Is UPS retarded?

In the three weeks that I’ve been living at my new address here in Los Angeles I’ve received somewhere right around twenty-five packages from UPS with no trouble at all. Which is why I was surprised this past Saturday when I received a postcard in the mail from UPS which, for all intents and purposes, informed me that I don’t live here. Someone tried to send me a package to this address, and despite the fact that UPS has delivered more than two dozen packages to me at this address, someone at the UPS depot decided that I don’t really live here after all and pulled my package off the truck before the driver even got a chance to try delivering it.

Nevermind that some company had paid UPS good money to send me an overnight package sent cross-country, UPS saw fit to mail me a postcard (which I didn’t receive until four days later) telling me that I’m not really at the address at which they were sending me the postcard. If they suddenly think I don’t live here, why are they sending me a postcard here? Oops. Worse, since I received the postcard on a Saturday, I had to wait until Monday morning to call them and ask what was going on.

When got ahold of them this morning, they told me that the company who sent the package had failed to include my suite number so UPS didn’t bother to send it out for delivery. This seemed fishy to me; if UPS was able to send me a postcard addressed to my suite number, and the suite number wasn’t on the package, where did they get my suite number from? And if they already had my suite number somewhere in their database, couldn’t they have just added the suite number to the package instead of sending me a postcard with the suite number on it?

They had no answer but offered to send the package out for delivery tomorrow. I figured I’d waited long enough (nearly a week) to receive this “overnight” package so I asked if I could just come over and pick it up. They said as long as I got there by 7pm there would be no problem.

So I head across Los Angeles to the UPS depot today and they tell me they’re not going to be able to hand me the package because the person I had spoken to earlier had gone ahead and tagged it for redelivery. I asked if the package was still on the premises, which I had naively assumed was a yes or no question, but their answer seemed to imply that the package was there somewhere but that it wouldn’t be particularly easy for them to find it and so they didn’t want to admit that it was really there. After I pointed out that I had just driven across LA in rush hour to get the package and that the only reason I did so was because one of their people told me I would have no trouble picking it up today, they agreed to go hunting for it.

After one hour and twenty minutes of looking, they finally emerge from the back room with my package. If they’d told me on the phone that they would have that much difficulty finding the darn thing, I would have saved everyone the trouble by just staying home and waiting for it to be delivered tomorrow. But I guess being up-front with me would have been too much to ask for.

Oh, and by the way… one quick glance at the label confirms that the original package label did in fact have the correct name, correct address, and yes, the correct suite number. Would someone like to explain to me why this correctly addressed package was pulled off the truck in the first place? And no, a shrug doesn’t count as an answer.

Is UPS just retarded?