mean someone was nice enough to put it back into the system after you guys delivered it to the wrong address?" He was like, "Yes, it looks that way." He went on to clarify that "they" (the postal service) were nice enough to correct the zip code on it after it got into the system so that it would go to the right place now, i.e. they fixed "my" mistake. I didn't push it, but seriously, if someone puts a package back into the system because it went to the wrong house, is the post office really going to just assume that they know where it was supposed to go and fix the zip, or are they going to send it back to the shipper? I'm thinking the latter. So, you know, seems to me maybe the package wasn't addressed incorrectly and the post office just fucked up the routing. But whatever. The package is supposed to make its way to me, and if I don't have to start all over by contacting Crucial and getting them to agree to resend it and all that jazz, all the better. I thanked the dude, wished him a merry, and now I await my RAM.

Next on deck are two SATA drives and potentially a whole new enclosure (for my DIY NAS project). I might just get those delivered to work.