Most of my poor experiences have been with UPS, followed by Airborne/DHL. Fed Ex has been very good to me. But the best has been, crazy enough, the US Post Office.

That *really* sucks. I hope you manage to track it down.

For me, UPS has been the best, especially after I called them and asked them to always require a signature. The U.S. Post Office? It's anyone's guess if I'll get the things they mark as "delivered." I've had several packages they claim they left at my doorstep that I've never gotten.

Actually, I didn't even know what the "gift" was, so really, I had absolutely no mental anguish and, in fact, I was quite gleeful when my neighbor handed me the package.

So... You can have the sympathy, although I wish you didn't have to. Good luck. Keep us updated. If you find out that it's actually lost, PM me.

Tim

Didn't he even TRY to deliver the package?

Aww man I feel for you. I know what you are going through, and it aint pleasant. I'll keep my fingers crossed that you get that lovely bit of gadget in your hands soon.

Things like this shouldn't happen though... I thought UPS and Fedex are supposed to confirm the name of the receiver. Why would they leave the package there makes no sense, unless they asked if that person was OP and they lied. But it sounds like some lazy Fedex worker who probably just left the package without doing a half decent delivery effort.

From the street there is a sidewalk that separates our gate and then a three step walk up to our front porch. We have no railing on the side of the porch as I installed some additional steps to make it easy on the mailman who can exit stage left to get to the neighbors porch...

A recent delivery from UPS went missing. They claimed it was delivered on a Wednesday and on Friday I still hadn't received it.

Saturday morning I found it under the side of the porch next to the mailman's steps lying it some thick ground cover.

I figure the dude didn't bother opening the gate to climb the front stairs and instead just tossed the small package on the porch from the sidewalk. From there it pro'ly bounced around like a dang pin ball until it fell off into the ivy.

Lazy is as lazy does I guess.

Oh, sometimes he'd deliver a package, but often we'd watch him sit in his truck in the parking lot about 35 feet from our sliding door filling out the "missed you" cards before he even entered the building. He couldn't have known who was home and didn't appear to care. That he'd wave to us on the way in to drop one of those cards in our box annoyed us the most.

We did fill out some complaint cards--they were right there at the post office where we had to pick up our packages, after all--but he never changed in the time we lived there. We considered confronting him, but decided he'd probably begin losing our bills or something.

The lady who delivers the mail to our house is much better. She's even come by in her own SUV after work to deliver a package that didn't fit in her little, red mail Jeep.

Wednesday, Jan 30:

We have the first clue in the case.

Fedex never got back to me (why did I instinctively type 'of course'?), so I called again today. Vanessa, who took the call, said the trace they had done involved querying the driver, who affirmed that he had delivered the package.

Duh. But where had he delivered it?

"To your house, 27 [Ourstreet], Montclair. A white house next to a blue house."

Aha! We don't live next to a blue house!

After promising to send a note to the Fairfield center and let the driver know that we live in a white house between another white house and a yellow one, Vanessa advised me that I'd hear back from them this morning (I'm writing this at 2:30 p.m. and haven't heard anything, but that just about goes without saying).

As it happens, number 23 is a blue house, and so I visited number 21 (no one home and no package lying about the premises) and left a message about the N810.

Perhaps the driver misread the 7 as a 1?

I hope to learn from our neighbors this evening if they took in a package they hadn't realized was misdelivered. With two really young children, they might not have bothered to open an unexpected delivery yet.

Well, at least I can hope.

I used to work in construction. One day my helper and I were hungry for lunch, and decided to have pizza delivered to the worksite for us and the carpenters. The house was just being framed up and was right on a street corner. No widespread cell phones back then so I drove to the site office, made the call and gave very specific instructions (noting it was a construction site; but they had delivered to us before so no big deal-- right?).

They told us it would be 45 minutes but when nearly an hour had passed I went back and called again. The pizza dispatcher told me the guy was having trouble finding us. Once again I provided very specific instructions, including not just the new address but repeating the appearance of the house under construction.

Another 15 minutes later and I angrily called again. This time they told me the pizza had been delivered 10 minutes ago but that no one would answer the door when the driver knocked. Trying not to explode (or faint from hunger), I told her we had received no such pizza. That there was no door to the house. That we were several starving construction workers that could easily be seen all over an UNFINISHED house.

Several minutes later, a frazzled delivery guy drove up to the house with several COLD pizzas. When I refused to pay, he started ranting. He kept insisting that he had tried to deliver them as we had asked and I had to point out many times that if he had knocked on any doors, he knew darn well it wasn't at our location!

He finally drove off, unpaid and fuming. We ate some very cold and soggy pizza.

Some time later, I found out the true source of the confusion: in their infinite wisdom, the city had somehow assigned the same addresses to two parts of one street-- at opposite ends! The poor guy really had gone to the correct original address, but just neglected to take into account what I had told him (such as the intersecting street).

Oh well. Crap happens! Just hope your situation turns out well, Roger.